Independent People
Amid the bleak, frozen wastes of an Icelandic winter, Bjartur of Summerhouses tends his sheep. A proud, stubborn man, who ekes out his humble living in a constant battle against nature, he has at last acquired his own smallholding after eighteen years as a hired hand.
Halldór Laxness´s splendid achievement in this timeless, elemental masterpiece, wich was one of the works for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, is to have evoked the mood and rhythm of life in an isolated community in a remote corner of Europe as no other writer has done since the time of the great Icelandic sagas. Richly lyrical, often humorous, conceived on a grand scale, and with a cast of memorable characters, Independent People is one of the truly great poetic novels of our century.
"There are good books and there are great books and there may be a book that is something still more: it is book of your life" Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books.
"I love this book. It is an unfolding wonder of artistic vision and skill - one of the best books of the twentieth century. I can´t imagine any greater delight than coming to Independet People for the first time" Jane Smiley.
"(Laxness is) a poet who writes to the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: he takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in an Evelyn Waugh-like humour: it is not possible to be unimpressed. The right stuff, the real thing" Fay Weldon on her"Book of the Century", Daily Telegraph.
Publisher: The Harvell Press, London, 1999.
Size: 13,5 x 21,5 cm
Softcovercover with 544 pages.