Fishes’ Love

"The love of fish is as cold as they themselves are."
Baron Cuvier

Samanta is reasonable, well behaved and a confident single. Her secret passion though are Sanskrit poems which she translates. But then, vacationing in Ireland, she meets her real live darling, a young fellow Icelander called Hans Örlyggson.
They swim around each other for years, like the fish do.

It’s very late until Samanta finally learns to accept the power of this love.

Too late?

Sigurdardottirs way of describing her protagonist is credible, loyal and present. As a reader, I feel the experience of being made alive through love and the pain it can bring. In addition, there are expressions and images between the lines of the volatility and avenue of life; Intense love comes and disappears, nothing lasts forever and still everything does in terms of our dedication to things.

Fish are slippery and sluggish against each other and apart. Perhaps, therefore, the title "The love of the fishes"; It is also with us people, which is why this book may be relevant at any time. It is based on existential and philosophical issues, but also psychological, including In terms of how we meet people, go apart and communicate as well as we can with the tools we have.

Bogrummet, Denmark

Light as a feather and yet meaningful. This is the short and also cheerful love story of the Icelander, a reading suitable for men and women alike. It is about the "passion against all reason", which happens to the independent editor Samanta when meeting the married manager Hans. The impossibility of the relationship turns around and becomes a stimulating and intensifying moment. Since the first-person narrator reports from memory, her grief still seems to be locationless, the event remains unresolved until a new love finds itself and the pain flows into the elemental Icelandic soul landscape. Steinunn Sigurdardottir, also in her other novels, added to the insular writing a self-assured note that, away from the purely epic, combines irony with melancholy, the unfathomable with the neurotic, and yet does not lose sight of the Icelandic forces of nature, and leaves me such a happy reviewer!!

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Germany

Fish lives without touching eachother, and this is a beautiful picture for the story of "two lovers who do not find each other," says the reviewer Wolfgang Müller. Instead of Hans, who does not want to go out of her mind for a long time, Samanta marries the divorced Erlingur - and his two children - and begins to wonder, "is it one and the same to stage an amusing life or have one?" , The reviewer was very pleased with the gentleness and empathy with which Steinunn Sigurdardottir attends to the souls of her characters, and with the background of the captivating and permanently beautiful Icelandic landscape she leaves the question open as to whether Samantas fate is tragic or not.

Die Tageszeitung, Germany