Independent People
by Halldor Laxness
A review by Jill Owens
Independent People was first published in Icelandic in 1946; it helped
ensure the Nobel Prize for its author, Haldor Laxness, but has been out of print
in English for most of the fifty years since. Much of Scandinavian literature
seems to entail a clear, young voice, incorporating fable-like rhythms into lilting,
transparent prose. Laxness's novel is no exception, and also contains an austerity,
a rich economy of language woven with undercurrents of mythological mystery.
The story of Bjartur of Summerhouses and his family struggling to survive in
an age when Icelandic sheep farming is slowly becoming less and less tenable,
Independent People is epic and thorough, covering the sweep of generations
as well as detailed hours ticking by during sleepless nights, ambling walks
around the plains. It is a novel of contrasts, especially in its nuanced exploration
of character: isolation and family; socialist ideals and the guilt of betrayal;
symbol and dream against the brutal truth of nature.
Bjartur is a farmer and also a poet, in the style of the old Icelandic sagas
with their internal rhymes and complicated syllabics. So, too, Laxness's use
of the language -- though lucid and smooth, his development and depth of image
can be as complex as Joyce's or Woolf's. His characters speak and see their
lives in concentric circles; the reader acquires a new layer of intimacy with
each turn.
Unusually enough for epics, especially one in which man's undoing waits in
every change of weather, Independent People is also awfully funny. Laxness
has a wonderful sense of irony; the reader knows much more than any one character
can see. The bailiff's wife extols the virtues of the Icelandic peasant without
ever having lifted a finger; the minister refuses to talk to his unworthy parishioners
about God. Fully realized minor characters abound, and the novel's dialogue
is exact. Laxness captures daily complaints about sheep and wayward children
as well as polished speeches of political candidates and the strange mutterings
(a mixture of Christianity and Icelandic legend) of the housekeepers.
But the story truly belongs to Bjartur and his daughter Asta Sollilja: the
immovable stone and the flower growing out from under it. Bjartur is, indeed,
intolerant, selfish, stupid -- "wonderfully stupid," in Brad Leithauser's
phrase -- and Asta irrational, dripping with dreams and tears. You cannot help
but see them in each other's eyes, one with a pall, the other a single-minded
blindness. Both insinuate their way into your heart; you wish to reach into
the novel and pluck the bad dreams away, open their eyes to each other, turn
them, like dolls, to embrace. Instead, they remain unreachably, stubbornly themselves,
acting and reacting in ways you can only admit are inevitable. The reader must
shake her head along with the grandmother in the corner, and sigh, "I knew
it would come to pass, this or something like it."
Laxness, in Independent People, exalts in the idea of sympathy as one
of the only ways that vastly different people -- dreamer and realist, socialist
and independent, father and child (alone among the sheep) -- can truly touch
each other's lives. He intimates it as a kind of respect when respect cannot
otherwise be given, the fruit of grudging tolerance, each noteworthy according
to its own nature. Through sympathy -- though never pity -- Laxness mitigates
the frustration of the idea of the other: accepting what cannot be changed,
and living nonetheless. No less each human life; no less our own.
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