clew's reviews: a book log

Independent People, Halldor Laxness

I knew this was great literature, although I had not remembered that the author had the Nobel in literature; and I have enjoyed some of the epics of the North to which it is compared: it was Hesperion XXI, I think, that accompanied the singing with an actual swans-bone flute. Iceland is in the news, of course; and the book itself was on the `employees recommend' shelf last week.

It is great literature, but you aren't going to get analysis of it from me, because I haven't the time or the skill and anyway better writers than I have done it. One of the cover blurbs is from E. Annie Proulx, who must be as close as the US gets to this degree of dank hyperrealist gloom -- but Proulx writes Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm compared to this slow starvation and rape and lightless mud. The hero Bjartur of Summerhouses is a freeholding sheep-farmer whose sole determination is to owe nothing to anyone. In trying, he kills most of his family by disease or starvation and loses his farm anyway.

Now, one of the reasons this is great literature is probably that it's also regularly funny, in a bitter way, and has episodes of any of the great emotions, although the kinder ones tend to be tragically misapplied, partly because almost everyone is badly malnourished and not thinking very well. There's some comment by, by, Marx? Shaw? Wells? about rural idiocy, which is much sneered at as classism; but here it looks like a consequence of starvation. Marginal farmland gives back fewer calories than it takes to farm it, and the people doing it wear out. Some wear out sooner than others: Bjartur loses two wives and regularly relies on the labor of female indigents sent by the parish. He's not willing to marry an equal with savings, though. Bjartur has virtue in the very, very old sense, which is sort of grand but painful to hear, like a swans'-bone flute.

P.S. -- The picture of the dead sheep is copyright by John and Susy Pint, from their blog entry Saudicaves in Iceland;

Apparently, even though it found itself inside a long narrow tube, with daylight rapidly fading, it didn’t have the smarts to turn around and go back out, preferring to starve to death rather than try something new.

Find in a Library: Independent People