Ágúst Borgþór Sverrisson is one of Iceland’s most practiced practitioners of short fiction, dedicating himself to the form long after his peers had moved onto writing novels. He too has now moved onto the longer form, but before he did so he published five volumes of short stories of which Twice in a Lifetime was the fifth. It his first book to be translated into English.
Twice in a Lifetime is not just a culmination of a craft but of a larger project. The stories within his five books share an imagined world and links can be found between them that form a spider’s web of associations. Sverrisson described its publication as a watershed moment in his life. This translation then, is a snapshot from an important transitional moment in Sveinsson’s writing, but without learning Icelandic it is difficult to say anything about how the book fits into the fuller picture of his work. It would be like trying to gather what is happening inside a house by looking through the only window on which the curtains are not drawn.
As a happy coincidence, the limited view of Sverrisson’s career an English reader is presented with is paralleled in his narrative technique. His stories invite us to draw conclusions from partial views of their narrator’s lives. The opening story, Spilt Milk, is mostly a flash back to an incident that the protagonist connects, internally, to the fact that “a resident of the building, a man of about thirty, vanished without trace in the summer of 1990”, but what relevance this story has to the missing man, if any, is left to the reader. Most of the ‘action’ of The German Teacher’s Wife takes place after the story ends. The First Day of the Fourth Week filters a man’s experience of unemployment through an argument about a toilet mat and time spent in a bus station. The stories in this collection brilliantly draw a world through brief details and coincidence. The other overriding theme in this collection is that people are not good or bad, they just are, and that the connections between them are arbitrary, and fragile. They are as delicate as the connections between Sverrisson’s stories, which in prose at once haunting and haunted, explore the inevitable loneliness of existence.
“As he drifts off into sleep he feels her speaking to him in a soothing voice: reassuring words. But it is only a dream. She is inside her own dream, tossing and turning in the dark.”