Icelandic · b. 1902
Icelandic novelist and Nobel laureate, the dominant figure of twentieth-century Icelandic literature, whose work drew on Icelandic saga tradition while engaging with modernism, Catholicism, communism, and the fate of the rural poor.
Halldór Guðjónsson — who took the name Laxness from his family’s farm — was born in Reykjavik in 1902 and lived, restlessly, everywhere else before coming home for good. He converted to Catholicism in his twenties, spent time in a Benedictine monastery, then abandoned the faith for communism after a stint in the United States during the Depression. He saw the Soviet Union and was briefly dazzled by it. He wrote a tract defending Stalin that he would later disavow. None of this restlessness undermined his fiction; if anything, it gave it range. By the time he settled back in Iceland, he had absorbed modernism, Catholic mysticism, and Marxist politics — and had found a way to pour all of it into novels rooted in Icelandic soil.
Independent People, published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935, is the work that defines him: the story of Bjartur of Summerhouses, a crofter who spends his entire life in ferocious, self-destructive pursuit of independence, and in doing so destroys nearly everyone he loves. It is simultaneously a tragedy of stubborn individualism, a portrait of rural poverty, and a dark comedy of Icelandic character. The saga influence is everywhere — in the long time scale, the laconic prose, the dry irony that keeps sentiment at arm’s length. His World Light tetralogy and the historical Íslandsklukkan trilogy followed, confirming a range that moved from lyric beauty to epic sweep.
The 1955 Nobel Prize returned Laxness to Iceland as a national treasure, a status he wore with the same sardonic equanimity that his fiction recommended. He remains, in Iceland, what Tolstoy is to Russia or Dickens to England: not simply the best writer the country produced, but the one who gave the country a clear image of itself. In translation, he has been chronically underread, which is one of the more significant failures of the anglophone literary world.
by Halldór Laxness
Bjartur of Summerhouses has spent eighteen years in bondage to pay for his croft. Now free, he will be independent or die. Through drought, famine, debt, and the deaths of those he might have loved, Bjartur's stubbornness is heroic and catastrophic in equal measure. Laxness's masterpiece—the great Icelandic novel, and the reason he won the Nobel Prize.
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by Halldór Laxness
17th-century Iceland under Danish rule. Jón Hreggviðsson, a peasant wrongly accused of murder, fights his case through the Danish courts for decades. His story becomes entangled with that of an Icelandic scholar who believes in Iceland's spirit and a beautiful woman who survives everything. Laxness's historical epic about Icelandic identity under colonial rule.
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by Halldór Laxness
Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík is a sickly Icelandic boy who grows up in bondage to farmers and dreams of being a poet. He achieves his ambition and is destroyed by it—cheated, humiliated, loved by the wrong people, ignored by the world. The most lyrical of Laxness's novels, and his meditation on beauty's price.
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by Halldór Laxness
A young woman from rural Iceland comes to Reykjavik to work as a maid and learn to play the harmonium. She discovers that Iceland is selling its sovereignty to NATO—her employer is among the politicians profiting from the deal. Laxness's most politically direct novel, written in 1948 as a protest against Iceland's military agreements.
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