Halldor Laxness' Independent People - Posting No. 3

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

I completed my reading of Laxness' Independent People.  This post is the third of a few that  highlight why I think he is a well-deserved Nobel laureate, and why his writing still matters, at least to me anyway.

Novelist Jane Smiley said "I love this book.  It is an unfolding wonder...one of the

Jane Smiley

best books of the 20th century.  I can't imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time."


Excerpts from INDEPENDENT PEOPLE-
[regarding the life of independent people, lone workers, and what they're up against when it comes to banks, businessmen, politicians, great landowners, churchmen--thieves the whole lot of them]

"In foreign books there is a holy story that tells of a man who was fulfilled by sowing his enemy's field one night.  Bjartur of

Summerhouses' story is the story of a man who sowed his enemy's field all his life, day and night.  Such is the story of the most independent man in the country."  

"Once again had they laid waste the lone worker's farm; they are always the same from century to century, for the simple reason that the lone worker remains the same from century to century.  A war on the Continent may bring some relief, for a year or so, but it is only a seeming help, an illusion."  

"The lone worker will never escape from his life of poverty for ever and ever; he will go on existing in affliction as long as man is not man's protector, but his worst enemy.  The life of the lone worker, the independent man, is in its nature a flight from other men, who seek to kill him."  

"From one night-lodging into another even worse.  A peasant family flits, four generations of the thirty that have maintained life and death in this country [Iceland] for a thousand years--for whom?  Not for themselves anyway, nor for anyone of theirs.  They resembled nothing so much as fugitives in a land devastated by year after year of furious warfare; hunted outlaws--in whose land?  Not in their own at least."  

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

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.

Halldor Laxness Matters: Posting No. 1

Halldor Laxness

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

I've been reading Laxness' Independent People for the past few weeks and I must say the language in this book is startling.  This post is the first 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--

[Conversation between little Nonni and his mother.]
"When anyone grows very old he becomes like a little baby again."
"And dies?" asked the boy.

Mother horse and son

It was a string in his breast that snapped, one of those delicate childhood strings which break before one has had time to realize that they are capable of sounding; and these strings sound no more; henceforth they are only a memory of incredible days."

[the relationship between little Nonni and his father's prize ram]
This was a most unpleasant prospect, for no animal scared him half as much as the Reverend Gudmundur.  This ram, which hated the sight of human beings, had a nasty trick of chasing the boy all the way into his dreams and through his dreams, and the boy would run as hard as he could, from one dream into another, fleeing in terror from this monster, which in spite of his father's faith in its pedigree was as preternatural in its hideousness as the Christmas cake and the meat soup in their splendour.  Thus there may also be an element of danger in a person's dreams.




   But as morning came nearer, his father's snores gradually lost their resonance, the resounding chest-notes dissolved on a slowly ascending scale, moved by degrees into the throat, from the throat into the nose and mouth, on to the lips with a whistle, sometimes only with a restless puff--the destination was near, the horses prancing with the joy of traversing scatheless the sounding wastes of infinity.  The homeland lay spread before the eyes.
   The breathing of the others lacked altogether the range and the magnificence of his father's snores, and was, moreover, heedless of time.

[Nonni and his mother]
There must have been something on his conscience to make him so attentive to her tonight: he had held her hand, a thing he had never been seen to do before, and then he had rushed off somewhere in the middle of the night, as if he were afraid.
   Few things are so inconstant, so unstable, as a loving heart, and yet it is the only place in the world where one can find sympathy.  Sleep is stronger than the noblest instinct of a loving heart.  In the middle of his mother's agony the night began to grow dim.  ...the drowsiness of midnight, so sweet, so heavy, began again to flow through his limbs; and little by little, like a hundred grains of sand, his consciousness filtered down into the abyss of his sleep-world until oblivion had once more filled it full.




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