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, after all, given explicitly to a book that “represents a culture”). For those who don’t grasp what I mean here by “culture”, don’t worry, I’m not sure I grasp it myself, in that any book surely represents a culture, if indirectly, through its language, or the other books or beliefs or experiences it derives from. But let’s just say that clause in the Booker Prize conditions (and in the conditions of my country’s – Australia’s – richest literary prize, the Miles Franklin, along with just about any grant for literature offered by its various Arts boards) riles me. Why? A passage I found by fellow Australian Gerald Murnane in the introduction to his novel Tamarisk Row, something I picked up by chance the other day, may help clarify:I cannot recall having believed, even as a child, that the purpose of reading fiction was to learn about the place commonly called the real world. I seem to have sensed from the first that to read fiction was to make available for myself a new kind of space. In that space, a version of myself was free to move among places and personages the distinguishing features of which were the feelings they caused to arise in me rather than their seeming appearance, much less their possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sat reading.And yet, true to form, the back-cover blurb of that same edition of Tamarisk Row claims, as its punchline, that the book offers “a truly original view of mid-twentieth century Australia”, as if that external (for want of a better word) “cultural” concern were its primary focus. And this is normal. To the Lighthouse, another book close at hand, is praised for being “at its most trenchant when it is exploring adult relationships, marriage and, indeed, the changing class-structure of its time.” Huh? I missed that bit about class-structure completely! As to marriage and “adult relationships”, I actually read that aspect only superficially, being far more interested in what the blurb doesn’t mention at all: the swooping technique of third-person yet subjective narration that juxtaposes many viewpoints all focussed on the abstract (and virtually undescribed) image of the lighthouse. In other words, a “new kind of space”, in which “possible resemblance to places or persons in the world where I sit reading” are irrelevant (despite that To the Lighthouse, apparently, is the most autobiographical of Woolf’s books, an observation that could only serve to dull my appetite if I paid any attention to it at all).So to Independent People... It’s a big book. Monumental. Not like a Diego Rivera mural or a Steinbeck novel; more like a cliff beaten and scoured by storms, smoothed till its scars seem integral to its make-up. On the surface, it’s monotonous, dreary, claustrophobic. As I read it I’d sometimes tell my wife, incredulous, what had happened in it: scarcely credible feats of survival at the absolute nadir of poverty; a life so barren and lonely that when a cow appears on the wide mountain pasture one winter it might as well be a miracle. “Ugh, why read that?” she’d sometimes say, as if it could only depress me. But I’d sold it short. It wasn’t depressing, but thrilling in its hulking hereness. It was here with me! I was there! In that tiny cabin-doubling-as-stable on that frigid plateau, with the gnarled aching old woman blowing and blowing on the damp wood to light it every morning, the room choked with smoke but the smell of coffee and tallow imminent, the meagre reward for all this hardship. More, it was hilarious. Absolutely. In the driest way possible. The meeting of stubborn frontiersman Bartjur with the cynical priest (fuelled by multiple jolts of coffee) was a showstopper. Bartjur’s struggle to stay alive in the snow while tracking a lost sheep was mindblowing – a dark expressionist adventure – and what he found when he got home days later was a kicker. On one level a straightforward realist (even social-realist) piece bemoaning the grinding poverty of its characters, this is, on another level, black otherworldly comedy, set in the most vividly realised otherworld since Middle Earth. “Exploration of a culture”? Sure, maybe. It’s got that. But me, I don’t read for that, or rarely. When the boy hears his mother (resurrected from chronic illness by the miraculous cow’s arrival) sing in the sunny heath in summer, that’s what I read for:And when later in life he thought of those days, and of the face that reigned over them, then he felt that he too, no less than the blue mountains, had been fortunate enough to experience the holiness of religious contemplation. His being had rested full of adoration for the glory which unifies all distances in such beauty and sorrow that one no longer wishes for anything – in unconquerable adversity, in unquenchable longing he felt that life had nevertheless been worth while living. […] In her song dwelt the most precious and the most incomprehensible dreams of mankind. The heath grew into the heavens in those days. The songbirds listened in wonder to this song, the most beautiful song in life.It’s not easy going (I’ve stopped halfway through, at Book 2, to take a breather) but it’s about as alive as literature gets. Raw and beautiful. A classic, social-realist or otherwise.
This story of a man determined to be an independent smallholder raising sheep in the years before the first world war is a great book, for the right reader. As a book it has two principal obstacles to being universally enjoyed. Firstly sheep are among the most important characters and much like their human dependants, their hardy virtues are easier to admire than love. Secondly it is full of misery, worse yet, misery that is handled with irony and detachment. The simplest way of describing Independent People it that is an Icelandic Don Quixote. The hero's broken down old nag, twenty-six years in his service, at the end of this novel would nod at Rocinante, if it wasn't so busy slowly cropping the grass.The quixotic notion here is that of the independent man. His notion of independence involves dependence on world markets, on sheep, on fair dealing. The independence of a man who lives off imported coffee and wheat flour. Repeatedly we are shown that the lake by his croft is full of fish while the marsh is full of fowl. Repeatedly the mouth watering trout and fat geese are dismissed as mere famine food in favour of dried stock-fish. Bjartur's independence is then independence from sense, independence from a natural world which, if not abundant, does have tasty proteins and vitamins there for the taking. An independence that denies independence to his wives for the sake of his own pride. These small time crofters live in a state of perpetual world war, not helpless in the face of ravaging armies but helpless in the face of the weather, the lung-worm, the foxes, the whole of the world, natural and unnatural, allied against them. The novel is built up of contrasts. Peace was poverty, war is prosperity. Like the prosperity in The Atom Station it is an alien intrusion, something criminal and bringing an insanity to Icelandic life. (In the light of the Icelandic banking crisis in 2008 what else can one say but Plus ca change). Discussing the First World War, Bjartur, unconscious of the irony says "Nowadays they fight just from sheer stupidity and obstinacy. But, as I've said before, stupidity is all right as long as other people can turn it to account". As the novel progresses we realise that all his independence is the result not of his own efforts but of other people taking his stupidity into account. Whether that be the marshy valley brought to be his kingdom, the medicines the Doctor gives him or the account he holds with the merchant, Bjartur is fleeced while the other party holds the sheers. Debt as creating a network of social obligations reminded me of Stone Age Economics. But this Iceland is no longer in the stone age but in an age of sheep and steamships. Here the rich can only grow richer if they they take advantage of the stupidity of others. The semi-starvation of Bjartur's family contrasted with the girth and sleekness of the Bailiff's family who rise and rise in the world on the backs of the misfortunes of other's.It is the Bailiff's town born wife who champions a rural culture of steadfast crofters that stands in ironic contrast to the rural culture we see in which the home-made whisk to froth up the dribble of milk from the starving cow was Jesus' gift to the Icelandic people.This leads me to see Bjartur and his quixotic struggle as a stand in for Iceland in this book published before Icelandic independence was achieved (achieved as it happened as a by product of another world war). Bjartur is as independent as his country can be, dependent as he is on world markets. He is as open to abuse as his country is. The issues of faith that Laxness picked up again in Under the Glacier are but spring lambs here. Christianity is chiefly a form of social propriety in a country that after a thousand years is still in a stalled process of conversion and accommodation with trolls, spirits, elves and rains that fall unceasing for longer than a mere forty days and nights.The gloom is tragic-comic, the conversation between Bjartur and the Pastor a great comic set piece. The poetry that Bjartur delights in, of too complex a form to bear much meaning, a cause of difference with another peasant poet who prefers to write properly Christian verse and isolates both from the Bailiff's wife whose poems idealise a rural life by leaving out the lice, the hunger and the lung-worm.At the end of the novel the horse is aged. We're on the forth generation of yellow bitches, yet the hero carries on. Alongside resilience the news of the death of the Tsar, a portrait of one of his ancestors hung in the Bailiff's office marks a change in consciousness, allowing an ending, if not exactly happy, is at least compassionate. The translationI read the Thompson translation. It's noticeably richer in vocabulary than the Magnusson translations of other Laxness novels I've read. If your taste is towards the laconic you might prefer the Magnusson version.
What do You think about Independent People (1997)?
sort of a twentieth century Icelandic saga. so far so good although i put it down in the middle over a month ago. i will finish it however.UPDATE: this book was amazing, one of those books that creates a whole world you live in for the time you're reading it. one of those books where, as a friend of mine says, you get sad at the end because your friends are going away now.not that the characters are necessarily likable. one of the novel's great achievements is creating a central character (Bjartur, a dirt poor farmer raising his sheep on a remote croft in early 20th century Iceland) who constantly infuriates you even as you feel a growing sympathy for him. he is stubborn, insensitive, even mean, and is probably to blame for both his wives' deaths. yet he has a soft spot for his 'flower', Asta Sollilja ('Dearest Sunlily'), the daughter his first wife dies giving birth to. this despite the fact that he is well aware the child is not his. the story is on one level a story of the love between these two stubborn people.but it's much more than that. and it's more than the story of a fiercely stubborn man's struggle to remain beholden to noone. ("he who pays his way is king," says Bjartur to whomever will listen.)this is a book that brings to life every minute detail of the grinding poverty of this farming family & their neighbors, from the stillborn children to the worms that beset their sheep & various remedies proposed to the daydreamings & longings of the children growing up in these circumstances. and the secondary characters are as colorful & real as in any Dickens novel. nor is the book without humor.in short, read it. then keep it for a few years & read it again.
—bill greene
Everything that one has ever created achieves reality. And soon the day dawns when one finds oneself at the mercy of the reality one has created.There is a subtle beauty in this text - an expansive desolation that plays as canvas to Laxness' protagonist Bjartur of Summerhouses creation of an independent life. Told in the early years of the 20th century on the hard-scrabble tundra of rural Iceland, the narrative follows the course of this stubborn Bjartur and his quixotic life-long quest for complete independence, come what may.An independent man thinks only of himself and lets others do as they please.Laxness surrounds Bjartur with a panoply of well imagined characters. They are in his orbit, regardless of his desire for them to be there. Time and again he will shatter the worlds of his family, his own, and will pick up those pieces wet and cold to arrange in an increasingly fragile independence of his own defining.Time effaces everything, crime and sorrow no less than love.Through Bjartur I learned that in order to be independent one is completely reliant on other people. And that no seemingly how far gone, redemption is always a possibility.Bjartur of Summerhouses is in you; as he is in me, even though we may not be related at all.
—Brian
Throughout its long history, Iceland has known periods of horrible poverty. At times, the fault was in some massive volcanic eruption. It didn't help that, for hundreds of years, the country was under the control of Denmark, that most louche of all colonial powers. Halldór Laxness, the country's only winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has in Independent People described a large swath of Iceland's history from the late 19th century to 1917 -- all from the point of view of a farmer named Gudbjartur Jonsson, usually called Bjartur of Summerhouses after his ramshackle sheep farm.Bjartur's aim in life, once he purchases Summerhouses, was to be an independent man, beholden to no one. The book begins with a Celtic sorcerer named Kolumkilli and his witch wife Gunnvor, who laid a curse on the Icelanders who supplanted them, proclaiming that no one would prosper there. Enter Bjartur, who was determined to do just that. He brings his young wife Rosa, but she dies. She is replaced by another, Finna, who also dies. Bjartur ends up with three sons and a daughter, Asta Sollilja, who in many ways is the emotional center of the book. Over the years, he loses his sons to emigration, death, and strike violence; and he even loses Asta Sollilja, whom he has always seen as the flower of his life.This is in many ways a difficult book to read: Bjartur and his little homestead run the gamut from bad luck and grinding poverty, to an almost manic (and surely temporary) prosperity brought on my the high prices for wool that come with the First World War. But once prices drop after the war, Bjartur's fragile pose of independence comes up against insuperable odds. As Laxness writes on the penultimate page of the book:The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy. The life of the lone worker, the life of the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him. From one night-lodging into another even worse. A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country for a thousand years -- for whom? Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs. They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws -- in whose land? Not in their own at least.Here we see a glimpse of the author as seeker, who at different times in his life adopted Catholicism and Communism, only to reject both. What saves Independent People from being too grim is the life that suddenly springs up from out of nowhere, from the beauty of Asta Sollilja (even though she is a bit cockeyed), from the old poems and bits of the Sagas recited from memory by Bjartur, from love that comes from nowhere, and the beauty of Iceland, which is unearthly, harsh, but always surprising.I have read several of Laxness's books, waiting only until now to read his most famous work. I continue to think he was the greatest Scandinavian author of the 20th century -- one much neglected, but deserving of a better reputation.
—Jim
