The Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness won the 1955 Nobel Prize for Literature and, in the words of the Nobel citation, his books have a 'vivid epic power which renews the great narrative art of Iceland'. It is certainly true that Laxness's novels have much of the elemental simplicity of the medieval Icelandic sagas but they are also written with a sense of irony and ambivalence that is entirely modern. In the course of his very long life (he reached the age of 95), he published more than 50 works of fiction as well as poetry, plays and essays. These ranged from The Fish Can Sing, a lyrical story of a young boy and his relationship with a reclusive opera singer who has found as much contentment in retirement as he ever found in the wider world, to The Atom Station, a powerful and satirical tale of a young woman's involvement in the struggle to prevent the Cold War invasion of Iceland by Americans intention the establishment of a bomber base. Probably his greatest novel, however, is Independent People, set amid the remote rural communities of Iceland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bjartur Jonsson, the flinty, unyielding character at the heart of the book, serves eighteen years in virtual slavery to a landowner so, when he finally gains his freedom and has his own small plot of land to cultivate, he is determined at all costs to retain the independence he has won so hardly. In doing so, ironically, he blights the lives of others around him, most particularly his daughter who longs to be free of the tyranny her father imposes on her. In Laxness's clear-sighted and rigorously unsentimental narrative, Bjartur's independence costs him as much, in human terms, as did his long years in bondage.

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