Independent People

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Often Funny
Review: This novel looks nostalgically at rural life in Iceland and regrets the effects of a market economy on rural people with simple wants and needs. The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is an obstinate, reactionary, and sometimes cruel herdsman who nonetheless possesses fine perception. Through this book, we learn a lot about the ecology of Iceland (it's a nice place to visit but don't try to raise sheep there), Bjartur, his family, and the society he belongs to. Author Halldor Laxness makes you appreciate the difficulties these people face but can also make you laugh out loud when he satirizes Bjartur's neighbors and the local gentry. I was impressed with this book and read many passages to my family. Unfortunately, there are also parts of the book where not much of interest happens for what seems like 50 or 75 pages at a time. I'm tempted to say that this would have been a better book if it were shorter but then Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature and I didn't.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful and Often Funny
Review: This novel looks nostalgically at rural life in Iceland and regrets the effects of a market economy on rural people with simple wants and needs. The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is an obstinate, reactionary, and sometimes cruel herdsman who nonetheless possesses fine perception. Through this book, we learn a lot about the ecology of Iceland (it's a nice place to visit but don't try to raise sheep there), Bjartur, his family, and the society he belongs to. Author Halldor Laxness makes you appreciate the difficulties these people face but can also make you laugh out loud when he satirizes Bjartur's neighbors and the local gentry. I was impressed with this book and read many passages to my family. Unfortunately, there are also parts of the book where not much of interest happens for what seems like 50 or 75 pages at a time. I'm tempted to say that this would have been a better book if it were shorter but then Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature and I didn't.

Rating:
Summary: The saga of a stubborn, oafish, loveable "independent man"
Review: What an amazing, overlooked, unexpected treat this book turned out to be. Halldor Laxness (who won the Nobel Prize in 1955) has performed the impossible: he's written a multi-generational saga centered about Bjartur of Summerhouses, a stubborn, foolish, often detestable curmudgeon, and he has somehow transformed this unlikely hero into a thoroughly likeable oaf. The result is nothing short of a miracle, both comic and tragic--and never predictable.

In his introduction to this edition, Brad Leithauser reports on his meeting with the author in Iceland in 1986, when he tells Laxness, then an octogenarian, how much he admired Bjartur. Laxness responded, "Oh, but he's so stupid!" Leithauser's reply: "Oh, but he's so wonderfully stupid!" Exactly. Bjartur is an uneducated sheep rancher who has spent 18 years in servitude with one simple goal: to own his own land and live as an "independent man." His philosophy is derived entirely from Icelandic sagas he memorized as a child; his politics are based wholly on the principle of sovereignty; his social skills are those of a loner.

The resulting adventures are both hilariously mortifying and tragically doltish: within his first year, he is lost in a blizzard searching for a sheep that he believes has gone missing but that his malnourished wife has surreptitiously slaughtered and eaten. He returns to find his wife dead after giving birth to a daughter who is still barely alive. All that and more occurs in the first 100 pages, and to tell you much more is too give too much away. (Indeed, Leithauser's excellent introduction divulges too much of the plot and should be saved for the end.)

Although Bjartur eventually remarries and raises sons, the story henceforth centers around the unlikely and uneasy bonding between father and daughter. In addition, Laxness weaves in the social and political changes transforming the country and victimizing any rancher who is caught up on the wrong side of the divide, which swings between capitalist financiers and cooperative societies. World War I brings untold wealth to the inhabitants of neutral Iceland, so "that the passion for building was exceeding the bounds of good sense, and that many children were returning home from school both hurriedly educated and over-educated." Mutton and wool were suddenly all the rage and "peasant culture had suddenly become the great gospel" of the national authorities. All this is too much for the simple-headed Bjartur, whose blind devotion to pastoral traditions and to hermitic self-sufficiency works against him as often as it works in his favor.

The translation by J. A. Thompson is startlingly fluent; it's often hard to believe that Laxness didn't write this book in English. Considering how funny, sad, heartwarming, trenchant, and topical this satirical epic is, even in translation, it's inexplicable that Laxness isn't better known--and it's incontrovertible that "Independent People" is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction.