Jim’s Reviews > The Islander: a biography of Halldór Laxness > Status Update

It suits Halldor [Laxness] to site Utopia in a place he has never seen. This may be an indication of why he becomes -- at least in his fiction -- doubtful about radical social struggle: he transports the ideal of a better society to the dream world that is inaccessible to human beings.

One starts off a poet and ends up a travelling salesman: that is the tragedy of being a writer.

I shall not conceal the fact that next to the plague I consider no sorrow more tragic for the history of the Icelandic nation than the emigration to Canada during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The difference is that those who died from the plague went to heaven, but those that went west disappeared into the British Empire or the humbug culture of the United States.

I am created from the fates of men and women, nations and entire centuries. During the day, I walk up to a hilltop and stretch out my arms and feel like dying from the knowledge that I am composed of so many different fates.