Anna's review
Independent People
by Halldór Kiljan Laxness
This certainly puts this book on my list...and perhaps somewhere near the top. It sounds a bit daunting, but sometimes, "little waves of beauty and tenderness" are all you need. Thanks for cluing me in!
(As a side note, "cluing" looks so absurd that it can't possibly be right. It is, though.)
Anna's review
Independent People by Halldór Kiljan Laxness
Anna's review
rating:
The first third of the book is so filled with misery as to be off-putting, but has sufficient points of light to keep one reading until the second 'book', when little waves of beauty and tenderness come lapping up to comfort you through the harsh Icelandic winter. There are, for instance, passages transcribing the inner lives of children that are heartbreakingly acute, and with great tenderness you are lead along with the characters until their actions seem inevitable and right, even as you dread the consequences.
In general, Laxness is unusually respectful, and interested in, the richness of human consciousness as it exists in the context of poverty and deprivation. He doesn't indulge the common novelistic habit of assuming that people are somehow less complex, their suffering more straightforward, maybe even less painful, when they live in difficult conditions and have few emotional and intellectual resources. These are lives lived with nuance, even on the edge of survival, ea...more
In general, Laxness is unusually respectful, and interested in, the richness of human consciousness as it exists in the context of poverty and deprivation. He doesn't indulge the common novelistic habit of assuming that people are somehow less complex, their suffering more straightforward, maybe even less painful, when they live in difficult conditions and have few emotional and intellectual resources. These are lives lived with nuance, even on the edge of survival, ea...more
This certainly puts this book on my list...and perhaps somewhere near the top. It sounds a bit daunting, but sometimes, "little waves of beauty and tenderness" are all you need. Thanks for cluing me in!(As a side note, "cluing" looks so absurd that it can't possibly be right. It is, though.)