Valentines is one of those treasures of contemporary literature that reside in the vast Vintage/Anchor backlist. I discovered it by accident while doing a Monday morning reorder cycle of Random House titles. Its sales track had spurted up suddenly like a red-streaked rocket that falls almost as swiftly back to earth, probably on account of some far away book club requesting the title.

“What the hell was that?” I said, since it’s my custom at excited moments to talk my computer. I was more intrigued when I found out that it was a cycle of 12 stories, each one named after a month of the year. I respected the account that was ordering it, so I bought one for myself. Yes, bought. I didn’t want to wait for a requested review copy to be sent from the publisher.

It was worth the purchase. The trade paperback format is wonderful, the ideal way to read and mark up a copy. I loved the cover art which I considered a couple of times as I read the stories: a tray of gold wedding rings, almost all identical.

I have to commend Mr. Olafsson’s arch sense of humor in calling his collection Valentines. All of these subtle stories are about relationships that crack or even crack apart.

I like to compare the books that I love to favorite movies or other art forms rather than to other books. I like a mix & match attitude. The blurb on the back of Valentines compares OO to Raymond Carver and John Updike and I don’t object. That’s not hyperbole. Olafsson’s rank is high on the scale of literary quality. But straight off I thought of the Ang Lee who directed The Ice Storm.

The collection starts snowy in January. Two ex-lovers are having a reunion in New York City. Olafsson’s skill in setting up a mood is masterly. A businessman finds himself stuck at the airport during a snowfall. He realizes that he’s not going to make it on to Chicago right away. He’s tried to stay at airport hotels before and hates the sterility so he opts to book into a good hotel on the upper East Side of Manhattan instead. He realizes that the woman he lived with ten years ago now lives in New York and sets up a dinner with her.

These dreary logistical details, that long-time business travelers are all too familiar with, make a nice setup for the dinner’s venue, which is a booked-lined hotel library with a fireplace. There are candles lit on the dining table. The reader can virtually feel these plush surroundings as a great relief after the cold exhausting schlep from the airport.

As the two old flames talk, Olafsson has you hoping for a reconciliation. Not by anything he expressly writes, that’s not his way, but by how he constructs this conversation, providing just hints of warmth between the pair and then taking them away. Making the reader hope for more. Good writers have to be great at the tease.

But just as the story ends, you realize that one of the pair is going to stand up the other the next morning.

I finally hit upon the technique of taking a break after reading one of these stories and then coming back to Valentines. Olafsson’s stories pack too much of a wallop to be read straight through. But the writer wields his sentences with a martial art. He seems to employ the greatest economy in his shots but the reader still goes down, floored by the intensity.

Like: a marriage barely survives a husband’s adultery but flounders because of a lie about a zip code. A husband whose wife refuses to adopt a child meets another family on a skiing vacation and pretends he has a son. A wife delays telling her husband that he doesn’t have a fatal disease after all because fear of terminal illness has brought them closer together. A father and son capsize a boat on a lake and, given the chance, the father opts to save himself rather than his son while his wife watches from shore.

Aren’t these premises intriguing? There are twelve of them, for heaven’s sake, and they’re all good, although you will have your favorites. The stories are full of athleticism. A white water rafting goes a long way towards destroying a marriage. And Olafsson is that rare bird, a writer who writes with equal sympathy about men and women. So Valentines is a guy’s read as well as being a women’s read. It’s a civilized read if you think of civilization as an intense engagement with the realities of being human. And it’s mostly about families. It’s very Ice Storm.

Olaf Olafsson hails from Iceland, a rare and beautiful country that pops up in these stories from time to time. As a character says: “Iceland is green and Greenland is icy.” My understanding is that he lives now in New York. The stories in Valentines are as rare and beautiful as the country that Mr. Olafsson comes from.