Customer Reviews

Independent People

5 star:		(69)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Independent People is not a book for everyone. It is a long, slow and sometimes punishing read. Laxness paints the sheep farmer's life in bleak tones. Think of Solzhenitsyn's Siberia or Rolvaag's Dakota prairie. So dismal is the mood at times that the reader feels the imminent onset of seasonal affective disorder. But Independent People also contains moments of pure, distilled beauty so arresting they seem to stand out from the cold landscape like stars in the ink of darkness. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a true epic hero. As Monte Christo is to vengeance, Bjartur is to self-determination. His emotional intransigence and the suffering he visits on all those close to him is balanced only by the enormity and brute force of his will. Asta Sollilja, his daughter, is the only possible counterweight to his obstinacy, in both emotional and literary terms. She is strong and sensitive, beautiful and grotesque, half Bjartur, half anti-Bjartur. Her duality provides the story's central drama and the book's over-arching metaphor. Masterfully constructed of vignettes woven into small books, Independent People is seamless. Laxness's voice is clear and lyric, never showy. The writing is fresh and modern, yet seems to be channeled from Iceland's mythic past. This is a land populated by many dark spirits and one never feels quite free of their presence here. Certain images from Independent People are indelibly etched on my consciousness. A man violently and accidentally riding a reindeer. A girl longing by a window for a stranger she's met just once. A young man seduced back to the home he has left by a siren on horseback. There is something more to why I love this book. I spent a week in Iceland in July 1998, and was transfixed by its rugged, austere beauty. The feeling I had while reading Independent People was the same feeling that possessed me the entire time I was in Iceland. It was the cold, astonishing sensation of stepping outside your self and gazing on the topography of your own heart.

I first read "Independent People" in 1996 after reading Brad Leithauser's essay in the "New York Review of Books." Leithauser's praise of the book and the author were so intriguing that I went to the library that day and found an earlier edition. I recently had the opportunity to read the book again, with Leithauser's essay serving as an introduction. A single reading cannot exhaust this outsize, obscure novel by the 1955 Nobel-prize winner from Iceland.

On a simple level, "Independent People" deals with the lives of the poor sheep grazers in Iceland early in the 20th Century. The hero is a farmer named Bajartur of Summerhouses who, after 18 years of working for another, the baliff, earns enough money to buy his own small farm. Bajartur's goal is to be independent and self-sufficient, to take what he earns and not take or give to others. In addition to this simple economic credo for independence. Bjartur is an "independent person" emotionally in his relationships with his wives -- he is twice married in the book -- his three sons and his daughter -- actually his first wife's daughter but not Bjartur's -- whom Bjartur names Asta Sollija the "beloved sun -lily" whom he refers to as his soul's "one flower." Much of this long, multi-faceted book involves Bjartur's relationship with Asta Sollija -- their estrangement and ultimate reconciliation.

Bjartur and Asta Sollija and their relationship frames but hardly exhausts this book. There is a picture of Iceland -- or of modernizing society in general with its conflict between farmer and town. There are long discussions of poetry and literature, of war, of politics, and particularly of philosophy and religion, see below. For all its length and seriousness, much of the book is funny, almost satirical in tone in the way it pokes fun at Bjartur and his intellectual and emotional limitations. The reader still comes to admire Bjartur for his fortitude and stubborness.

The book is timeless in character and the chronology is blurred. World War I plays a pivotal role in the middle of the book but the times before and the times after seem to be endless and undefined. There is something that is prototypical and archetypical about this book -- it is hardly an exercise in the realistic novel.

From a subsequent essay about Laxness by Brad Leithauser, I learned that Laxness was the kind of person generally called a seeker. This made me admire him and this book all the more and informed greatly my second reading. Growing up in a small, isolated nation, Laxness read exhaustively and put something of himself into his readings. He changed his mind many times during his life, being at various stages entirely secular, a socialist with perhaps communist leanings, and an adherent of various forms of Christianity. He took a rare delight in important ideas and showed an openness and fluidity to them that I find reflected in the themes of "Independent People." Most obviously, their is Bjartur's character with its emphasis on economic self-sufficiency and laissez-faire. This attitude leads to Bjartur's heroism but also his poverty, and it is contrasted artfully with the cooperative movemement and, implicitly, with a socialist approach to society in the early 20th century.

The book is pervaded by a strong spiritual tone. Bjartur for most of the book represents a position of independence and utter skepticism, but at key moments he does things not fully consistent with his stated beliefs. The book is framed by old Icelandic pagan legends and by spirits who are said to continue to haunt Bjartur's farm. We see various Christian ministers who in general are satirized in the course of the novel. But I was most impressed with the following erudite, and well-taken reference to Zoroastrianism, the religion of good and evil,which is alluded to many times during the course of the book and frames its story. In a moment of irony, Laxness puts the following speech early on, at Bjartur's first wedding, into the mouth of the bailiff's wife.

"I don't know whether you are aquainted with the religious beliefs of the Persians. This race believed that the god of light and the god of darkness waged eternal warfare, and that man's part was to assist the god of light in his struggle by the tilling of the fields and the improvement of the land. This is precisely what farmers do. They help God, if one may say so; work with God in the cultivation of plants, the tending of livestock, and the care of their fellow men. There exists no calling of greater nobility here on earth. Therefore, I would direct these words to all husbandmen, but first and foremost to our bridegroom of today: You sons of the soil whose labour is unending and leisure scanty, know, I bid you, how exalted is your vocation. Agriculture is work in co-operation with the Creator Himself, and in you is He well pleased." (p. 25)

I am intrigued by the repeated references to the "religion of the Persians" and to its appropriateness for the story. This quote,and its irony, reminds me of the sermon in "Moby Dick", a book which shares in its obscurity and in its questing character many of the qualities of this one. The speech shows the author's ability to adopt material from little-known traditions into his own ideas and work, and to make them live for the reader. It was one of the qualities that leapt out at me in my second reading of "Independent People."

This book remains a little-known masterpiece. It will reward those readers willing to take the time with it.

Having just read INDEPENDENT PEOPLE, I feel as though I have been drawn into the vortex of some great hurricane and am being carried around the globe by it, high above the surface, trapped in its gravity.

This story has captured me and will not let me go. It is above all the heroic struggle of a Viking farmer to be free and his refusal to grieve in loss and defeat that grip me. He never grieves. Why then did I continually grieve for him? And why am I grieving for him still?

The answer must be that my character is weak in comparison. Laxness may have spoken for all survivors everywhere. "Never mourn what you have lost."--"rather content yourself with what you have left, when you have lost what you had."

Some people learn Russian to read Pushkin. I want to learn Icelandic to read Laxness.

As for politics and ideologies, not to worry. They are just a little dust here and there on the floor of the croft, at times a little distraction. The story unfolds outside and above and all around them and in its enormous weight little concerns them.

Could this book possibly have been written just for me? To enjoy it most, a reader should probably have lived at least a thousand years.

This novel looks nostalgically at rural life in Iceland and regrets the effects of a market economy on rural people with simple wants and needs. The protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, is an obstinate, reactionary, and sometimes cruel herdsman who nonetheless possesses fine perception. Through this book, we learn a lot about the ecology of Iceland (it's a nice place to visit but don't try to raise sheep there), Bjartur, his family, and the society he belongs to. Author Halldor Laxness makes you appreciate the difficulties these people face but can also make you laugh out loud when he satirizes Bjartur's neighbors and the local gentry. I was impressed with this book and read many passages to my family. Unfortunately, there are also parts of the book where not much of interest happens for what seems like 50 or 75 pages at a time. I'm tempted to say that this would have been a better book if it were shorter but then Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature and I didn't.

Every year, I try to read at least one classic work of fiction, whether I need to or not. So far in 1998, my choice has been Halldor Laxness' 1946 Nobel Prize winning novel Independent People. This is a book which I had never heard of until it was re-issued in English (the original is in Icelandic) in 1997. Laxness, who subtitles his work "An Epic," tells the tale of sheep-farmer Bjartur of Summerhouses, and his life-long, monomaniacal struggle for financial independence. In the process, he loses two wives, a son leaves him, and his dearest child -- Asta Sollilja ("Beloved Sun-Lily") -- is disowned. Only by losing all of his wealth does he find what he truly values. While styled "an epic," this is also a whimsical and lyrical work. Bjatur, in addition to farming, is a bit of a poet, and the most remarkable extended scene is Bjatur's desperate struggle with bitter cold in the wilderness while trying to find a strayed sheep. In the middle of the night, to keep his senses and way, he returns to his muse:

'Seldom had he recited so much poetry in any one night; he had recited all his father's poetry, all the ballads he could remember, all his own palindromes backwards and forwards in forty-eight different ways, whole processions of dirty poems, one hymn he learned from his mother, and all the lampoons that had been known in the Fourthing from time immemorial about baliffs, merchants, and sheriffs.'

Ultimately, the poetry keeps him alive as he finally crawls his way on all fours to safety. I found myself reading this book in short doses so that I could savor the language, and so it would not end too soon. If someone was with me in the room as I read, I found myself inflicting upon them sentences or whole paragraphs, just to savor the felicity of language and expression. I concur with Jane Smiley's cover blurb: "I can't imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time." (Reading this novel and Smiley's remarks, it is clear where she derived many of the themes, descriptions, and grandeur in her 1988 novel Greenlanders. Smiley's work, however, is a much darker book).

This is one of my favorite books, but I have only managed to read it once. This is a book you must brace yourself to read despite the absorption you feel while reading, because of the absolute dourness of the presentation of life in pre-WWII Iceland. I read this book while living in Reykjavik for an Icelandic literature course, and while it remains one of my most satisfying reads ever, it is also one which I am not in a hurry to repeat.

Independant people is a tale of survival and self denial in Iceland, before its modernisation. The absolute brutality of the unforgiving living conditions, and Bjartur's unwillingness to lean on or borrow from other people shapes the life of his family, and their absolute poverty, which was unfortunately quite common in Iceland until WWII, when Iceland was liberated from the Danes, and they got freedom to trade with the rest of the world.

The lyrical beauty of the writing contrasts sharply with the bleak life of Bjartur of Summerhouses, which revolves around sheep. Life in a turf house is explored in all of its depressing detail. The common beliefs in trolls and witches somehow fit into the landscape and lifestyle which most modern Americans would normally never be able to accept. The shaping of the Icelandic landscape, and how that has affected the people who live there is explored in a catalogue of gloom.

It is incredibly and somewhat strangely satisfying for me, an 20 yr. old Icelander, to read foreign people's almost unanimous praise upon this masterpiece by my countryman Halldór Laxness. I found, like many other reviewers, the book to have a profound and lasting effect on myself. It is a beutiful book, no matter how harsh or unconventional it may be. To those who find it boring I want to say this: If you cannot fathom the meaning of Sjálfstætt fólk, its uniqueness and wonderful insight into human nature (which is of course not at all restricted to where and when the book takes place), then the reason (blame?) probably is to find within yourselves - not Laxness. Laxness is forever implanted into Iceland's "national soul" as the author who changed and corrected our understanding of our past and present history. With Gerpla, he rewrote one of our loved sagas (Fóstbræðra saga). He shattered the glorified image of our ancestors and portrayed them in a manner that was unprecedented at the time. He showed them not as the blond-haired, eagle-eyed justice-seeking heroes that our independence fight in the 19. c. had envisioned but portrayed them as stubborn, dark and almost barbaric hoodlums with questionable morals, to say the least. And thus made them more believeable, human and interesting than ever. Many narrow minded and arrogant people of the time were shocked and appalled and he was even criticised for what was seen as "lack of patriotism". Since then, historians have have come to the conclusion that his portrayal was much closer too the truth. Laxness was very controversial early in his lifetime (in the USA, the fact that he was a communist did not exactly do him well in the 50's or even onwards) although in the past decades he has rightfully been given his due as the genious he truly was. I will not elaborate further on the subject, although I could go on for (p)ages but urge people to read more of Laxness' work, especially Íslandsklukkan. In my opinion, it stands with Sjálfstætt fólk as his greatest work. If Íslandsklukkan has not been translated into English, I suggest that transscribers pull up their sleeves... quickly.

There's not much I can say about "Independent People" that hasn't already been written here. It's an extraordinary read, full of complex characters, striking detail, and a wintry, desolate setting that is at once oppressive and alluring.

It's not a perfect book. When the subtitle claims the novel is "an epic," it's not kidding. According to Miriam-Webster, an epic is something "extending beyond the usual or ordinary especially in size or scope." In every sense of the word, this book is an epic. At times, the book travels into unnecessary spaces, gives us plot lines and characters that really don't go places. It's long. Very long. The prose is epic, too.

But you know? The book is awesome because of its flaws. Its epical nature fits the story, the time, and the place. Perfect. Sublime. A definite reader's read.

In 1954, the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to one Ernest Hemingway; his successor the year following was a considerably lesser known Icelander named Halldor Laxness. Yet Papa Hemingway would no doubt have felt both admiration and kinship with Laxness's stubbornly comical, almost tragic hero Gudbjartur Jonsson, in INDEPENDENT PEOPLE. Bjartur, as he is called, is undoubtedly one of literature's great single-minded characters, a Don Quixote of Iceland's punishing sheep country, a Candide devoted to the seemingly simple concept of personal independence. Unlike Sartre's spineless seeker of freedom, Matthieu Delarue (THE AGE OF REASON), however, Bjartur has both guiding principles and a backbone, although probably too much of both.

The plot lines are surprisingly minimal for a book of nearly 500 dense pages. After eighteen years of working as a sheep-herder for the local (and wealthy) Bailiff, Bjartur scrapes up enough money to purchase a scrabbly piece of boggy land and a few sheep from his former employer. The land is rumored to be cursed, but Bjartur disdains these superstitions and resolutely forges ahead, optimistically naming his homestead Summerhouses. Refusing to assume debt or even ask for help in order to preserve his cherished independence, Bjartur of Summerhouses builds a sod house (the sheep live downstairs, the humans upstairs), slowly expands his flock through birthing, and marries a woman (Rosa) who dies alone in childbirth; Bjartur is out in a violent snowstorm searching for a sheep that he doesn't know his dead wife had cooked and eaten. The infant (named Asta Sollilja - Beloved Sun-Lily) only survives thanks to the body warmth of Bjartur's dog. Later, Bjartur marries again and fathers three boys (Helgi, Gvendur, and Nonni), as well as several stillborn children. His second wife dies, but Bjartur and his children eke out an existence that suddenly improves with the increase in price in Icelandic wool during World War I. Of course, this newfound wealth brings its own set of curses, luring Bjartur and his farming colleagues into building new, more modern houses. The intrusion of worldly affairs into Summerhouses also threatens the solidarity of Bjartur's family and results in breakup and tragedy, but also in a certain degree of good fortune. By the end of the story, Bjartur and his much-reduced family and flock are forced to set out for new land even further into the rugged north, recalling nothing so much as the ending of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN.

Plot and story is not really what INDEPENDENT PEOPLE is about. Laxness has penned a great satire of Icelandic mores and customs, turning Bjartur into the sort of close-minded, impossibly stubborn farmer who, the more he strives for independence, the greater and tighter are the shackles that bind him. Bjartur is surrounded by a colorful group of supporting characters, from the equally stubborn Asta and romantic Nonni to the other sheep farmers, the odd and slovenly Bailiff Jon, the politically ambitious Ingolfur Arnarson Jonsson (the Bailiff's son), the old grandmother Hallbera, and perhaps best of all, the Bailiff's wife, the Mistress of Rauthsmyri. The Madam Myri is a satirical triumph, an incessant worshipper of the noble peasants and their lifestyle while she lives in magnificent comfort and even complains of the burdens and unhappiness of being rich.

Nearly everything is the subject of satire in INDEPENDENT PEOPLE. World War I becomes an insane exercise to kill ten million people over some guy named Ferdinand. The economics of socialization (rural cooperatives) versus capitalism (the merchants) becomes nothing more than the replacement of one set of heartless thieves bleeding the farmers with another set, both sets caring only about money and little about the farmers' lives. Modernization in the form of roads and bridges become just another way to help the rich get richer and to distract the young with dreams of the big cities and foreign lands. Even America is satirized as the distant land of impossible dreams, so that the word America becomes a pejorative for the young who leave their families to discover their own America. Of all these symbols, however, America appears to be the one with a positive side - youngest son Nonni leaves for America because he has been prophesied to be a great singer, one who will sing a song for the whole world to hear. We see little of Nonni after he leaves Summerhouses, but we can guess that he perhaps represents Laxness himself.

INDEPENDENT PEOPLE is rich in its sense of place, drawing unforgettable pictures of the northern Icelandic sheep-farming countryside. Laxness's depictions of Nature are captivating, and his tales of struggle against the elements make the reader feel a part of the fight for existence. One scene, in which Bjartur nearly dies attempting to capture an elk during a snowstorm, is truly memorable. For all that, however, Laxness writes in a style that many readers will find slow and dense, reminiscent of authors like Thomas Hardy, George Elliot, or Charles Dickens. First published in 1945, this book shows its old-world, European novel roots. Nevertheless, patient readers will be amply rewarded; those expecting Grisham-style pacing will doubtless be unwilling to persevere. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves classical literature, looks for novels with a serious message and point of view, or simply wants to meet and savor a memorable story with classical pacing and an unforgettable cast of magnificently-drawn characters.

The fact that this book remained out of print in English for many years is astonishing. Also amazing is its absence from the many (albeit silly) lists enumerating the best novels of the 20th century. I certainly consider it the best novel I have ever read. Much of the book's appeal comes from its deeply rooted human themes. Laxness is largely credited with bringing the Icelandic myths to the Western literary conciousness. These myths (READ JUNG or J. CAMPBELL) are a founding force behind many of the world's religious texts. Independent People reaches into these myths and draws out a simple story which speaks to the deepest part of human nature. It is this contrast that makes the book so effective. The simplicity of the theme and the lightness of the plot underscore the weight of the human condition and the complexity of the human psyche. This makes Laxness' novel truly epic by definition: it can be read in two ways. On the one hand it is an adventure tale of a hero struggling to overcome the cruel and treeless landscape of Iceland. It is also a journey into our universal mythology, which is the metaphysical genetic code of the human soul.