My yellow submarine
Oh the beautiful days! 2024
Interview with Jòn Kalman Stefánsson.
A writer, literary double of Jón Kalman Stefánsson, spots his childhood hero, Paul McCartney, in a London park. Determined to approach him, he searches for words, puts his thoughts in order and retraces the thread of his memories, marked by the Beatles’ repertoire. He recalls the death of his mother, a fan of the English band, and the comfort he felt listening to Yellow Submarine over and over again. He remembers the Trabant driven by his father, a silent and abusive bricklayer, the wild beauty of the Western Fjords, his disappointing biblical upbringing and the discovery of his vocation as a writer in his “yellow submarine”, a room in the basement of Keflavík’s public library, where he took refuge. Rod Stewart, a Ringo Starr turned bishop, a driving instructor indifferent to John Lennon’s assassination, poems from Gilgamesh and passages from the Bible all jostle in the writer’s whimsical memory.
With Mon sous-marin jaune (My Yellow Submarine), the great Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson moves away from the novelistic vein that has made him such a success, to deliver a more personal account of memory and forgetting.
Celebrated the world over for his trilogy Entre ciel et terre, La Tristesse des anges and Le Coeur de l’homme, an odyssey through the wild and hostile Iceland of the late 19th century, Jón Kalman Stefánsson made a name for himself in France with his previous book Ton absence n’est que ténèbres, which reached over 100,000 readers.
To read
Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Mon sous-marin jaune, translated from Icelandic by Éric Boury, Christian Bourgois, 2024.
Interview with Jòn Kalman Stefánsson.
A writer, literary double of Jón Kalman Stefánsson, spots his childhood hero, Paul McCartney, in a London park. Determined to approach him, he searches for words, puts his thoughts in order and retraces the thread of his memories, marked by the Beatles’ repertoire. He recalls the death of his mother, a fan of the English band, and the comfort he felt listening to Yellow Submarine over and over again. He remembers the Trabant driven by his father, a silent and abusive bricklayer, the wild beauty of the Western Fjords, his disappointing biblical upbringing and the discovery of his vocation as a writer in his “yellow submarine”, a room in the basement of Keflavík’s public library, where he took refuge. Rod Stewart, a Ringo Starr turned bishop, a driving instructor indifferent to John Lennon’s assassination, poems from Gilgamesh and passages from the Bible all jostle in the writer’s whimsical memory.
With Mon sous-marin jaune (My Yellow Submarine), the great Icelandic author Jón Kalman Stefánsson moves away from the novelistic vein that has made him such a success, to deliver a more personal account of memory and forgetting.
Celebrated the world over for his trilogy Entre ciel et terre, La Tristesse des anges and Le Coeur de l’homme, an odyssey through the wild and hostile Iceland of the late 19th century, Jón Kalman Stefánsson made a name for himself in France with his previous book Ton absence n’est que ténèbres, which reached over 100,000 readers.