Your Absence is Darkness

A man finds himself in a church somewhere in the Westfjords, not knowing how he got there, or why. It's as if he has lost all his bearings. When he discovers the inscription "Your absence is darkness" on a tomb in the village cemetery, a woman posing as the daughter of the deceased offers to take him to her sister who runs the only hotel in the area. The man then realizes that he is not just lost, but amnesiac: and yet everyone seems to know him. Little by little, different stories then unfold as if to restore his lost memory, plunging him into the extraordinary history of a family, from the middle of the 19th century until 2020. Mistakes, weaknesses and renunciations dominate the lives of these women and men as much as the quest for happiness. All are faced with the question of how to love, and all must make difficult choices. Your Absence Is Darkness is striking in its scale, its construction and its audacity: the number of characters, the span of time, the power of feelings, the violence of destinies - the stories are embedded in each other, forming an extraordinary mosaic, as if Stefánsson had wanted to reconstitute the lost memory not of a character, but of all of humanity. The result is incandescent.