Halldor Laxness - 3 novels (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1955)

HALLDÓR LAXNESS (1902-1998) was the undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and one of the outstanding novelists of the century. Major influences on his writings included August Strindberg, Sigmund Freud, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht and Ernest Hemingway. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

THE GREAT WEAVER FROM KASHMIR (1927) was his first major novel, the book that propelled Icelandic literature into the modern world. Shortly after World War One, a young philosopher-poet dandy leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland's shores for mainland Europe, seeking to become "the most perfect man on earth." His journey leads us through a huge range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, from hedonism to socialism to aestheticism to Benedictine monasticism, exploring, as Laxness puts it, "the far-ranging variety in the life of a soul, with the swings on a pendulum oscillating between angel and devil."

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE (1934) is an epic novel that deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondage in the last generation, and surviving on isolated crofts in an inhospitable landscape. The novel is considered among the foremost examples of social realism in Icelandic fiction in the 1930s. It is an indictment of materialism, the cost of the self-reliant spirit to relationships, and capitalism itself.

Sometimes grim, sometimes uproarious, and always captivating, ICELAND'S BELL (1943) is both an updating of the traditional Icelandic saga and a caustic social satire. At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering under extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes a bawdy joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king's hangman. In the years that follow, the hapless but resilient rogue Hreggvidsson becomes a pawn entangled in political and personal conflicts playing out on a far grander scale. The novel creates a Dickensian canvas of heroism and venality, violence and tragedy, charged with narrative enchantment on every page.


The following books are in ePUB format:

* THE GREAT WEAVER FROM KASHMIR (Archipelago Books, 2008). Translated by Philip Roughton.

* ICELAND'S BELL (Vintage, 2003). Translated by Philip Roughton with an Introduction by Adam Haslett.

* INDEPENDENT PEOPLE: An Epic (Vintage, 1997). Translated by J. A. Thompson with an Introduction by Brad Leithauser.