Customer Reviews

Salka Valka

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The title of Bergman's film, "Through a Glass Darkly" comes to mind, not only because it, like this novel, is Scandinavian, but because I felt that I was reading SALKA VALKA through an encrusted window. My edition, first published in England before WW II, was translated from the Danish which in turn had been translated from the original Icelandic. The book certainly impressed me, but I wonder how much more vibrant and immediate it could have been if it were a) translated directly and b) not couched in prewar, middle class British idiom, which, whether you like it or not, is somewhat remote from Massachusetts some 65 years later. I was not enamoured of mistakes like the use of `commissary' for `commissar' either...perhaps Soviet terminology was exotic for English translators in those days (or perhaps it's another example of dialect differences.)

SALKA VALKA is much more than a character study of the woman whose nickname is the title of the novel. It is an attempt by Laxness to write a love story in the context of social revolution. That change, which rocked Iceland as deeply as any of the revolutions that took place elsewhere with more blood and drama, overthrew the centuries of grinding poverty that had oppressed the farmers and fishermen of that bleak but beautiful northern land. The end of the monopolistic merchants---who bought and exported all the fish, owned the only store, and paid no wages, only allowing workers to withdraw goods against accounts---ushered in modern Iceland, one of the healthiest, best educated, and well-housed nations of our times. Perhaps such books have been written with more outward drama---one thinks of Zola's "Germinal", Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", and Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don"---some with greater ideological content than others. This is a political novel as well as being a kind of documentation of `how the steel was tempered' in the Icelandic context. I may deliver myself of the comment that if Laxness had written in a Communist society, he never would have been allowed the shades of character, the wry humor, the outright political incorrectness (from a Marxist point of view) that we find in SALKA VALKA. Since he did not live in such a society, the characters are well drawn, (all are real human beings with frailties, contradictions, and abrupt turns of behavior; not at all like the cardboard heroes of the Social Realism novels) the harsh natural environment vivid, and the love story sensitive. Indeed, the last chapter is one of the most touching I have read in a long time. I recommend this novel whole-heartedly---it is down to earth and avoids maudlin scenes at all costs--- but I advise readers to see if they can get a better translation. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in 1955. Now I know why.

This book is somewhat obscure in the USA (look for it fetching a premium on Amazon.) It was originally published in Iceland in two parts (Žú vínvišur hreini and Fuglinnn í fjörunni) in the early thirties. This is one of Laxness's earlier works, written before Independent People and covering some of the same territory, but focusing on life in a fishing village rather than on a sheep-farm.

The scene is set on the first page:

"When one goes by boat along these coasts on these freezing mid-winter nights, one can't help thinking that there can hardly be anything in the whole wide world so tiny and insignificant as a little town like that, glued to the foot of such immense mountains. God knows how people live in such a place! And God knows how they die! What can they say to each other of a morning when they wake? How do they look at one another of a Sunday? And how does the parson feel when he gets into the pulpit at Christmas and Easter? I don't mean what does he say, but, honestly, what can he think? Must he not see that nothing here matters a bit? And what does the merchant's daughter think about when she goes to bed of an evening? Indeed, what kind of joys and what kind of sorrows can there be around those dim little oil lamps?"

This is a novel about fish. And love. And, surprisingly, gender and feminism. Salka is an unlikely heroine, homely, coarse and ignorant- but not stupid- she is possessed of a vitality which cannot be defeated. Salka's struggle to find her place in a hostile world- a fickle mother, faithless lovers and lack of any real friends- is the common thread woven throughout the work. The book has a complicated mix of sub-themes: illegitimacy, class, domestic abuse, infant mortality, hypocrisy, poverty, Socialism, Capitalism, and Christianity. As a novel of Social Realism, it can be ranked with the finest of Dickens, or even Zola's Germinal. Sprinkled throughout is Icelandic folk wisdom, dark humor, fatalism and a strong sense of the absurd. A tremendous book- certainly worthy of a new translation- but considering that Laxness's great Iceland's Bell (Íslandsklukkan) wasn't translated into English at all until 2003, English readers may have to wait a while for the proper return of Salka Valka, or else trouble themselves to learn Icelandic!

I really enjoyed this book it really makes you feel as one of these poor people living in the middle of nowere. How does it really feel not even to have propper clothes and live basicly by the artitic circle. I've been there and today people are very modern, but just before the WW2 it was like any other 3td world country except it is very cold! And the houses these poor people lived in, mud huts! Ok in Africa but over there where it basicly does not go over 0 in winter and 10 in summer. You have to read it its just so fullfilling, I read it in one night. How is seems as because the climate is so cold, peoples feelings mirror it.