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Under the Glacier
'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the funniest books ever written' Susan Sontag A naive young man is sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go. What he discovers is a community that regards itself as the centre of the world - earthly yet otherworldly, banal yet astonishing. Brimming with humour, mystery, and the supernatural this is a surprising and moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG
Halldór Laxness
Study of Iceland's Nobel prize-winning novelist and his works.
Independent People
From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author: a magnificent novel that recalls Iceland's medieval epics and classics, set in the early twentieth century starring an ordinary sheep farmer and his heroic determination to achieve independence. • "A strange story, vibrant and alive…. There is a rare beauty in its telling." —Atlantic Monthly If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to free himself is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.
World Light
A magnificently humane novel from the acclaimed Icelandic Nobel Prize winner: as an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet’s life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness. As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this extraordinary novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf’s ambition drives him onward—and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women—World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.
Wayward Heroes
“Drawing on historical events, including King Olaf’s reign in Norway and the burning of Chartres Cathedral, Laxness revises and renews the bloody sagas of Icelandic tradition, producing not just a spectacular historical novel but one of coal-dark humor and psychological depth.” – Publishers Weekly First published in 1952, Halldór Laxness’s Wayward Heroes offers an unlikely representation of modern literature. A reworking of medieval Icelandic sagas, the novel is set against the backdrop of the medieval Norse world. Laxness satirizes the spirit of sagas, criticizing the global militarism and belligerent national posturing rampant in the postwar buildup to the Cold War. He does that...
Paradise Reclaimed
From the Nobel Prize winner comes a captivating novel about an idealistic Icelandic farmer who journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise. • "Full of an earthy poetry...a style wonderfully wise and entirely Scandinavian in its combination of magic and reality." —The New York Times Book Review • With an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children. But when he impulsively offers his children's beloved pure-white pony to the visiting King of Denmark, he sets in motion a chain of disastrous events that leaves his family in ruins and himself at the other end of the earth, optimistically building a home for them among the devout polygamists in the Promised Land of Utah. By the time the broken family is reunited, Laxness has spun his trademark blend of compassion and comically brutal satire into a moving and spellbinding enchantment, composed equally of elements of fable and folkore and of the most humble truths.
The Islander
"An enthralling, heartening study of a man of unflagging interest in life" Independent "A thoroughly researched biography" New York Review of Books "Provides readers of English with a perfect introduction to the life and works of an outstanding writer, one whom everyone should read" Irish Times "I am thoroughly convinced by Gudmundsson's portrayal of Laxness" J. M COETZEE A strong and memorable portrayal of a man who fought heroically to write for the world, but in one of its rarest languages. Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. During his life, which spanned nearly the entire century, he not only wrote sixty books, but also became an active participant in Europe's i...
Iceland's Bell
From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering under extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes a bawdy joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king’s hangman. In the years that follow, the hapless but resilient rogue Hreggvidsson becomes a pawn entangled in political and personal conflicts playing out on a far grander scale. Chief among these is the star-crossed love affair between Snaefridur, known as “Iceland’s Sun,” a beautiful, headstrong young noblewoman, and Arnas Arnaeus, the king’s antiquarian, an aristocrat whose worldly manner conceals a fierce devotion to his downtrodden countrymen. As their personal struggle plays itself out on an international stage, Laxness creates a Dickensian canvas of heroism and venality, violence and tragedy, charged with narrative enchantment on every page. Sometimes grim, sometimes uproarious, and always captivating, Iceland's Ball is at once an updating of the traditional Icelandic saga and a caustic social satire.
Independent People
Om en islandsk fæstebondes håbløse higen efter at blive en fri og selvstændig mand
