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The Great Weaver From Reykjavik: A Profile of Halldor Laxness |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / WRITERS AND WRITING |
| Author: Bruce Allen |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 4/1/2003 |
| Size: 3,114 Words, 20,841 Characters |
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The eminent Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness (1902-98) is enjoying a considerable--if as yet incomplete--renaissance, thanks in large part to the championing of his work undertaken by American poet and novelist Brad Leithauser. Laxness, who won the 1955 Nobel Prize in literature, is in many ways a throwback: a novelist with the soul of an epic poet, whose broad canvases accommodate much of his homeland's embattled history and rich oral and written literary culture. His major books might be called Tolstoyan were they less rigorously down to earth. Their focus is not on watershed historic events or glorious adventures but on the quotidian struggles of stoical and, sometimes, annoyingly stubborn ordinary people.
Four of Laxness' novels are currently in print in this country: the ambitious ...
. . .
...). His countrymen understandably compare him with the great Russian novelists. Laxness, by virtue of his heritage and individual talent, is something very near to a unique figure: a compassionate, and enormously skillful chronicler of the ordinary and the everyday, whose clear-eyed gaze takes in the nimbus of "world light" (and shadow as well) that embraces, transforms, and exalts the commonplace.
(806 of 20,841 characters)
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