With a stunningly palpable prose, remarkable in its poetic vision and intensity, Gunnar Hoydal’s Under Southern Stars is an ever-expanding narrative universe. The vivid immediacy of Hoydal’s style evocatively renders histories, lives, and meanings in constant dialogic flux-in a perpetual present where even the most tenuous tendrils of human experience come to light, pleach, and proliferate before our eyes.

As our Faroese protagonist and his siblings embark on a precarious South American pilgrimage, they find themselves at pains to negotiate and reconcile the re-emerging episodes of their lives and collective consciousnesses that they situationally confront as they re-engage the people and places they have known. En route, hurrying through streamlined hubs of Euro-American hegemony, they are reminded that the corridors of money, technology, and power often transform people. The concepts of democracy and equality all too often boil down to greed behind mellifluous promises and flickering computer screens. In the words of their Faroese father, a former United Nations development supervisor who was transferred to Ecuador with his young family in the mid 1950’s, “The way the world treats the weak doesn’t change”.

Through the lowlands, up into terracotta plateaus, and across beckoning white mountains to the Pacific coast, the telling landscapes of the great southerly continent and its people’s plight, mingle inside our protagonist, spurring agonizing ambivalence. In acclimatizing to such pinnacles of stark observation and haunting insight, he passionately invokes the complex inter-relationships and inter-dependencies that indissolubly bind us, all the while indicting and juxtaposing the so-called achievements of multinational progress and development capital in South America and the Faroe Islands. The swinging fists of compradors cannot quell the endeavoring pulse of hopeful generations, but an appropriative architecture nevertheless exerts its fragmenting influence: Factories that were supposed to help lift populations out of inflicted poverty now stand abandoned or degenerate. Tall, glittering buildings, with sleepless glass eyes, turn people into automatous-suits and cast a calculating blue light across the hovels of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador; invisible, probing beams move along dusty roads, through the random jumbles of huts that defiantly cling to the slipping hillsides that grow steeper and steeper.

Under Southern Stars is a veritable postmodern Canto General, an eloquent and much needed affirmation that we could be capable of co-existing in a house without doors. However, Hoydal’s epic novel ironically concedes that naive fantasies of solidarity can be harrowingly seductive and lead to profound disillusionment; so continues the struggle between those who want to manufacture profitable goods and those who seek to empower people. In the end, shading their eyes in an attempt to peer through reflective windows, our Faroese protagonist and his siblings see their own distorted physiognomies staring back at them. Their nest is ruined, and they again taste the bitter blood of displacement.

Randi Ward