The Fish Can Sing Read online

  Halldór Laxness

  THE FISH CAN SING

  Halldór Laxness was born near Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he has written more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 1998.

  ALSO BY HALLDÓR LAXNESS

  Iceland’s Bell

  Independent People

  Paradise Reclaimed

  Under the Glacier

  World Light

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, FEBRUARY 2008

  Translation copyright © 1966 by Methuen & Co. Ltd.

  Copyright © 2000 by Magnus Magnusson

  Introduction copyright © 2008 by Jane Smiley

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in Icelandic as Brekkukotsannáll by Helgafell, Iceland, 1957. Copyright © by Öll réttindi áskilin, 1957. This translation first published in Great Britain by Methuen & Co. Ltd, in London, in 1966, and revised by The Harvill Press, an imprint of The Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2000.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents, either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-38934-3

  Map by Emily Hare

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note on Pronounciation

  Map

  Introduction by Jane Smiley

  1 A Strange Creature

  2 Fine Weather

  3 Special Fish

  4 What is the Value of the Bible?

  5 Two Women and a Picture

  6 Proper Titles at Brekkukot

  7 Barbed Wire at Hvammskot

  8 The Mid-Loft

  9 The Authorities

  10 Talk and Writing at Brekkukot

  11 The Icelander’s University

  12 A Good Funeral

  13 A Woman from Landbrot

  14 Light over Hríngjarabær

  15 White Ravens

  16 Superintendent and Visitor

  17 Pepper for Three Aurar

  18 When Our Lykla Calves

  19 Morning of Eternity: and End

  20 Latin

  21 Converting the Chinese

  22 Schubert

  23 Gardar Hólm’s Second Homecoming

  24 Der Erlkönig

  25 A Man in the Churchyard?

  26 The Note

  27 The Chief Justice

  28 Secret Doctrine at Brekkukot

  29 A Good Marriage

  30 The Soul Clad in Air

  31 Perhaps the God

  32 Political Meeting in the Temperance Hall: the Barbers’ Bill

  33 Fame

  34 Gardar Hólm’s Third Homecoming

  35 Ribbons and Bows

  36 Evening at the Archangel Gabriel’s Tomb

  37 Night in the Hotel d’lslande

  38 Singing in the Cathedral

  39 The Store’s Jubilee

  40 One Eyrir

  41 The End

  NOTE ON PRONOUNCIATION

  The only extra consonant in Icelandic used in this translation is _(D), the so called “crossed d” or “eth”, which is pronounced like the voiced the in breathe.

  The pronunciation of the vowels is conditioned by the same accents:

  á as in owl

  é as in ye, in yet

  í as in seen

  ó as in note

  ö as in French fleur

  ú as in moon

  y as in seen

  æ as in life

  au as in French oeil

  ei, ey as in tray

  Introduction to the Vintage Edition

  By Jane Smiley

  When Halldór Kiljan Laxness stood up, in 1955, to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, he opened by referring to his double obscurity: “I was travelling in the south of Sweden a few weeks ago, when I heard the rumour that the choice of the Swedish Academy might possibly fall on me. Alone in my hotel room that night, I naturally began to ask myself what it would mean to a poor wanderer, a writer from one of the most remote islands in the world, to be suddenly singled out by an institution famous for its promotion of culture, and brought here to the platform by its command.”

  Twenty-first-century American readers may take this modesty at face value, but in fact, in this speech as in all of his works, Halldór Laxness was playing a layered game, and in the novel he was writing at the time, The Fish Can Sing, we can see just how adept Laxness was at folding irony upon irony, double meaning upon double meaning. Halldór Laxness was no simple reincarnation of the obscure authors of the Icelandic Sagas—he was a sophisticated, well-traveled, highly literate modernist author who was as adept as anyone at employing language and literary form to depict and comment upon the complex world around him. He was also hardly obscure—in Iceland, he was by far the most famous writer of his century, and Iceland had an almost universal literary culture. His work was also firmly in the tradition of such celebrated Scandinavian authors (and winners of the Nobel Prize) as Sigrid Undset and Knut Hamsun (whose 1920 novel, Growth of the Soil had partly inspired Laxness’s own Independent People, 1935). The Nobel exposed him to a wider audience, but Salka Valka had been translated into English in 1936, Independent People had been translated in 1948, and Laxness had been awarded the Stalin Peace Prize (later renamed the Lenin Peace Prize) in 1949. Indeed, Laxness did not receive the Nobel as a “poor wanderer,” but as an author who had been ambitious and controversial for, at that point, about twenty-five years.

  But, as The Fish Can Sing demonstrates, Laxness was preoccupied with the interplay of fame and obscurity, worldliness and humility, “out there” and “back home” while he was writing the novel, and it is a remarkable novel for a man at the height of his career to have been writing.

  Entitled Brekkukotsannáll in Icelandic, The Fish Can Sing takes as its inspiration the medieval form of the chronicle—that is, a year-by-year account of the events in a given spot—a monastery or an outpost.

  It is a humble form, with no pretensions to theme or development. It is, perhaps, the closest literary form to the unvarnished events of life itself, the diary of a place rather than a person. In the case of Brekkukot, a fishing outpost not far from Reykjavík, there are few events that break the mesmerizing monotony of seasonal existence.

  Bjorn, the patriarch, is a fisherman who catches fish from his rowboat and sells them from a wheelbarrow each day to regular customers. His great virtue is that he ignores the precepts of capitalism entirely, and sells his fish for the same price whether they are scarce or plentiful. His companion, whom the narrator refers to only as “Grandmother,” keeps the house and takes in various stray humans, including the narrator, who is the son of a girl who had been leaving on a ship for America. With his customary wit, Laxness begins the novel, “A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.” In other words—Reader, beware! Paradoxes abound!

  Alfgrimur, the narr
ator and protagonist of the novel, is a happy child. His world ends at the gate of the little farm, and he feels surrounded by interesting and affectionate “characters” (in both the sociological and the literary sense). There is an anomaly in his world, though—a woman who lives nearby, Kristin, is the mother of the most famous Icelander ever, Gardar Holm, an opera singer who travels the world, singing before kings, popes, and other luminaries. Gardar is adept at Icelandic music—thereby bringing Iceland to the greater world—but he is also adept at opera and classical music, and is particularly famous for singing Franz Schubert’s “Der Erlkonig,” an especially difficult song about a child foreseeing his own death at the hands of an “elf king” (the first syllable of Alfgrimur’s name also means “elf”). Periodically, Gardar Holm returns to Iceland from abroad, and his visits are much anticipated and celebrated by the Icelanders, especially by Gudmundur Gudmundsen (whose patronymic is spelled in the Danish rather than the Icelandic fashion), the man who owns the largest import/export company in Reykjavík, and also one of the newspapers. Gudmundur’s daughter also figures in the narrative—she is about the same age as Alfgrimur, but she is obsessed with Gardar Holm.

  Alfgrimur is not without talents himself; he is soon discovered to be a good singer. One of his jobs as a boy is to sing at the funerals of unidentifiable men who have been pulled out of the sea and must be buried in the nearby churchyard. Gardar Holm acknowledges some sort of relationship to Alfgrimur, but what it is remains ambiguous. The reader is led to believe that the resemblance that others see between the two could be paternal (since Alfgrimur’s father is not named, and his patronymic is “Hansson,” meaning “his son,” a sign of illegitimacy). Alfgrimur’s grandfather and grandmother are ambitious for him. Against his will, they send him to school, and gradually his horizons expand. Though he is always drawn to the humble goodness of his earliest companions, he recognizes his obligation to leave home and fulfill his promise.

  In fact, according to the website of the Laxness museum in Iceland, Halldór Laxness was contemplating fame a great deal when he first conceived The Fish Can Sing: “Wherever Laxness travelled, he always took along a notebook in which he jotted down his thoughts and things that seemed relevant to whatever he was working on at the time. One such notebook from the 1950s contains a statement of intent with regard to The Fish Can Sing: “ ‘The Hidden People,’ the ordinary, ‘unspoilt’ people—however infinitely frail from the standpoint of moral theology or other codes of ethics—the book is to be a hymn of praise to them, proof that it is precisely these people, the ordinary people, who foster all peaceful human virtues. The main character has his origin in the tranquil depths of the common people, and [the decent people] he meets in his youth have the effect of making all the glory of the world seem hollow on the day when it is offered to him—as a result of the longing he feels to return home and experience once more the tranquil depths of ordinary human existence.”

  Although Laxness wrote this passage and conceived The Fish Can Sing while in his mid-fifties, in even his earliest writings he was preoccupied with how to live a moral life, and how personal and public morality intersect and influence one another. In the course of his long career, he embraced at least three conversions—the first was to Catholicism, in the early 1920s, after which he entered a monastery in Luxembourg for a period, only to leave upon the publication of his first novel.

  After a sojourn in Hollywood, looking for work in the movies, Laxness embraced Communism, and, influenced by Marx’s analysis of capitalism, he wrote his three great realist novels of the 1930s, Salka Valka, Independent People, and World Light. In the 1940s, he wrote Iceland’s Bell, in which he contemplated the colonial history of Iceland at the hands of the Danes, using historical figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1948, he published The Atom Station, in which he criticized the installation of the American military base at Keflavik.

  In 1952, he published one of my favorite novels, Gerpla, translated as The Happy Warriors, a mock Icelandic saga that explores (and sends up) violent militarism as a way of life.

  “Sends up” is the right expression, because Halldór Laxness was a funny man, and his work is full of his characteristic paradoxical wit. There is something ridiculous, in a Laxness novel, about even the most sordid or painful experience, and there is something silly about even the most redeeming one. But there is also something sordid about what is considered, in the larger world, “greatness.” Irony is never far from Laxness’s voice, and in part, this is owing to Icelandic literature and culture, always Laxness’s model and artistic ideal. The sagas are full of dark humor—in Laxdaela Saga, for example, men surround the sheep-tending hut of an enemy. When he spears one of them through the window, the others remark that there must be someone home.

  In addition to his great novels, Laxness wrote travel pieces, commentary, a screenplay, several plays, stories, and his memoirs (though only the major novels have been translated into English). He also translated works into Icelandic. In 1963, he repudiated Communism and Stalin in a book that has not yet been translated; and subsequently, he seems to have adhered to a type of Taoist belief (which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make fun of Eastern religion—he does, in The Fish Can Sing).

  One anecdote related on the Laxness Museum website is very telling. As a result of winning the Nobel Prize, Laxness received congratulatory messages, letters, and telegrams from all over the world—more, he thought, than he could possibly answer. One of these was from a work crew in Iceland. Laxness wrote,

  “What could thrill the heart like knowing oneself responsible for the fact that men who stand bent double over pipes deep in the ground, trying to get the water to flow through, should suddenly straighten their backs and climb out of their drain in the midst of the winter in Sundsvall in order to shout hurrah for literature?”

  This telegram was the only one he answered. We may be certain that he was moved by the good wishes of these humblest and most obscure of workmen. But we may also rest assured that he thought of the whole thing as a wonderful joke upon the literary world.

  As it turns out in The Fish Can Sing, all is not as it appears with Gardar Holm, the great singer. I think that we may see Laxness’s novel as a contemplation of himself both as a boy and as a world famous representative of Iceland who knows that all lives are more complicated than they look. What is the relationship of Gardar to Algrimur? They may be father and son, for the purposes of the plot, but for the purposes of the theme, the two of them together are the closest Laxness ever came to depicting himself.

  1

  A STRANGE CREATURE

  A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father. And though I would never subscribe to such a statement wholeheartedly, I would be the last person to reject it out of hand. For my own part, I would express such a doctrine without any suggestion of bitterness against the world, or rather without the hurt which the mere sound of the words implies.

  But whatever one might think of the merits of this observation, it so happened in my own case that I had to make do without any parents at all. I will not say that it was actually my good fortune – that would be putting it too strongly; but I certainly cannot call it a misfortune, at least not so far as I myself was concerned, and that was because I acquired a grandfather and a grandmother instead. It might be closer to the truth to say that the misfortune was all my father’s and my mother’s: not because I would have been a model son to them, far from it, but because parents have even more need of children than children have of parents. But that is another matter.

  Anyway, to cut a long story short, I must tell you that to the south of the churchyard in our future capital city of Reykjavík, just where the slope begins to level out at the southern end of the Lake, on the exact spot where Gumundur Gúmúnsen (the son of old Jón Gumundsson, the owner of Gúmúnsen’s Store) eventually built himself a fine mansion-house – on this patch of ground there once stoo
d a little turf-and-stone cottage with two wooden gables facing east towards the Lake; and this little place was called Brekkukot.

  This was where my grandfather lived, the late Björn of Brekkukot who sometimes went fishing for lumpfish in springtime; and with him lived the woman who has been closer to me than most other women, even though I knew nothing about her: my grandmother. This little turf cottage was a free and ever-open guest-house for anyone and everyone who had need of shelter. At the time when I was coming into this world, the cottage was crowded with people who would nowadays be called refugees – people who flee their country, people who abandon their native homes and hearths in tears because conditions at home are so desperate that their children cannot survive infancy.

  Then one day, so I have been told, it happened that a young woman arrived at the place from somewhere in the west; or north; or perhaps even east. This woman was on her way to America, abandoned and destitute, fleeing from those who ruled over Iceland. I have heard that her passage had been paid for by the Mormons, and indeed I know for a fact that among them are to be found some of the finest people in America. But anyway, without further ado, this woman I mentioned gave birth to a baby while she was staying at Brekkukot waiting for her ship. And when she had been delivered of the child she looked at her newborn son and said, “This boy is to be called Álfur.”

  “I would be inclined to name him Grímur,” said my grandmother.

  “Then we shall call him Álfgrímur,” said my mother.

  And so the only thing this woman ever gave me, apart from a body and soul, was this name: Álfgrímur. Like all fatherless children in Iceland I was called Hansson – literally, “His-son”. And thereupon she left me, naked as I was and with only that curious name, in the arms of Björn, late fisherman of Brekkukot, and went on her way; and she is now out of this story.

  And I now begin this book with the old clock that used to stand in the living-room at Brekkukot, ticking away. Inside this clock there was a silver bell, whose clear pure note as it struck the hours could be heard not only all over Brekkukot but up in the churchyard as well. In the churchyard there was another bell, a copper bell, whose deep resonant tones carried all the way back into our cottage. And so, when the wind was right, you could hear two bells chiming in harmony in our little turf cottage, the one of silver and the other of copper.