elevator comes to a halt.
How long did the tormented pianist Ryder, the character in Ishiguro’s novel, spend in the elevator during his first elevator journey on his mysterious concert tour? Sturla recalls how irritated his colleague and friend, the poet Svanur Bergmundsson, was with Ryder: how he, Svanur, had practically pulled his beard out (he was, indeed, bearded) because of his bewilderment at the way the author had allowed a character to have a conversation with another character for what seemed like half- or even three-quarters of an hour, even though the actual time they spent conversing, according to the narrative, could only have been a minute or two at most. Could it be that poets—with Svanur Bergmundsson at the head of their ranks—wouldn’t put up with novelists playing around with and twisting the concept of time; is poetry alone allowed to challenge the reader’s perception of logic? Does this particular method mean that the novelist’s work falls to pieces, that it doesn’t hold water in the eyes of a perceptive reader, one who feels that he deserves—as compensation for the effort and generosity which reading a long book requires—not to be sent out into the wilderness and abandoned there, alone, insecure, and lost?
At that moment—as Sturla thinks about the information he has given his neighbor about his published books—he has the quite amazing realization that the whole flock of books he’s published under his name (if you can call seven a “whole flock”) are in circulation: in libraries, on the shelves of literary-minded people, in bookstores (at least his two most recent books). But has he contributed something to that form, a form he has by now spent roughly a quarter-century devoting the bulk of his spare time and energy to—or is it a formlessness (which one could also say about time and energy)? How widely held, for example, is his father’s opinion that if he really wants to continue with poetry—composing, as he’d called it—then he should ball the poetry up into one continuous text and hide it there, because this impatient world no longer has the appetite or attention span for irregular linebreaks and for words that come in outfits which remind one of frayed rags (prose, on the other hand, wears a carefully-cut, broad-shouldered suit)—in other words, for a dense, weighty book wrapped in a beautifully designed jacket which will protect the poet’s work from dust, from the passage of time, and from use.
One moment Sturla feels there is depth and purpose to his writing but the next—and this is something which has been happening more and more often—he, the poet, starts to think that he can’t see anything in the production of poetry but emptiness and the surface emotions that still lifes offer: more or less beautiful textures, at best, things better suited to being the subject of a watercolor on the wall of a room. In those gloomy moments when the latter feeling grips him—like the moments when he allows himself to delve into the work of his favorite authors for writing inspiration—he looks at and thinks about certain poems which he has loved more than others, poems that one could say left him exposed as a poet and—paradoxical as it sounds—made him greater and lesser at the same time. One of those poets who “opened and shut” Sturla’s creativity in that way was the same poet his father Jón referred to the day before, when he criticized Sturla for verging on old-fashioned forms of poetry by rhyming—or half-rhyming. And yet that reactionary innovation in Sturla’s poetry didn’t originate with him, though these days he isn’t able to look into the eyes of the person from whom it came. The image Sturla’s father had mentioned originally had used perfect rhyme, accompanied by alliteration: “the mother in the window / the murk of the shadow.” To better fit the words to his own style, and also because rhyme was a somewhat fussy custom that irritated him, Sturla altered the lines so they read, “the mother, the window / the darkness of the shadows.” He’d downplayed the subtle symmetry of the lines in favor of the necessary friction that makes the art of poetry something more than just form.
But how long is it possible to fill out the same form? Is the form of poetry infinite? These and other questions bob about in Sturla’s mind as he stands in the stationary elevator. His neighbor, on the other hand, has another question as he holds the elevator doors open:
“What do people do at a book festival?” And he apologizes at once for not having introduced himself; he is called Áslákur, nicknamed Láki—though of course they’d met at a tenants’ meeting. He knows Sturla’s name well, and he too has a cousin with that revered name, a friend who is, in fact, actually called Sturla Snorrason. He also apologizes again for having asked if he, Sturla Jón, would travel down to the laundry room. He just needs to get the laundry and then they can go back up in the elevator. It will only take a moment.
Sturla has nothing against the unexpected digression that is this elevator journey. He is interested in finding out what this so-called Láki wants with the broom—a question he ultimately doesn’t get an answer to because Láki sets it down in the laundry room while he takes things out of the dryer and forgets to take it with him when he gets back in the elevator.
During this stop on their trip to the laundry room, the neighbors have the following conversation:
“So, what do people do at these book festivals?”
Sturla realizes that to some extent he needs to answer this question carefully; it is as though something important rests on it. “What do people do?” He gives himself some time to reflect. “People meet and chat together. And they give readings. That is generally the purpose of such a festival: people read to other people.”
“So that . . .” Láki pushes open the door into the laundry room. “It’s a kind of holiday for authors? After they’ve finished writing their books?”
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Sturla answers, but as he is setting out to convince this man about the significant energy and organization that goes into the travel of the majority of authors, he is asked another question:
“So you’ve been to this sort of festival before?” Láki puts the broom against the wall, opens the dryer, and looks over at Sturla, who is standing with his back to him and staring out the window.
“I’ve probably been to two or three,” answers Sturla, turning around. And while he recalls the two he’s previously been invited to, in Belgium and the Faroe Islands, he realizes his neighbor isn’t listening while he takes the laundry out of the dryer. And thinking this, he wonders whether he ought perhaps to revise the way he’d described his first trips to poetry festivals in the article he wrote last night, the article that imagines The Season of Poetry, which is the name of the festival in Lithuania. Although it should be very clear to the reader of the article that Sturla is joking in his, as it were, advance review of the festival, he isn’t sure everyone would understand the disparaging remarks he’d made about past festivals, which he’d included mainly to underscore the frustrated tone of the article’s narrator, the character Sturla invented as the voice of the piece. Sturla begins to realize that people like this married man, Áslákur, a father of four children, weren’t likely to comprehend that behind the personality who appears in the text lives another character: the omniscient author who can allow himself to turn everything upside down.
“I’ve recently begun writing a little story myself,” says Áslákur, after a few seconds have passed without Sturla saying anything. “But I’m not sure it counts as literature,” he ploughs on, stuffing the laundry into a red plastic tub.
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s an altogether different thing to be a real artist who carefully puts together well-rhymed and well-alliterated poems,” replies Áslákur and closes the dryer.
At around the same time the day before the salesperson in the clothing store on Bankastræti had contrived to tell him he painted. And though Sturla had found a need to let this stranger, his neighbor, know he was going to a book festival (not to a gathering of supers), generally speaking Sturla didn’t have any reason to let people know out of the blue that he writes poetry. When it seems that Áslákur
