Jon Kalman Stefansson may look exactly like Sting, but he doesn’t put The Police at the top of his intimate charts. We know that the place is occupied by the Beatles, whom he places on the same level as Schubert. In 2016, interviewed in Saint-Malo as part of the Etonnants Voyageurs festival, Stefansson declared: “One day, a friend told me that we could divide the 20th century into two categories. Not before and after the war , but before and after the Beatles. There was a generation that had become too old to understand the Beatles, and that generation would never be able to understand the younger generation who understood the Beatles. With the Beatles, music became suddenly inseparable from my own life. When I hear a Beatles song that I listened to in my youth, it immediately restarts the memory machine…”
Stefansson was born in 1963, at the height of Beatlemania. Now in his sixties, he has many memories stored in his machine. His new autobiographically inspired novel, My yellow submarine, begins in a slightly goofy way. In August 2022, his romantic double sees (or thinks he sees) Paul McCartney in a London park. The writer observes his idol, who makes a phone call (to Ringo Starr?), reads a book, dozes. Should he approach it? Public gardens don’t say anything good to the Fab Four: McCartney risks taking him for a crazy fan, “an Icelandic avatar of Mark Chapman”, the man who murdered John Lennon in front of the entrance to the Dakota Building, near Central Park, in 1980. Not daring to disturb him, he goes into numerous digressions which will last 400 pages – a bias which can make one think of James the Fatalist and his master. Stefansson does not have the lightness of Diderot, but that is understandable: he is inhabited by many demons.
A trauma comes and returns constantly: that day in 1969 when the writer learned of the death of his mother – a few months before the Beatles broke up. This mother who particularly liked the title Things We Said Today (written by McCartney) that she played on guitar, asking her son to sing with her. Raised in austere conditions, subjected to intensive study of the Bible, the child found there an escape. After the disappearance of his mother, he finds himself face to face with a mute and cold father – when he wakes up it is to erupt, like a volcano. This difficult father nevertheless meets another woman, originally from the west of Iceland, and the little boy thus discovers the fjords on the coast of Strandir.
A style like James Joyce
This is not enough to cure his melancholy. He then moved to Keflavik. Stefánsson notes that “Liverpool is a bit like the Keflavik of England”, we can therefore imagine that the converse is true and that Keflavik is the Liverpool of Iceland. The gloomy years pass. The future writer worked for a time in a fish factory before returning to study in Reykjavik. There he made a close friend, a “sworn brother”, his Lennon, named in the novel Orn Orlygsson. One night, Orn, son of a taxi driver, borrows his father’s car and drives to a cliff from which he throws himself: “He stayed for a long time before jumping, plunging like an extinguished star into the ‘ocean.” No salvation, even when we cling to the Bible and the Beatles… We must here say a word about Stefansson’s unique style. It will disconcert Katherine Pancol’s readers. The construction of My yellow submarine is completely dislocated. With his ample poetic prose made of streams of consciousness, dramas and epiphanies, the Icelander especially recalls an Irishman: James Joyce.
We don’t just come across the Beatles in My yellow submarine. The Rolling Stones are entitled to a dig: “At the end of the 1960s, the Rolling Stones were very fashionable. They then quickly transformed, as you know, into living mummies, and became with the times as fertile as a desert.” Stefansson also refers to David Bowie, Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart (treated with irony), Simon and Garfunkel or Lana Del Rey. But as noted in the introduction to this article, no place is left for The Police in this pop Pantheon. We advise the Sting lookalike to rediscover the group’s fourth album, Ghost in the Machine. This should speak to this haunted writer: his memory machine is full of ghosts.
My yellow submarine, by Jon Kalman Stefansson. Translated from Icelandic by Eric Boury. Christian Bourgois, 403 p., €22.
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