|
Showing 1 - 10 of
10 matches in All Departments
The great Icelandic novel by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Halldor Laxness 'There are good books and there are great books and
there may be a book that is something still more: it is the book of
your life' New York Review of Books First published in 1946, this
is a humane, epic novel set in rural Iceland. Bjartus is a sheep
farmer determined to eke a living from a blighted patch of land.
Nothing, not merciless weather, nor his family, will come between
him and his goal of financial independence. Only Asta Solillja, the
child he brings up as his daughter, can pierce his stubborn heart.
As she grows up, keen to make her own way in the world, Bjartus's
obstinacy threatens to estrange them forever. Written by the Nobel
prize-winner dubbed the 'Tolstoy of the North', this is a
magnificent portrait of the eerie Icelandic landscape and one man's
dogged struggle for independence. 'I defy anyone to finish Halldor
Laxness's Independent People without wetting the pages with tears'
Jonathan Franzen, Guardian 'The greatest Icelandic novel and surely
one of the best books of the 20th century' Hallgrimur Helgason,
Guardian
This magnificent novel--which secured for its author the 1955
Nobel Prize in Literature--is at least available to contemporary
American readers. Although it is set in the early twentieth
century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics
as Sigrid Undset's "Kristin Lavransdatter." And if Bjartur of
Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer,
his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely
heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants
nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But
Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to "him." What
ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching,
elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely
detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a
masterpiece.
|
Salka Valka (Paperback)
Halldor Laxness; Translated by Philip Roughton
|
R265
R229
Discovery Miles 2 290
Save R36 (14%)
|
Ships in 5 - 10 working days
|
A new translation of Nobel Prize-winning author Halldor Laxness's
masterpiece Late one snowy midwinter night, in a remote Icelandic
fishing village, a penniless woman arrives by boat. She comes with
her daughter, the young but gutsy Salka Valka. The two must forge a
life in this remote place, where everyone is at the mercy of a
single wealthy merchant, and where everything revolves around fish.
After her mother's tragic death, Salka grows into a fiercely
independent-minded adult - cutting off her hair, educating herself
and becoming an advocate for the town's working class. A
coming-of-age story, a feminist tale, a lament for Iceland's poor -
this is the funny, tender, epic story of Salka Valka. 'Laxness is a
poet who writes to the edges of the pages, a visionary who allows
us a plot' Daily Telegraph TRANSLATED BY PHILIP ROUGHTON
A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocative tale. Halldor Laxness' wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stone cottage of Bjom of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavik. It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents' home in the early years of the twentieth century, an hospitable place where dignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfish to a bible had a fixed price which never changed.
|
Under the Glacier (Paperback)
Halldor Laxness; Introduction by Susan Sontag
|
R311
R253
Discovery Miles 2 530
Save R58 (19%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the
funniest books ever written' Susan Sontag A naive young man is sent
by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has
reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant
pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed
a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go. What he
discovers is a community that regards itself as the centre of the
world - earthly yet otherworldly, banal yet astonishing. Brimming
with humour, mystery, and the supernatural this is a surprising and
moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author. WITH AN
INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG
|
Independent People (Hardcover)
Halldor Laxness; Introduction by John Freeman
|
R516
R425
Discovery Miles 4 250
Save R91 (18%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent
People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family
and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of
landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense
awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of
Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty
determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and
bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude
before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to
be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks
unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to
him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh
and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in
its homely detail. An utterly compelling read.
|
Under the Glacier (Paperback)
Halldor Laxness; Translated by Magnus Magnusson
1
|
R446
R335
Discovery Miles 3 350
Save R111 (25%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness's Under the Glacier""is
a""one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once
earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland
dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against
the pastor at Sn?fells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to
have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary
finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a
community that regards itself as the center of the world and where
Creation itself is a work in progress.
What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up
church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up
alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his
time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced "ooh-a,"
which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored
never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top
of improbability, Under the Glacier""overflows with comedy both
wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it
is profound.
IAn idealistic Icelandic farmer journeys to Mormon Utah and back in search of paradise in this captivating novel by Nobel Prize—winner Halldor Laxness. The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children. But when he impulsively offers his children's beloved pure-white pony to the visiting King of Denmark, he sets in motion a chain of disastrous events that leaves his family in ruins and himself at the other end of the earth, optimistically building a home for them among the devout polygamists in the Promised Land of Utah. By the time the broken family is reunited, Laxness has spun his trademark blend of compassion and comically brutal satire into a moving and spellbinding enchantment, composed equally of elements of fable and folkore and of the most humble truths.
When the Americans make an offer to buy land in Iceland to build a
NATO airbase after World War II, a storm of protest if provoked
throughout the country. The airbase provides Laxness with the
catalyst for his astonishing and powerful satire. Narrated by a
country girl from the north, the novel follows her experiences
after she takes up employment as a maid in the house of her Member
of Parliament. Marvelling at the customs and behaviour of the
people around her, she emerges as the one obstinate reality in a
world of unreality. Her observations and experiences expose the
bourgeois society of the south as rootless and shallow and in stark
contrast to the age-old culture of the solid and less fanciful
north. A witty and moving satire on politics and politicians,
Communists and anti-Communists, phoney culture fiends, big business
and all the pretensions of authority, Laxness' masterpiece of
social commentary is as relevant today as when it was written in
1948.
|
|