A while back, I entered into a discussion with the friend who recommended me this book concerning the value or otherwise of literature as an exploration of culture – ie, in the mold of Grapes of Wrath or The Tree of Man or just about anything over 400 pages that wins the Booker Prize (which is, a...
The appeal of this book was in the writing, not in the main character. Poor Olafur was a rather frustrating character. I could pity his condition, but so wanted to seize him and shake him! He saw beauty in nature and had a bland goodwill to all, including those least worthy of it, yet was quite o...
Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Sn?fells Glacier, who, among other th...
There are several Icelands in history. Best known is the Iceland of the Vikings, roughly from the time of settlement in the 9th century to the transfer of the country to the Norwegian King Haakon in the 13th century. Then we skip the better part of a millennium to come to the hip modern Iceland, ...
“Suicide - masturbation multiplied by itself”Browsing through the used bookshop this weekend I came across this book and it was the author’s last name that made me slip it off the shelf and into my hands… Laxness… the name had a calming effect on me. Then I saw just below his name in bright red l...
The fish can sing just like a bird,And grazes on the moorland scree,While cattle in a lowing herdRoam the rolling sea.Starting from this Icelandic paradox put in verse, Halldór Laxness weaves an enchanting tale on the outskirts of Reykjavík, in a time when the price of a Bible was equal to that o...
Amid the bleak, frozen wastes of an Icelandic winter, Bjartur of Summerhouses tends his sheep. A proud, stubborn man, who ekes out his humble living in a constant battle against nature, he has at last acquired his own small holding after eighteen years as a hired hand. Halldór Laxness's splendid...