Laxness Could Sing As Well as Growl...

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Giordano Bruno @ 2008-09-15

The Fish Can Sing

$15.00
...and this is the one of his sixty novels in which he sings most whimsically and lyrically, somehow transforming his usual deep pessimism into an affirmation of the vigorous and unmaterialistic life of his beloved/detested Iceland. This is a light-hearted, funny book in its sardonic Viking way. It was the first Laxness I read, and it would be a very good choice for anyone who doesn't know the work of the Nobel Prize winner - one they got right! It's a story of a boy and an old man... and aren't a huge number of the world's most touching stories exactly that, stories revealing each of our starts and finishes? It's also quite a travelogue; I'll bet more people plan vacations in Iceland after reading this book than after any amount of brochures and travel agency flyers.

I haven't just finished it, I confess. I read it some ten years ago, and then searched out every novel of Laxness I could find in English or Swedish. Laxness ranks for me among the top five novelists of the 2oth Century. I'm reviewing this now because I'm reading the Penguin edition of Gisli Surson's Saga, and I can't help thinking of the richness of the literary tradition of the people on that Ultima Thule island of fire and ice.