I’m delighted to be the first person to rate and review this book on GR.
I’ve discovered Olafsson by reading The Sacrament, which I really enjoyed, and was excited to read more by him when this came to Netgalley.
Olafsson is very, very good at writing quiet drama. There’s a measured Scandinavian calmness to his work, that certain brand of matter-of-factness, balanced out perfectly with a strong emotional backbone of the narrative.
This is a very simple story about a seventy-five-year-old Icelandic man who, amid the recent apocalyptic events, decides to reconnect with the love of his life, a Japanese woman he knew in London who has vanished on him fifty years ago without a word.
Through the dubious miracle that is social media, the two of them find each other once more, and skating through traveling restrictions across the distance that spans miles and decades, he goes to Japan.
Throughout his trip, the narrative dips back into the past, to take the reader into the swinging 70s (or whatever the 70s that followed the swinging 60s were) of London to tell a tale of two star-crossed lovers from very different cultures.
She and her father are Hiroshima survivors known as hibakusha, who in very bizarre twist of fate and a stunning example of victim blaming/shaming, became ostracized in their native land.
He somehow never heard of Hiroshima’s fate and has to educate himself about it. That read so strangely…but maybe it isn’t a well-known fact globally? Isn’t it? Shouldn’t it be?
Why would a young educated English-speaking man from a first world country not have heard of it? How? Very odd.
Anyway, the two meet and it’s love. Real love. It doesn’t last, because they are soon separated – it lasts a lifetime because they never leave each other’s hearts.
Still reclaiming it fifty years later is no easy task.
An absolutely lovely story. A lovely love story without any traditionally concomitant sap and cheese. Olafsson engages the readers easily with his writing style, there’s an organic storytelling quality to his narrative. A pleasure to read and a surprisingly quick read too. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.