World Light Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: PRONUNCIATION

  INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S - World Light

  BOOK ONE - THE REVELATION OF THE DEITY

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  BOOK TWO - THE PALACE OF THE SUMMERLAND

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  BOOK THREE - THE HOUSE OF THE POET

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  BOOK FOUR - THE BEAUTY OF THE HEAVENS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  NOTES

  About the Author

  Also by HALLDÓR LAXNESS

  Copyright Page

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: PRONUNCIATION

  The modern Icelandic alphabet has thirty-two letters, compared with twenty-six in modern English. There are two extra consonants (ð and þ), and an additional diphthong (æ). Readers may find a note on the pronounciations of specifically Icelandic letters helpful:

  ð (Ð), known as “eth” or “crossed d,” is pronounced like the (voiced) th in breathe. þ (), known as “thorn,” is pronounced like the (unvoiced) th in breaths. æ is pronounced like the i in life.

  The pronunciation of the vowels is conditioned by the accents:

  á like the ow in owl

  é like the ye in yet

  í like the ee in seen

  ó like o in note

  ö like the eu in French fleur

  ú like the oo in soon

  ý like the ee in seen

  au like the œi in French œil

  ei, ey, like the ay in tray

  Please note asterisks (*) within the text indicate an explanatory note to be found on pages 599–606.

  INTRODUCTION TO HALLDÓR LAXNESS’S

  World Light

  BY SVEN BIRKERTS

  The first, and possibly main, thing to be said about Halldór Laxness’s World Light is that it is a surpassingly strange novel. Strange as in exalting, eye-opening, and sense-refreshing. But certainly strange. The book fits on none of the usual grids. It cannot be assimilated to the categories of psychological novel, or social, or historical, or philosophical, or, quite, spiritual; certainly it has elements of all. Neither is it an old style Bildungsroman, though in its presentation of a life in fairly distinct “stages,” it owes some debt to that form. It does not create a strong dramatic arc, avoiding most strategies whereby tensions are gathered toward resolution, creating instead its own unique terms and procedures. Nor does it have as its core preoccupation the exploration of human relationships. And though it features as its protagonist an individual with a strong visionary aptitude, it does not ascend, except in isolated—wonderful—bursts, into the realms of higher seeing; it remains quite closely tethered to the inhospitable ground surface of its Icelandic setting. World Light, more than almost any novel I can think of, declares itself sui generis, summoning readers with its call to independence.

  Moving in on the novel from a distance, we can first try to place it in the context of the author’s career. Halldór Laxness, the undisputed giant of Icelandic letters, was born Halldór Kiljan Guthdjónsson in Reykjavík in 1902, and began to publish early—a privately printed love story, Child of Nature, appearing when he was just seventeen, followed in short order by stories, a novel, a treatise on Catholicism, a collection of essays, and poems, all before his thirtieth year. In the decade of his thirties, Laxness would produce his monumental saga, Independent People (1934–35), various stories and essays, a play, and then, in 1937, first issued in four separate volumes, World Light. Dozens of works of all descriptions followed decade after decade, including The Fish Can Sing, representing the more directly lyrical turn of his late career, which was published in 1957, two years after the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many of these works have not been translated into English and remain inaccessible to this reader. But the point is obvious: World Light, like any of Laxness’s works we may wish to single out, is but a boulder in a rockslide, one small part of what might be seen as a compulsive lifelong quest to fix a world to the page.

  Yet for all that, there is nothing that feels rushed or ad hoc or partial about the novel. It possesses an almost glacial mass and solidity, and unfolds in an atmosphere of such pre-electronic stasis that the present-day reader may feel she has been removed to a counterworld, a place of the imagination where everything happens differently, where scarcely any news of modernity has reached. How odd it feels when we encounter, as we do, once or twice, references to the telephone or to airplanes, reminders that the world of the novel might be more or less contemporaneous with novels by Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence.

  Laxness’s narrative of the hardscrabble and ultimately (at least from the outside) tragic life of Ólafur Kárason is based, at least in part, on events and episodes from the life of one Magnus Hjaltason Magnússon, an Icelandic folk poet (1873–1916), including Magnússon’s abandonment by his mother, his long childhood illness as well as the extreme deprivations he endured, his tormented marriage to a grasping, manipulative epileptic woman, and his prison sentence for the sexual violation of a fourteen-year-old girl. But if the Magnússon story activated Laxness’s imagination and gave him a scaffold of sorts, his mission was less to re-create the life than to use the solitudes and encounters of that life to he
lp him body forth a whole culture, the world of tough-luck villages and remote farmsteads, and to play variations upon some of his favored themes, like the isolation of the creative imagination, the deep-rooted struggles between the forces of labor and capital, and the all-transforming power of the spiritual encounter.

  The four books of World Light can be seen to represent the four essential stages, or passages, in the life of Ólafur Kárason, taking him from the damaging indignities of his boyhood in the rural isolation of the oddly named Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti, into the isolation and romantic and poetic questing of his young manhood in the village of Sviðinsvík; through the demoralizing entrapment of marriage and the abrasions of political and moral struggle in the conflict between union-activists and owners that transforms village life for a long period; bringing us finally to his public disgrace, trial, and imprisonment, all of which destroy the frail structures of his life and pave the way for his tragic romantic transfiguration. But while movement from our first introduction to our last sighting—the poet walking out to his certain death on the vast glacier—can hardly be called happy or fulfilling, the paradoxical triumph of the novel is that the reader nevertheless feels throughout the ennobling and redeeming force of the spirit.

  This redemption is manifest for Ólafur—and the reader—both as a sense of mystical union, experienced over and over through the poet’s encounters with the beauty of the physical world and in his periodic seizures of creative inspiration. And this last points to what is probably the greatest liberty Laxness has taken with his source material. For folk poet Magnússon was by all accounts regarded as a second-rate versifier, hardly a vessel for the Northern Muse. But whatever the objective quality of Ólafur’s verses—the cited examples don’t make the case for greatness—the visitations he experiences have a Rilkean intensity and integrity. The author, so fond of mocking his characters, protagonist included, is dead earnest in depicting the shuddering inrush of inspiration. It renders all of Ólafur’s real-life travails temporarily moot.

  World Light opens with great vividness and compression. The boy Ólafur, who will come to seem to us as solitary as any character in literature, the works of Beckett included, is seen standing by himself on the shore of the bay of Ljósavík. Within a few pages we have grasped both his situation and his character. A dreamer, drawn to the distant promise of books as well as to the immediate solace of his natural surrounding, Ólafur is ridiculed and ritually abused by the rudely unreflective members of his adoptive family. His mother, who is still alive, had him sent away from her in a sack while he was still a baby. He has been taken in less out of kindness than in the vain hope that he will grow up to be a useful worker on the homestead. Life at Fótur-undir-Fótarfæti is bitter, at near-subsistence level—“sometimes the evening meal was only pickled tripe and milk”(5)—and Ólafur, frail as he is, can do little to pull his weight. He lives in corners and crannies, hiding from the blows of his two thuggish “brothers,” his inconspicuousness belying the fierce intensity of his inwardness, which battens onto whatever scraps it can—cautionary stories told by his stepmother, the few books and pamphlets he comes across. From these paltry influences arises his ambition: “Often the boy was overwhelmed by an uncontrollable yearning to write down in a hundred books everything he saw, despite what anyone said—two hundred books as thick as the Book of Sermons, whole Bibles, whole chests of books”(7).

  Then there is the matter of his spiritual susceptibility. Not yet nine, he is described as having mystical encounters worthy of one of the Desert Fathers: “He would be standing down by the bay, perhaps, in the early days of spring, or up on the headland to the west of the bay where there was a mound with a rich green tussock on top. . . . Then suddenly he felt he saw God’s image open before him. He felt the deity reveal itself in Nature in an inexpressible music, the sonic revelation of the deity; and before he knew it he himself had become a trembling voice in a celestial chorus of glory”(10). At times Ólafur seems to be a splinter of the extraordinary wedged into a world driven forward by the most limiting natural exigencies.

  Humiliated by his family, divided within himself by their conflicting claims on him, brought to the breaking point by the tension between his inward sense of things and the unyielding crudity of his circumstance, Ólafur collapses into his long infirmity—the nature of his illness is never clear, not to the family or the reader—taking to his little bed under the eaves. Here, mostly ignored, reviled from a distance, he retreats into a kind of waking coma, a condition of extreme life deprivation interrupted only by the arrival, for a time, of an old man named Jósep, with whom he discusses the glories of poetry and the Icelandic sagas before the old man dies, and the sporadic visits from Magnína, the poignantly obese daughter of the house, who surreptitiously reads to Ólafur from the one precious book in the house, The Felsenburg Stories.

  Laxness, so generously lyrical in scenes of spiritual encounter, can also render the near-absolute stasis of Ólafur’s confinement: “This boy had counted the floorboards and the joints and the planks in the clinker-built ceiling more than a thousand times . . . He knew every single knot in the ceiling and the floor, and every single nail, and how the rust from the nails had stained the wood” (71). We can scarcely believe that anything will ever change. But always, when the limits of the tolerable have been reached and exceeded, comes rescue: “Then suddenly Magnína came up the stairs, brought out a worn book from under her apron, and sat down on the edge of his bed” (71).

  The subtle art of the first section is to persuade us of Ólafur’s absolute estrangement and to prepare the ground for the various strange transformations that will follow in succeeding sections. Soon enough the family will give up on the useless invalid, whose illness is regarded as sheer laziness by the vicious brothers, and he will be sent away to burden others.

  The first book closes with several fateful encounters, a phrase which is to be taken quite literally, for Ólafur’s life, like the lives of characters in myth and legend, is in a sense nothing but a sequence of fateful encounters.

  At one point, not long before his departure, the family celebrates the wedding of Jónas, one of the brothers. The house is full of guests. Ólafur, abed as ever, listening to the noises downstairs, suddenly discovers that there is a young woman in the room with him. This is Jarþrúður from Gil, who for some reason—poor health, it appears—is avoiding the festivities. Her exhausted indistinctness is vivid. Ólafur “had to examine her carefully to make sure she had any appearance at all. Youth had faded from her cheeks and her eyes were brownish and moist like seaweed . . .” (90–91) But Jarþrúður seems to be a young woman of some sensibility, and as they converse, she somehow manages to extract from Ólafur the promise that he will one day marry her, a promise that will become one of the terrible manacles of his later life.

  Then, one day soon after, the mysterious “escort” Reimar comes to take the young man away. The destination is unclear. Indeed, departure is thrust upon Ólafur like some arbitrary stroke of fate. The boy is so weak that he has to be carted away over the mountains and through the rocky valleys on a stretcher. But Reimar, who will play a crucial messenger role at novel’s end, has a plan. He brings him to órunn of Kambar, a beautiful, provocative priestess figure who lives with her sisters at an isolated farmstead. There, with incantations and the laying on of hands, órunn miraculously restores Ólafur to health, gives him back to the world, though that world will prove for long years to be but the shambles of an isolated fishing village.

  The second book begins with Ólafur’s arrival in Sviðinsvík, where his visionary inwardness will suffer the complex assaults of new circumstance. The young poet, destitute, necessarily reliant on the proverbial kindness of strangers, is pulled inexorably into the intensities of village life, first through his contact with Vegmey, yet another of the mysterious young women who appear in the pages of the novel as if by spontaneous generation, then with the various rivalrous town officials—the partish officer, the Privy-Counc
illor, and Pétur ríhross, manager of the Regeneration Company, a peculiar mercantile operation that seems to have the whole village clutched in its economic tentacles.

  Through the offices of the energetically self-involved ríhross, Ólafur comes to squat in a dilapidated abandoned manor house called the Palace of the Summerlands, to which he repairs when he is not foraging for food, composing poems for village occasions, or wandering about the countryside, often as not thinking of Vegmey. The soul of the poet is compelled by beauty and the fierce longing for love. Looking at Vegmey, he has seen “that hot, wordless dreamland which is sometimes in a girl’s eyes when she looks at a man” (142).

  The second book, drawing a broad and often satirical portrait of village life, is episodically constructed around Ólafur’s various encounters and involvements. If his interactions with Pétur ríhross expose him to the machinating intelligence of the merchant entrepreneur, then his later friendship with Örn Úlfar exposes him to the most extreme political idealism. Örn may be a socialist dreamer, but he is also an activist bent upon breaking the monopolistic hold that the Regeneration Company has over the village. He wants to help his fellow villagers establish a union that will guarantee them equitable wages. While Örn is Ólafur’s opposite—a man of action and engagement—the two men share an emotional zealousness in the service of a larger vision of life.

  More kindred in obvious ways is the poetess, a laborer’s wife who takes Ólafur in and feeds him when he needs care, and who, far more importantly, encourages him in his poetic pursuits: “The poetess gave him paper and exercise books, and then he would sit up late, sometimes all night, writing with all his might as if the end of the world could overwhelm them at any moment and everything depended on getting enough words down on paper before the sun, the moon and the stars were wiped out” (192).

  Events in this second book take an overtly comic turn when órunn of Kambor, who had been the one to restore Ólafur to health, is brought in by the manager to conduct a séance, one radical consequence of which is the decision of the town’s Psychic Research Society to disinter the bones of Satan and Musa, a long-dead murderer and adultress, to have them reburied, an initiative meant to mark a symbolic new beginning for the village. The intensity of debate among the locals inscribes as nothing else could the credulous insularity of village life.