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We were prepared to fall in love with the country — Iceland’s said to be the most literate place in the world, with more writers and readers per capita than any other. Various explanations have been offered for this: The long winters with lots of time for books. The verbal dexterity that comes with a multi-lingual population. A dramatic landscape that makes phantasmagoric events seem plausible, even likely. A literary tradition that goes back centuries and is taken very seriously; the famous Icelandic sagas were written down in the 12th and 13th centuries and describe individuals and events that date from the settlement of the island in the 800s.
Whatever the reasons, any country that boasts more statues of novelists than of generals is my kind of country. “Iceland — where nothing is forgotten and everything is written down,” is the way Halldor Laxness put it, and if you familiarize yourself with the country’s literature you’ll realize he wasn’t exaggerating.
Laxness (1902-1998) is Iceland’s sole Nobel Prize in Literature winner, but he’s much more than that — he’s Iceland’s Tolstoy, Dickens, and Marquez rolled into one. He published more than 60 books during his career, including novels that approach the old Icelandic epics in their feel for the pageantry of life. He was, in turn, a devout Catholic, then a devout Communist, but he was far too original and imaginative a novelist to let any ideology interfere with his work. His novels translate well and have real staying power — there’s no question he was one of the 20th century’s greatest artists.
Until our trip I had never heard of him. Astonishing, my ignorance — and all I can say in my defense is that, read all you want to, there will be masters that you miss. We drove right past Gljufrasteinn, his house outside Reykjavik that’s now a museum, and I couldn’t be bothered to pull in. It was only in the National Museum’s bookstore that I happened upon his great novel, and only when I got home that I read it, in a superb translation by J.A. Thompson.
This masterpiece, the book a devoted fan club of writers and critics insist is one of the best of the last hundred years, is Independent People. First published in 1935, and dealing with events in rural Iceland in the 10 years either side of World War I, it’s a book of such scope and richness (Laxness labeled it an “epic,” not a novel) that it’s impossible to sum up other than in the most inadequate of ways.
A shepherd named Bjartur, after spending 18 years slaving for a prosperous farmer, finally saves enough money that he can buy his own hardscrabble farm, albeit one that has been cursed for a thousand years. He has one and only one ambition, but he clings to it savagely: He will never be beholden to another person again, not a rich man, not a banker, not a politician, not — worse for him — any wife or child.
What he devotes his life to is sheep, and he does this merely to survive. As critics like to point out, you will hate Bjartur for his single-mindedness, his emotional stubbornness, but in the end you’ll come to understand and even respect him. He’s one of those great characters who, faced with desperate poverty, has nothing to put against it but the overwhelming determination never to surrender.
Bjartur will even abandon his children rather than give an inch. “Let him go,” he thinks to himself, when his oldest son decides to emigrate to America. “The strongest man is he who stands alone. A man is born alone. A man dies alone. Then why shouldn’t he live alone? Is not the ability to stand alone the perfection of life, the goal?”
Well, maybe it is — but, as Laxness unflinchingly points out, standing alone comes at a terrible cost.
The other characters in the book are just as memorable. There’s the incredibly old grandmother, the survivor of survivors, who knows only two or three things about life but knows them to the very depths. Bjartur’s daughter, Asta Sollilja, is the only person who can break through his shell; Laxness’ descriptions of her emotions, her transition from child to woman, are as powerful as anything in literature. And there’s Nonni, his youngest son, who will eventually break away from the farm’s poverty. The chapter “Winter Morning,” describing his thoughts as a boy as he wakes up in the bedroom all the family members share, is a small masterpiece on its own.
“At dawn when the boy awoke, his father would still be snoring with long, long, deep, deep snores. This kind really belonged not to morning but to the night itself. These snores bore no relation to the world we live and wake in; they were an alien excursion over titled space, immeasurable time, extravagant existence; yes, the horses of this cavalcade had little in common with the horses of our world, and still less was the landscape of the snoring life akin to the landscape of the day.”
Independent People deals with grim realities; Iceland, as trendy and prosperous as it is now, was wretchedly poor for most of its history, and not only lambs and cows would starve in late winter, but children. Despite this, the novel isn’t a gloomy one, and the reason it isn’t is Laxness’ wonderful sense of humor. It’s sly at times, mordant or sardonic at others, but often surprisingly gentle, even playful; unlike most humor, it ages well. In the kind of contradiction farmer Bjartur would appreciate, this grimmest of novelists is also the most enjoyable and readable.
I’ve followed up Independent People with four more Laxness novels (Iceland’s Bell, Under the Glacier, World Light, The Fish Can Sing), reading with ever-increasing admiration and delight; it’s been a long time since I’ve found a novelist I can learn so much from (i.e., his unique use of dialogue; Laxness’ characters never say what you expect them to say, even in the most offhand of remarks). He was blessed with two kinds of imagination: the ability to make improbable events seem believable and the deep insight into the human condition called empathy. And he had the craft and courage to keep writing his books right to the end of a very long life.
“All men are poets when they are young, but never afterward,” he has one of his characters say. “But the gods grant this gift to some through a special grace that they sustain from the cradle to the grave.”
Laxness was granted this grace.
It sometimes happens to a writer that he or she comes upon another novelist working roughly the same corners of human experience, with similar ambitions, themes and approaches. And yet so incomparably more talented is this other novelist that it makes you despair — if only I could write like that!
Humbling, but good humbling, the kind you draw encouragement from. Halldor Laxness’ work reminds us why we read great fiction, proving that novels were — and maybe still are — the best means ever invented for entering the heart, mind and soul of another human.
W. D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer who lives in Lyme.