Independent People

Laxness, the Nobel Prize-winning author from Iceland who died in l998, is one of the great novelists of the twentieth century, but somehow I’ve missed him until just this year. 

Independent People is his classic—a book about an Icelandic sheep farmer that has a depth of understanding and compassion that makes Hemingway seem shallow.

This book is for readers who demand the most from a novel.

The Icelandic author Halldor Laxness, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1955, yet few people have heard of him. A shame! I recently discovered this extraordinary writer by listening to the audiobook of his most famous work, the novel  Independent People.

Written in 1935, it is a dramatic narrative telling of a poor Icelandic family beset by poverty and superstition. The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is a stubborn, harsh man whose struggle to remain independent—to own his own land and sustain his livelihood completely by himself—is the backbone of this strange, beautiful saga that poignantly… show more.

Iceland is one of the first off-the-beaten-track places I visited as an aspiring young travel writer and I arrived with the onset of the first Gulf War - the one against Saddam Hussein.

I visited with three other people. We immediately met a man in Reykjavik who introduced us to his diplomat friend, and before it was all said and done we spent most of that trip with the Icelander and the Frenchman in front of a much more rudimentary CNN, watching the war.

While I’ve been back to Iceland a number of times since, that first trip, the instant… show more.

A key work of Iceland's only Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, the novel describes the struggle of a family of poor farmers in the north of Iceland, against debt bondage and the harsh nature of the island. Laxness portrays the quintessential experience of generations of Icelanders, a country that was one of the poorest in Europe for centuries, and at the same time shows how important and crucial the old stories and poems from the sagas, and poetry and the written word overall, have remained throughout these centuries for all Icelanders as the unifying element of Icelandic culture and society.

To understand Icelanders, I believe you need to understand Bjartur. Bjartur is the independent hero of Halldór Laxness’s greatest novel, Independent People. The book is set at the beginning of the twentieth century. Over eighteen years as a shepherd, Bjartur saves the money to buy his own farm on some very marginal land. Bjartur’s life is a struggle to eke a living out of this farm, called Summerhouses. He marries twice, faces starvation and destitution, but never gives up on his dream of remaining an independent farmer. He is stubborn to the point of cruelty. He is also a… show more.

Written in the 1930s by Iceland's Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness, Independent People is to my mind one of the great (out of favor) literary works of the 20th Century. This epic novel following sheep farmer Jónsson not only bridges the old world of witches and superstitions with Modern Man's agnostic search for independence, but, I think, also makes the Western case for the East's belief in 'karma.' At the heart of all our experiences in life, Laxness seems to be saying, sit not only the causes and effects of our personal behavior in this lifetime, but also the entire repository… show more.

Perhaps Asta Sollilja is the fictional heroine who haunts me the most - even more than Gudrid. Her sufferings are the result of accumulative bitter ironies on a saga scale, but Asta Sollilja has a capacity for love that isn’t evident in the strong women of the Medieval sagas. She has a different kind of strength. Born into poverty-stricken rural Iceland in the early 1900s, Asta Sollilja is raised the hard way by her stepfather Bjartur, the central character of the novel. Bjartur’s harsh struggle as an independent sheep farmer is emblematic of Iceland (national independence came in 1944). However,… show more.