Under the Glacier

Having read one book by Laxness before, The Fish Can Sing, which I loved, this felt kind of like more of the same, but different. I mean that in a positive way. I've never been to Iceland, nor am I overly familiar with Iceland, but Laxness' works feel exactly like an Icelandic book would, to me. They feel somewhat dreamlike, but not really, I wouldn't even be able to really put a genre on this. That's also how Susan Sontag introduced it, which I thought was pretty interesting:

“The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated int he nineteenth century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose opinions and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that deviate from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the nineteenth century, but still, to this day, seem innovative or ultra-literary or bizarre. I am thinking of novels that proceed largely through dialogue; novels that are relentlessly jocular (and therefore seem exaggerated) or didactic; novels whose characters spend most of their time musing to themselves or debating with a captive interlocutor about spiritual and intellectual issues; novels that tell of the initiation of an ingenuous young person into mystifying wisdom or revelatory abjection; novels with characters who have supernatural options, like shape-shifting and resurrection; novels that evoke imaginary geography. It seems odd to describe Gulliver's Travels or Candide or Tristram Shandy or Jacques the Fatalist and His Master or Alice in Wonderland or Gershenzon and Ivanov's Correspondence from Two Corners or Kafka's The Castle or Hesse's Steppenwolf or Woolf's The Waves or Olaf Stapledon's Odd John or Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke or Calvino's Invisible Cities or, for that matter, prono narratives simply as novels. To make the point that these occupy the outlying precincts of the novel's main tradition, special labels are invoked.

Science fiction.

Tale, fable, allegory.

Philosophical novel.

Dream novel.

Visionary novel.

Literature of fantasy.

Wisdom lit.

Spoof.

Sexual turn-on.

Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries' perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories.

The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Halldor Laxness's wildly original, morose, uproarious Under the Glacier.”

That's an intriguing introduction, and it definitely sold me on the book. Laxness is the one Icelandic author everyone should read.