The Icelandic Canadian - 01.08.2002, Page 42

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THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 57 #1
Book Reviews
Ga iL T
H e i. c, a s o N
SWIMMING
into
DARKNESS
Swimming into Darkness
by Gail Helgason
Coteau Books, 284 pages, $18.95 Canada
$16.95 USA ISBN# 1-55050-186-0
Reviewed by Norman Sigurdson
“Being thirteen is like standing on the
soft ridge of sand that divides the shallows
from the deep waters,” writes Gail
Helgason in Swimming into Darkness, her
first novel. “You want to be pulled in. And
you don’t.”
Much of the novel traces this adoles-
cent ambivalence and explores themes of
loyalty and responsibility.
The novel takes place mostly in and
around rural Gilead, Saskatchewan, in the
summer of 1962 when the narrator, Thora
Sigurdson, is a “thin-boned” thirteen-year-
old with “lank hair the colour of straw”,
spending the summer at her parent’s lake-
side cottage.
Alternating with this story are chapters
set in Edmonton in the summer of 1998,
when Thora is now an historian on the
cusp of fifty, clad in denim skirts and
Birkenstocks. She is weathering a failed
relationship with a geologist named Paul,
and obsessing over her current project, the
restoration of the pioneer homestead of
Markus Olafsson, a “humble Alberta
farmer (who) produced the finest poetry in
the Icelandic language since the thirteenth
century.” Markus’ homestead is set to open
as a museum in two weeks, but there is a
persistent leak in the basement and Thora’s
donors are beginning to get nervous about
the project.
Markus Olafsson, who is loosely based
on the poet Stephan G. Stephansson, lived
on this homestead on the banks of the
North Saskatchewan River, in what has
now become suburban Edmonton. By day
Markus plowed the fields. At night he
wrote Icelandic poetry “that once ranked
him with Emerson and Whitman, and per-
haps still would do, were it not for the
daunting difficulties posed by English
translation.”
But in 1914, when Markus was 61
years old, his son Siggi was killed by light-
ning while out haying, and Markus turned
his back on poetry forever, leaving the final
volume of his “Sagas of West Icelanders”
unfinished.
In the fall of the summer described in
the novel Thora’s Uncle Gisli discovers a
cache of Markus’ letters while cleaning out
his attic. The letters were written to
Markus, cousin, Kristjan Sigurdsson,
Thora’s great-grandfather. Thora asks her
father, Bjorn, to translate the letters for her,