For Helga, by Bergsveinn Birgisson

For Helga
Available here

The monster of the publishing industry, to call it somehow striking 😛, is always eager for new pens that provide that freshness typical of any new author not yet subjected to the whirlwind of editorial demands. Some demands that although they satisfy the readers, prevent a greater fruitfulness in the creative genius of the great current storytellers.

The effect of that fresh air is even greater when a guy like Birgisson enters unapologetically into a Nordic narrative highly labeled in the noir genre, and presents his love novel ...

But Bjarni's story does not correspond to a comfortable story of today's misnamed literary romanticism. Love has edges and offers impossible allegories of a time that is no longer; awakens old guilt and paces the anxiety of the minutes linked with the doubt of what could be. The punishment that unrealized love can become he delimited it perfectly Milan Kundera in his novel La Inmortalidad, a work that essentially surrounds that magic of the ultimately wasted moment.

Love is always half of what you have and all that you lack. That is why, when a love story is told well, it becomes an existential narrative that, in Bjarni's already worn mind, translates into a decadent waltz under the symphony of memories and lost opportunities.

Nothing is more evocative than a letter as a sign of other times when furtive love was written with ink, tears and blood. Nothing is more painful than the idealization of the impossible kiss and the misprints of a life manifested in a letter.

An answer so many years later I will never find its destiny. Bjarni knows it and despite it needs to turn his concern when the shadows of the last night loom over him. From Bjarni's letter we link to the original letter, the one Helga sent him when the future was still a long way to go.

Bjarni and Helga shared living space and hiding places in a small Icelandic town secluded from all noise and rocked by long, endless winters. It is not a love that will meet parental opposition. The truth is that this love was an adulterous but irrepressible encounter by the same young blood that watered his desires.

Birgisson delves into all the details of that burning between the ice, staging for the reader under a dim light of that end of the world that is northern Europe and in which telluric and manners, cultural and philosophical associations fit perfectly.

The only thing left for such a story was to strike with an ending that matched the intensity of the narrative itself. And the blow ends up coming, from the chest to the entrails ...

You can now buy the novel For Helga, the shocking book by Bergsveinn Birgisson, here:

For Helga
Available here
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