Halldor Laxness Matters: Posting No. 2

Halldor Laxness, Nobel prize winning author of Independent People (1946).

I've been reading Laxness' Independent People for the past few weeks.  This post is the second of a few that will highlight why I think he is a well-deserved Nobel laureate, and why his writing still matters, at least to me anyway.

Excerpts from INDEPENDENT PEOPLE-

[Regarding Nonni's grandmother and her morning ritual of starting the fire in the stove.]

    "The flame in the wall-lamp would gutter low on the wick.  But his grandmother's ritual gambling was never so protracted that it didn't carry with it the promise of coffee.  Never was the smoke so thick or so blue, never did it penetrate the eyes, the nose, the throat, the lungs so deeply that it could be forgotten as the precursor of that fragrance which fills the soul with optimism and faith, the fragrance of the crushed beans beneath the jet of boiling water curving from the kettle, the smell of coffee."

"She had another trick too.  After having lain for hours as if dead, life would rise to the surface in her like the slow bubbles rising at long intervals from the bottom of the stagnant pools down in the marshes--life revealed in strange mutterings, whisperings, and grumblings, in odious psalms from another world.  ...No one who sang so many hymns and knew so much about the joys of the eternal life and so on could be more devoid of missionary fervor than his grandmother."

"...True, she taught him to lie down to sleep with its language on his lips; he discerned nothing of its landscape through the words, and still less of its insubstantial inhabitants."

     "The alien life of the hymns, as it rose to his grandmother's unconscious lips, aroused in him the same dread as the pools in the marshes with their muddy, acrid water, their slime, and their shaggy, loathsome plants, their water beetles."

"Presently the smell of coffee began to fill the room.  This was morning's hallowed moment.  In such a fragrance the perversity of the world is forgotten and the soul is inspired with faith in the future; when all was said and done, it was probably true that there really were far-off places, even foreign countries."

Laxness, Halldor.  Independent People: An Epic,  New York: Vintage International, 1997.