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Avg. Rating: 4.5
Sheep and Cows
The book started off very slow, and without an appreciation of sheep, cows, or rural Iceland I found it difficult to get through. By the end I thoroughly enjoyed it and was impressed by the characters, and the progress that Iceland had made in a generation.
Kindle Edition full of typos
This is not a review of the book, but a review of the Kindle Edition. The publisher and Amazon should be ashamed to charge money for such a badly assembled e-book. Hardly a page goes by without a typo that would have been caught by a non-English speaker with a spell-checker. The first word of almost every line of dialogue is garbled, because the optical-character recognition software doesn't recognize opening quotation marks. "I'll routinely appears as Hell and "I've appears as VVe. I can understand that many of the free or nearly free public-domain titles that are available as Kindle Editions might have typos or poor navigation from the table of contents. But for $9.99, I expect a book that is relatively free of typographical errors. Shame, shame, shame!
Bjarturing bread for independence
"Independence" is a word thrown around a lot, especially here in America where we think we have some kind of freehold on it. For much of its history, Iceland was a desperately poor land of sheep farmers and fishermen with a very small class of large landowners and merchants (often Danish) who kept the others in thrall. Halldor Laxness lived and wrote in the times when this age-old society was changing. He helped bring in the change, supporting a better life for his long-suffering countrymen, supporting socialism. If he had a slightly too rosy a view of Russian communism, he didn't, at least, have to live under a system so arbitrary and cruel. But what of a poor Icelander from "the back blocks" as the Australians say, who worked and struggled all his life to make a go of it, fighting the elements, predatory landowners, and supernatural enemies as well ? INDEPENDENT PEOPLE is the epic story of such a man, known as `Bjartur of Summerhouses', who remains aloof from every enticement, every trend or opinion. He refuses to side with the cooperative movement, he refuses to kowtow to the local powers as well. To eat someone else's bread is the worst fate he can imagine. To avoid that, he will let his wives and children die, lose the surviving children to emigration or urban poverty, live his life in a leaky hovel, and refuse all help from whatever quarter. Above all, he isolates himself from his stepdaugher Asta Sollilja, who craves his love. He denies any feeling for her, or for anything except his sheep. Yet he will not be defeated. Stoic survival at last breaks to reveal the feelings Bjartur suppressed for years so that he could carry on. If you don't choke up at the end, you haven't got an ounce of emotion. He might well be Iceland itself---a tiny nation as the world counts nations--but always itself, always choosing its own path, no matter what the consquences.
INDEPENDENT PEOPLE is one of the great novels of this world. If Laxness had not written other great books like "Salka Valka" and "The Fish Can Sing", his reputation would have been settled forever with just this one book. Pathos, love, courage, childhood, the beautiful but harsh landscape, the cries of marsh birds in the vast silence, the lives of rural Icelanders in the first quarter of the 20th century and their struggles for change---everything is portrayed by a master. How could you not read it ?
Bleak, comic, and unforgettable
At the beginning of this edition of "Independent People" is a patch of thin ice onto which you must not--must not--venture. It is Brad Leithauser's forward, which should really be an afterward (and it would be a very good one, indeed). Unfortunately, Leithauser's essay gives away the plot in ways that no introduction ever should. Should you fall into this before reading such a wonderful novel, you will be very very sorry.
Once past this danger, prepare to give this book your full attention and to lose yourself in another time and place. There are many summaries of this novel in other reviews, so rather than repeat them, I'll just mention two things, and I won't give away anything. First, enjoy Laxness's rendering of the farm talk among these Icelandic crofters when they come together at weddings and funerals. It's specific (sheep maladies, taxes, straying children, straying sheep), bleak, colloquial, and often comic. If you live in a rural area, you can hear a version of the same thing at the feed store or a church supper. Second, get ready to be astonished at the sheer complexity of all of the characters, even minor ones, not just the central characters, Bjartur the crofter and his daughter, Asta Sollilja. There is, for instance, Madam Myri, the local well-to-do poetess who makes pronouncements on the virtues of rural life. There is Hallbera, the muttering grandmother who lives longer than almost anyone else, like a candle (as the narrator says) that can't be snuffed. You will not be able to forget any of them.
This is not an easy novel to recommend to others. A novel about an Icelandic sheepherder, you say? A novel about a man so conservative, so principled, so stubborn, and so independent that he expects nothing from anyone (including the government) and can scarcely accept a gift proffered freely? Is Bjartur a man for our times?
Don't fail to get your hands on this great novel so that you can decide for yourself.
M. Feldman
A tough, stubborn, surprising book
Laxness, an Icelandic author, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955 for his ability to create epic tales. This is certainly one of them. It's the story of Bjartur, an Icelandic sheep farmer who is set like a mountain in his ways. He stubbornly bears the loss of family members, attacks on his sheep, political corruption and the changing world around him, set on his goal to live independently and build his home and farm, Summerhouse.
"Yes, it was a good man indeed who could stand immovable as a rock in these times, when everything around him, including money and views of life, was afloat and swirling in perpetual change; when the strongest boundary walls between men and things in time and place were being washed away; when the impossible was becoming possible and even the wishes of those who had never dared to make a wish were being fulfilled."
The most interesting conflict though, better than Bjartur's conflict with the world, is his stubborn feud with his equally strong-willed daughter, Asta Solilja. The pig-headed way in which Bjartur disowns his daughter and refuses to make amends makes you hate him, but in the end, as he is weighted down by debt and loneliness and finally begins to admit regrets, it's hard not to feel for Bjartur. For his entire life, he has been principled to a fault, but principled nonetheless. It is then, as he looks over Summerhouse, ruined by poor financing and poor construction, that he writes:
"For what are riches and houses and power
If in that house blooms no lovely flower?"
Independent People is a book that at times feels like it is being endured, much as Bjartur endurs the harsh northern winters. While there are moments of action, sharp conflict and shocking surprise, much of the novel is concerned with the various diseases that infect the sheep, descriptions of the weather and landscape, the politics of socialism and the poems that Bjartur enjoys writing and reciting. It's rewarding in the end, but is a slog to get through. It has been compared to Tolstoy. The story at times also reminded me of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, though I would be quicker to recommend that book. As frustrating as it is at times, by recommending Independent People to someone, I'd worry that they might return and throw the book at me.
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