Windswept Dawn

Probably the masterpiece of the great Feroean writer...

Nowhere like along the shores of tiny islands in the European North Atlantic do writers seize the power of Man confronted to Nature. As an apparent consequence, rarely as well is Religion so present. Henri Queffelec for the Brittany Islands (notably Ushant and Sein), George Mackay Brown for the Orkney Islands, and to a far lesser extent, Sam Llewellyn for the Islands of Scilly are impressive illustrations of this literary fact.

Thanks to our artist friend Budam, I came across William Heinesen. Writing from the small Feroë archipelago (roughly halfway between Iceland and the Orkney Islands), he was maybe the most talented novelist (though he was a short storyist, a poet and a painter as well) inside this tradition. In this very first novel, "Windswept Dawn", written in 1934, his portrait gallery encompasses all kinds of human beings, often with a dark (if largely tongue-in-cheek) sense of humor.

Economic struggles, love stories, religious doubts, perils of the sea densely pack these 500 pages. Characters like Morberg the solicitor, Vitus the poor half-wretch, Sylverius the successful and generous shipowner, Young Gotfred the impatient would-be skipper, Landrus the undecided grocer, Martens the mad minister, or Reinhold Vaag the preacher are definitely worth any literary pantheon. No wonder then that Heinesen has often been acknowledged as one of the greatest Scandinavian writers.

A literary discovery which makes me impatient to read his other novels, notably when some fantastic touch is said to be developed, like in "The Black Cauldron" or "The Lost Musicians".