Love on hold

Covid, which practically brought the entire world to a standstill for a couple of years, has been all but ignored by novelists. It is as if it never happened. That is not the case with Touch by Olaf Olafsson (2022).

Olafsson bookends his wonderful novel with two events, Hiroshima and Covid, in which human existence was threatened by human technology. Life is precious, the author tells us with his beautiful prose. Don't waste it.

Kristofer, our narrator, closes his Reykjavik restaurant in the middle of the pandemic. He is of retirement age and has money saved. More importantly he has received a cryptic Facebook message from Miko, a Japanese woman he met and fell in love with while working in her father's restaurant in London back in the 1960s. He decides to fly to Japan to find her, Covid or no Covid.

Miko's mother died because of radiation from the Hiroshima bombing. Those exposed to radiation, as Miko was as a baby and her father was, were ostracized in Japan. So she and her father moved to London. The  two lovers work side by side in the restaurant, all the while keeping their relationship a secret from her father for reasons Kristofer doesn't fully understand.

Then one day Miko and her father disappear. After a long and fruitless search, Kristofer gradually accepts the truth. He marries another woman he never truly loves and raises a stepdaughter who never loves him. He buys a restaurant and lets the decades pass. Now widowed and 75 years old, he gets the message from Miko, and his heart catches fire again.

Olafsson builds his story with agonizing slowness, a little bit about the present followed by a little bit about the past. And this pace works to perfection. The ending may or may not surprise you, but either way you will love it.