IF THE HUT HE LIVES IN IS HIS OWN:

The Great Weaver From Reykjavik: Iceland's treasured independence became both matrix and subject for novelist Halldór Laxness. (Bruce Allen, April 2003, World and I)

The eminent Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness (1902--98) is enjoying a considerable--if as yet incomplete--renaissance, thanks in large part to the championing of his work undertaken by American poet and novelist Brad Leithauser. Laxness, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize in literature, is in many ways a throwback: a novelist with the soul of an epic poet, whose broad canvases accommodate much of his homeland's embattled history and rich oral and written literary culture. His major books might be called Tolstoyan were they less rigorously down to earth. Their focus is not on watershed historic events or glorious adventures but on the quotidian struggles of stoical and, sometimes, annoyingly stubborn ordinary people.

Four of Laxness' novels are currently in print in this country: the ambitious masterpieces Independent People and World Light and two quirky and charming later novels, The Fish Can Sing and Paradise Reclaimed. Of the more than sixty volumes published during his long working lifetime, six other works of fiction--notably the early Salka Valka, the unconventional pastiche saga The Happy Warriors, and a mordant political satire, The Atom Station--have appeared in English translations, most of them unavailable for many years. And that's all we have: less than 20 percent of the total oeuvre of a writer of enormous range and high accomplishment, long since acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's most gifted and protean creative artists.

The cradle, as it were, in which this talent was nurtured comprises a tiny Scandinavian country's experience of subjugation by larger and more militant neighbor nations--for many centuries, Norway; thereafter Denmark (from which Iceland achieved full independence only as recently as 1944)--and also a devotion to the spoken and written word that manifests itself in an unusually high degree of literacy. In every Icelandic household, a common saying declares, you'll find at least one of Halld-r Laxness' books. Beyond Laxness, there looms the single most important source of what must be called a national commitment to literature: the literary form Iceland gave to the world, that of the medieval sagas. Written down mostly in the tenth through twelfth centuries, though preserved and transmitted orally long before that, these stark, fatalistic narratives of exploration, feuding, murder, and revenge simultaneously echo the themes and preoccupations of classical Greek epic and tragedy and anticipate the modern realistic novel.

Their emphases on struggles for property and respectability waged by laymen who boldly oppose the stronger forces of nobility and royalty (as in the celebrated Egil's Saga, which details a poor landowner's one-man rebellion against a greedy Norwegian king) find echoes in several of Laxness' persistent (not to say mule-headed) everymen. Laxness' fascination with travel may well have been stimulated by The Vinland Sagas (stories of westward Viking voyages), and it's more than likely that his deep empathy with iconoclasts and troublemakers was influenced by the colorful figure of the outlaw antihero of Grettir's Saga (a tale replete with folklore and supernaturalism). Furthermore, the antecedents of the strong women characters who are such vital presences in even his very early fiction can probably be found in the great, mad figure of Gudrun, the much-married monster of appetite who proudly bestrides the operatic Laxdaela Saga.

Though it's more fully plotted, Salka Valka has many points of resemblance with Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun's wry tales of village life. Laxness rejected the comparison, perhaps unwilling to be linked to Hamsun's notoriously fatalistic sensibility. The novel has pace, color, and considerable narrative momentum. Salka is an avatar of courage and determination--while Arnaldur declaims and theorizes, she assumes the care of four motherless children--who's also impatient, humorless, and narrow-minded. She is a very considerable creation and forerunner of even more fully human and imperfect characters yet to appear. [...]

One such is Bjartur, the unforgettable protagonist of Laxness' most famous novel, Sjálfstaettfólk (1934--35; English translation, Independent People). Bjartur is a farmhand who buys a plot of land (which he hopefully names "Summerhouses") from his wealthy employer and embarks on a life of stoical combat with unending misfortune.
Returning to Iceland in 1930, Laxness settled down to his life's work: recording and celebrating not the rarified condition of the artist as distinct from society but the grit and monotony of everyday life, the heroism of simple perseverance and devotion to duty.
His first wife dies while giving birth to a daughter, Asta Sollilja. Though she is another man's child, Bjartur raises her as his own. His second wife also dies; crops fail and livestock perish in a symphony of mischance reputedly caused by a fabled Irish sorcerer who had cursed the land Bjartur works. Summerhouses is sold at auction to the avaricious bailiff who is Bjartur's worst enemy and Asta's biological father. Asta is seduced and impregnated by a visiting tutor and becomes alienated from the only parent she knows.

Laxness subtly plaits together a lengthy narrative that nevertheless gathers a hurtling momentum. Independent People paints a vivid picture of a nearly primitive culture saturated with folk beliefs and the felt presences of unearthly forces (a scene in which Bjartur subdues and rides a maddened reindeer feels very like an excerpt from one of the sagas). There are several powerful characterizations. The haunted imagination of Bjartur's sensitive youngest son Nonni, either an artist or a victim in the making, is beautifully drawn, as is Asta's vacillating love and hatred for Bjartur, with whom she achieves a fragmentary, doomed reconciliation.

Bjartur is an indomitable force of nature who might himself be a saga character. Yet as much as his stubborn endurance impresses, a contrary truth is repeatedly hammered home: Bjartur's cherished, jealously guarded "independence" isn't real. He's a victim of supernatural and human inimical forces--and both his strength and his tragedy derive from his refusal to acknowledge this self-evident truth.

Independent People is perhaps in part a retort to Hamsun's The Growth of the Soil (1918), a much more benign portrayal of peasants' hard lives. The most harshly realistic of Laxness' novels, it probably represents the most artful interweaving of narrative, characterization, setting, and theme that he ever achieved. [...]

Based on the no more than half a dozen titles available in English, we can conclude that Halldór Laxness is a writer of almost unparalleled range and vitality. No American or British equivalent comes to mind (though I detect a little of Twain and Dreiser, and even Faulkner in him--not to mention a healthy dollop of Dickens). His countrymen understandably compare him with the great Russian novelists. Laxness, by virtue of his heritage and individual talent, is something very near to a unique figure: a compassionate, and enormously skillful chronicler of the ordinary and the everyday, whose clear-eyed gaze takes in the nimbus of "world light" (and shadow as well) that embraces, transforms, and exalts the commonplace.

If you read no other book in 2005, do yourself a favor and read Independent People. As is the curious case with Dashiell Hammett and The Maltese Falcon, it's a great book by an unrepentant Stalinist which effectively repudiates all his beliefs.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 7, 2005 7:19 AM