Summer Light, and Then Comes the Night

"Sometimes, in small places, life becomes bigger" Sometimes a distance from the noise of the world opens our hearts, our senses, our dreams. An intensity of feelings erupts from the life of a village of four hundred souls in the Icelandic countryside, where the infinite light of summer makes its inhabitants want to explore, and the eternal night of winter lights up the magic of the stars. It becomes a microcosm of the eternal conflict between human desire and destiny, between the limits of reality and the wings of the imagination. The director who immerses himself in Latin and astronomy to the point of abandoning everything for the secrets of the universe, the greedy postman who reads every letter and then publicizes the villagers' private affairs, the lawyer who believes that the world is based on calculus, but then discovers that he cannot count the fish in the sea or his own tears. With the enchantment of poetry, and full of humour and tenderness for human weaknesses, Stefansson explores the question of why we live at all, and at the same time immerses us fully in the river of life. Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton