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The history of this book exerts remarkable power over the human imagination. Figurative speech can help us transform what we see, feel, and think. In this sense, those who hope to find definitions or stereotypes about Hell or Paradise are deceiving. The fabric of human relations and the symbolic space of the world is too costly and complex to be crystallized or statist in rigid concepts.
Heaven and Hell do not widen into complex philosophical reflections that, if truth be told, break the rhythm of novels and exude vain pretensions when wrongly thought. But on the other hand, Stefansson reaps much of the practical Judeo-Christian wisdom in the wisdom books and the gospels.
This parable arises in the context of an Icelandic fishing community. Situated at the end of the 19th century, the sea's violence and the world's separation from the mountains in local and human geography seem to leave no room for the "dream of light" (Victor Erice).
This geography of physical isolation symbolizes human distance indifferent to the death of Bárður. Water suggests life and the possibility of dying; the sea interrogates the men who navigate it, and Hell incarnates Paradise. At the bottom, "the depths of the sea are free from all evil, they are only life and death, while there would be a need to bless the lines, not just one, but at least ten thousand times, if we had to send them down into the depths of the human soul " (p.53)
Romance is full of sensuality, silence, and initiative; prayer is the expression of a dancing body, syncopated by the sea waves. It is not apart from life but springs from the depth of events. The sea is the temple that teaches sharing and the breaking of bread and feels the weight of the words addressed to the Creator. So, prayer that comes from life, conjugated with daily life, is knowledge that is not exclusively thought but felt and effective.
There is a profound theology and Christology here. That prayer evokes the servant as a condition for believing in human living, a worshipper that does not appeal to mere assistance or a reductive game of giving and receiving. On the contrary, it brings forth the time and space in the Word that makes all things. The evocation of the blessing of God is not magic or ritualism but a sign of our precariousness. Faith nurtured with trust, without excess or defect, elevates all that we are to one another in the love of God.
There remains the call for a close reading of this small masterpiece of contemporary literature. Italo Calvino affirmed that "a classic is a book that never finishes saying what it has to say." It hadn't said all about Paradise and Hell. The fundamental condition for apprehending it may be silence, suspending our pre-judgments without refusing to think seriously about the text.