THE ISLANDER

We returned from our trip to Iceland with two souvenirs: a small Icelandic flag we planted amid our geraniums, and a novel that’s the best I’ve read in the last eight years.

I was prepared to fall in love with the country, since Iceland is reputed to be the most literate place in the world, with more readers and writers per capita than any other. Various explanations have been offered for this over the years.

The long dark winters with lots of time for reading. The verbal dexterity that comes with a multilingual population. An always dramatic, frequently bizarre 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 twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and describe individuals and events that date from the settlement of the island in the 800’s.

Whatever the reasons, any country that boasts more statues of novelists and poets than they do generals or quarterbacks 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 (1902-98) is Iceland’s sole Nobel Prize in Literature winner, but he’s much more than that—he’s Iceland’s Dickens, Balzac, and Marquez rolled into one. He published over 60 books during his career, including novels that approach the old Icelandic sagas in their feel for the tragic pageantry of life. He was, in turn, a devoted Catholic, then a devout Communist, but he was far too original and imaginative a writer 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 twentieth century’s greatest artists.

Until our trip I had never heard of him.

Astonishing, my ignorance. All I can say in my defense is that, read all you want to, there will be masters who you miss. We drove right past Gljurastein, his house outside Reykjavik maintained as a museum, and I couldn’t be bothered to pull in. It was only in the National Museum’s bookstore on our last day 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 books of the last hundred years, is Independent People. First published in 1935, and dealing with events in rural Iceland in the ten years either side of World War One, it’s a book of such scope and richness that it’s impossible to sum up other than in the most inadequate way.

A shepherd named Bjartur, after spending eighteen years slaving for a prosperous farmer, finally saves enough money to 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 to a rich man, not to a banker, not to a politician, not to…worse for him…any wife or child.

“The man who lives on his own land is an independent man,” he decides. “He is his own master. If I can keep my sheep alive through the winter and pay what has been stipulated from year to year—then I pay what has been stipulated, and I have kept my sheep alive. He who pays is way is a king. He who keeps his sheep alive through the winter lives in a palace.”

As critics 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 novel’s other characters 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 deepest depths.

Bjartur’s daughter, Asta Sollija, is the only person who can break through his shell; Laxness’s 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 shares, is a small masterpiece on its own.

Independent People deals with grim realities. Iceland, as prosperous and trendy as it is today, was wretchedly poor for most of its history, and not only lambs and cows would starve in late winter, but children. Withal, the novel isn’t gloomy, and the reason it isn’t is Laxness’s wonderful sense of humor. It’s sly at times, mordant at others, but often surprisingly gentle, even playful; in the kind of contradiction farmer Bjartur would appreciate, this grimmest of novels is also, if you have the stamina, enjoyable and highly readable.

I followed up Independent People with four more Laxness novels (Iceland’s Bell, Under the Glacier, The Fish Can Sing, World Light), 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, ie. his unique use of dialog. Laxness’s characters never say what you expect them to say, even in the most offhand of remarks, and this trick quickly transitions his scenes, his insights, into entirely new directions.

Next to Independent People I enjoyed World Light the most, with its wonderful hero Olaf Karason, who is born with the soul of a true poet and absolutely no poetic talent whatsoever. No better description of a “failed” poet—if in the end that’s what he is—has ever been written.

“He had never dreamed of calling himself a poet proper, but on the other hand he had made the acquaintance of poets in his day. Some men become rich and have fine progeny and retire with dignity in their old age—but they never made the acquaintance of poets. What was their life worth?”

Laxness’s last years remained productive; between the ages of 70 and 90, he published two novels, four works of autobiography, plays, collections of essays, and dozens of obituaries for his peers. He stayed friends with his fellow old-timers who were still around; in his biography (The Islander by Halldor Gudmundsson), there’s a charming passage about a visit he paid the 98-year old Isak Dinensen of Out of Africa fame, bringing the tough old Dane gifts of whisky, cigars, and chocolate.

Laxness was a writer’s writer if there ever was one. Here he is approaching 80, worrying about the kind of things aging novelists probably should worry about.

“I have a little novel in the works since autumn, driven on by the same need for renewal that has always plagued me, and has now lost me most of my readers. Many of them have become incredibly stiff, simply wanting me to repeat the same old stuff from years ago. But as it says in the old rhyme, ‘No one puts me in the ground before I am dead.’”

Make that the aging writer’s motto: No one puts me in the ground before I am dead.

Laxness was infamous for his eccentricities, so no one particularly noticed when he developed dementia his last years, but he kept working until the very end.

“All men are poets when they are young, but never afterward,” he has one of his characters say, in words that apply to himself. “But the gods grant this gift to some through a special grace that they sustain from the cradle to the grave.”

One last word on this unique genius.

It sometimes happens to a writer that he or she comes upon another novelist working roughly the same corners of the human experience, with similar ambitions, themes, 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 inspiration from. Halldor Laxness’s 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 being.