A haunting meditation on climate change in Iceland
On Time and Water. By Andri Snaer Magnason. Translated by Lytton Smith. Serpent’s Tail; 352 pages; £16.99. To be published in America by Open Letter in March 2021; $26.
IN AUGUST 2019 an extraordinary plaque was unveiled at Borgarfjordur, in western Iceland. It commemorates Okjökull, the first of the country’s glaciers to be completely lost to climate change. Okjökull was declared “dead” in 2014, when it was no longer thick enough to flow across the landscape, as it had done for centuries. Framed as “A letter to the future”, the plaque reads (in Icelandic and English):
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