This is a better novel (richer, deeper) than anything else you're likely to meet this year. Its people are as real as you or me— as are its shorebirds and its blizzards and its dreams and its cows.
— Brad Leithauser on Salka Valka, Wall Street Journal
A gripping wonder, and Laxness’s most sustained piece of narrative drama . . . Even in moments of high drama, [Philip Roughton] moves along with calm assurance, tossing off Laxness’s inventive and always spot-on descriptions as though they were commonplace, as when, on a cliff, the puffins ‘squatted with the dignity of church officials in front of their burrows.’ He captures Laxness’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace . . . Despite [Laxness’s] mischievous show of ease, he is giving his book everything he has in the hope that it will exceed him.
—Salvatore Scibona on Salka Valka, The New Yorker
[Laxness's] novels from the 1930s—Salka Valka in particular—brim with life, humor, devastation. Laxness detonates some sentences like little bombs . . . Others he lets expand and accumulate to reveal an almost Dickensian delight in people and their idiosyncrasies . . . I find his descriptions of the natural world incomparably moving . . . The novel is a singular work of social realism.
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books
Laxness somehow blends epic form with the day-to-day realism of loan negotiations and herring and haircuts. He is a humorist and a visionary, a critical eye and an open heart. Salka Valka is a marvel, a pleasure, and a masterpiece.
— Rivka Galchen on Salka Valka
A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer. Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland . . . There’s a poetry to Laxness’s depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship . . . [Salka Valka is] full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.
—Kirkus Reviews
Laxness’ small-town tale depicts a world where life is difficult, but the novel never sinks into deep gloom; there’s a variety of resilient spirit here – with Salka Valka’s particularly pronounced and strong . . . a very fine novel, and a wonderful character-portrait of a remarkable figure.
—Michael Orthofer on Salka Valka, Complete Review
Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.
—Alice Munro
Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas’ shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.
—The Guardian
Science fiction. Table, fable, allegory. Philosophical novel. Dream novel. Visionary novel. Literature of fantasy. Wisdom lit. Spoof. Sexual turn-on. Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries′ perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories. The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Halldór Laxness′s wildly original, morose, uproarious Under the Glacier.
—Susan Sontag
More than any other novel I know, Iceland′s Bell recreates a world Pieter Brueghel would have felt right at home, not merely in its fascination with bumblers (petty thieves, purblind watchmen) and grotesques (faceless lepers, hanging corpses), but also in its unearthly ability to find beauty in a landscape of destitution, wisdom in a congress of fools.
—The New York Times Book Review
One quality that makes Laxness’s novels so morally uplifting is their air of tender but urgent gratitude. While his tone can vary widely from book to book…the reader consistently feels that the books are conceived in a spirit of homage; they are some of the world’s most substantial thank-you notes.
—Brad Leithauser, The New York Review of Books
Laxness habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present…[A]ll his narratives…have a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force.
—Richard Rayner, LA Times
One of the world’s most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists.
—Jane Smiley
