Volume 49, Number 15 · October 10, 2002
Laxness the Great
By Brad Leithauser
Paradise Reclaimed
by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson, with an introduction by Jane Smiley
Vintage, 304 pp., $13.00 (paper)
The Fish Can Sing
by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson
London: Harvill, 246 pp., $13.00 (paper)
In the Fifties, in his fifties, the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness entered a stretch of broad and seemingly easeful creativity. This was an Indian summer whose angling northern sunlight invested the most earthbound objects in his books—stone walls, turf huts, paving stones, spindly trees—with a clement and redemptive glow. A number of plausible explanations might account for why this writer, whose turbulent earlier novels had been painted in blood reds and icy grays, chose now to portray his characters in golds and ambers. Perhaps the change in palette mirrored the literal gold of his Nobel Prize, awarded in 1955, when he was fifty-three. Or perhaps it reflected the gratifications of a happy second marriage and a growing brood of daughters. The mellowing effects of simple aging may have had something to do with it. Or maybe the change is best understood as another phase in a protracted artistic evolution: Laxness was a peripatetic soul, both physically and artistically, whose literary career was marked by sharp veerings and departures.
Review, 4312 words
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