Wearying with sadness ( )

I just wearied with the sadness of it all. Read about 1/3

Independent People by Iceland’s Nobel Prize winning author Halldor Laxness, is a magnificent book, skillfully written, brutal, captivating, and harsh.

At the end of 2018 and early 2019, I attempted to read both Independent People and Njal’s Saga in preparation for a trip to Iceland. I managed to read neither, dismayed by the weight and gravity of each tale. I understood the bleak novels once I had visited the countryside of Iceland. It is a beautiful but punitive land, waterfalls, mountains, and bird-heavy coastlines abutting miles upon miles of nothingness. There are almost no trees. Farming is a hard-won trade. Until the middle of the 20th century there was no electricity, and people lived in turf houses, poor shelter against the winds and low temperatures of the Icelandic winter. I visited a turf house and was overcome by coughing due to a smoking fire, poor ventilation and lack of windows.

In such a house does Bjartur live. He is the independent person of the title, a sheep farmer on his own hard-won land in Iceland. Nothing is as important to him as his ewes and his lambs. He has a battered horse and a mangy dog, has two wives over the book’s course, a mother-in-law, and a handful of children. His first child, a girl named Asta Solilja, is the light of his life although you would not know it from the text. The family struggles to live through cold, starvation, and 16-hour days tending the hay and the ewes. Bjartur is a unforgiving man, who places the comfort of his ewes above the well-being of his children. He is easy to hate, this poetry-composing farmer, and for reasons I don’t yet understand, part of me loved him despite his behaviour and words.

Through the book we are taken through the history of early 20th century Iceland. We see the beginnings of the cooperative movement, the Icelanders who move to America to escape the unforgiving land, the boon to trade that comes with WWI, and the incursion of socialism.

Although the twenty hours I spent listening to this book were hard ones in topic, there was great beauty in this novel. I think Laxness must have toyed with calling this book Bjartur’s Saga, as that is what it was. Filled with poetry, sagas and the supernatural, Independent People is eventually a story of redemption and hope. It is one of the most admirable books I’ve ever read, and hey! Njal’s Saga can be listened to on audiobook as well! ( )

Our book group chose [b:Independent People|77287|Independent People|Halldór Laxness|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1282892439s/77287.jpg|1391302] for rainy February's title and I tried several times to get into it without success. After about 150 pages, I was ready to concede defeat but persevered and finally started to cotton to this long, dense tale of an irascible Icelandic sheep farmer who buries two wives and numerous children and animals in his single-minded ambition to be an independent man beholden to none. Great swathes of text describe the unremitting misery of the climate and the lives of sheep and men, living and dead, as they struggle to survive. "Great is the tyranny of mankind," says Laxness, and great is the tyranny of the Classics reading list which brought this book to my attention. Yet, I admit that I liked it! The author can be wry and funny and poetic in spite of the hackneyed poetry salted throughout, the husbandry and the grim weather: "And the ceaseless rain of this inclement summer poured down upon the three little unprotected workmen of the moors...turning their headgear into a shapeless, sodden mass and running down their necks and faces in rivulets stained with the colour from their hats." Yet there is youth and beauty and love: "she was leading two spirited young thoroughbreds whose coats glistened with good feeding, glossy as silk. The sunshine and the breeze played in her golden hair, in its waves and its curls; her young bosom rose cupped above her slender waist, her arms were naked to the shoulder, her eyebrows curved in a high care-free bow. Her keen eyes reminded him both of the sky and of its hawks; her skin, radiant with the fresh bloom of youth, colour incomparable, make him think of wholesome new milk in May." (402) Bjartur, the key figure, relentlessly pursues his dream of independence realized in Summerhouses, his bought-and-paid-for plot of land after eighteen years of servitude as his family abandons him and his sheep come down with disease. And it hones to the definition of a classic as it tackles the human condition and our universal responses. My response would have been to abandon the sheep and retire with the coffee and a book while the snows blow around the croft, but these were hardier souls who need the sheep to survive. ( )

The weather is as brutal and unforgiving as some of the characters in Halldor Laxness' arduous and earth-and-sky-bound family saga (an almost obligatory word for a review of an Icelandic novel), and both snow and intransigence make for hard lives and hard reading at times.

The ironic title foregrounds the way in which Laxness' isolated sheep crofters are unable to escape the weather and each other, as well as time and place (with one exception), limited as they are by geography, politics, disease, ignorance, distrust and delusion. Much of the time they seem free only to make bad choices, hurt one other, and suffer the ups and downs of world war or sick sheep.

The story centers on Bjartur, a stubborn, harsh and myopic crofter who attempts to assert his financial, social and political independence in the face of an inhospitable landscape, disaffected family members, economic hardship and local superstition. His daily concerns and those of his busybody neighbours and local potentates revolve around sheep worms, mythical evil spirits, Icelandic poetry, debt and ownership, and coffee and food. Shepherding is foremost in his mind, and he is a disaster as a husband and father. The plot takes several tragic turns, through which Bjartur largely plows unbowed, unrepentant and unaware of his fundamental dependence on the world around him.

If this all sounds grim, it is. However Laxness manages to bring a sardonic humour to bear on the misunderstandings, illusions and impulses of his characters that allows the reader to find a lighter perspective on these lives that allows - in some admittedly narrow crevices - for signs of hope and redemption. Not to mention his frequently lyrical writing, as translated by J. A. Thompson, and his compassion for his characters' limitations and impoverished lives. This rich and complex novel continually reminds us that our dependencies, not just our autonomies, can provide meaning and beauty:

". . . but weeping too is an independent element in the breast of man, another current, and weeping also is controlled from another world, and man is defenceless against his own tears and cannot get away and cannot get away and cannot get away"

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