Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
Golden Notebooks
By Brad Leithauser
The Complete Sagas of Icelanders
edited by Vidar Hreinsson
Reykjavik: Leifur Eiriksson, five volumes, 2,260 pp., $299.00
The Sagas of Icelanders: A Selection
with a preface by Jane Smiley and an introduction by Robert Kellogg
Penguin, 782 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Let's assume you deplane in a foreign country, in the dead of night, in the dead of winter, and get into a cab. The driver speaks lightly accented but excellent English. You ask about the weather lately and what follows would do a professional meteorologist proud: an avidly comprehensive report, involving a high-pressure area to the east and a low-pressure area to the west, or maybe vice versa, which, in conjunction with atypical precipitation patterns in neighboring countries, and slight divergences in the usual ocean currents, have contributed to the highly uncommon weather of late. (You'll have to take on faith that the weather's peculiar; the sky outside the cab is black and you can't see a thing.) Next, the cabbie learns that you're an English teacher and he holds up a Modern Library edition of Izaak Walton's seventeenth-century classic, The Compleat Angler, which he's enjoying hugely. He solicits your professional opinion ('But do you think Walton has a graceful style?'), and you mumble in reply, 'I haven't read it, I'm only an English teacher, not a cab driver'—or something of the sort. What country are you in?
Review, 5105 words
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