Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Under the Glacier (original 1968; edition 2005)by Halldor Laxness (Author), Magnus Magnusson (Translator)
Work InformationUnder the Glacier by Halldór Laxness (1968)
Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I got 80 pages in and still had no idea what the hell was going on, and there was no compelling reason to stick around and find out. Next. If I'm being honest with myself, I need to reread this all at once to better understand it. Halldor Laxness is a great author and he writes very well. This book is unlike most of everything else that I've read by him, however. Despite being absurd and funny, this story throws a lot of big ideas at the reader without much explanation (because we experience this all through an unnamed narrator that was chosen because of his lack of experience). So the reader has to muddle through and try to make sense of it all with the narrator. I also recommend reading the Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne before reading this because Laxness definitely took inspiration from that story. To me, the story also reminded me of Candide (as others have said) because the way that Laxness presents his story parallels Voltaire in that there are big ideas being presented through a naive narrator that's just trying to make the best out of his situation. In some ways, it's similar to Cat's Cradle too because of the absurdities presented by some of the characters. The biggest negative about this book is that I don't feel that I understood everything properly, which is a difficult thing to admit. I plan to return to it once I've read a Journey to the Center of the Earth and maybe reread Candide and Cat's Cradle. Overall, I enjoyed the book. I found a lot of it to be funny. I liked a lot of the characters and it was well written. I like books about theology. I am fascinated by Halldor Laxness' life. Independent People is a masterpiece. Unfortunately, I have no stomach at all for anything that resembles magical realism, which of course this book does. Everything is so quirky! The final two chapters were quite good, but otherwise it reminded me a bit too much of At Swim Two Birds, i.e., I don't get the references at all, not because they're too erudite for me (I like not getting those references), but because I just don't care. That's probably not fair to Laxness' book, but that's the (unjustifiable) feeling I had. I'm looking forward to reading more of his work, since this is apparently an outlier. Under the glacier is a splendidly eccentric novel that doesn't fit into any particular pigeonhole, except perhaps for a generalised sixties feel of "anything goes". A naive young man is sent by his bishop to report on the state of the church community in a remote parish on the slopes of the famous Snæfellsjökull volcano in the far West of Iceland. Not coincidentally, the crater of Snæfellsjökull is where the explorers in Jules Verne's Journey to the centre of the Earth descended below ground. It is clearly a place conducive to all kinds of strangeness. It turns out that the pastor supports himself mostly by shoeing horses and repairing primus stoves; that his wife - who may or may not be a mythical creature - has been missing for 35 years; that no services have been held in living memory and the church is nailed up, its fittings mostly used for firewood; that a mysterious wealthy outsider has had a bungalow built on part of the churchyard; and that there is at least a strong rumour that bodies have been buried in the glacier rather than in the cemetery. Definitely all very odd, and you won't be much clearer about what is going on at the end than you were at the beginning, but great fun, and plenty to make you think about what we mean by religious belief and the nature of objective observation. In odd ways, it reminded me of Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost, published five years earlier - but Laxness is a lot less wordy than Bernhard! no reviews | add a review
Has the adaptation
Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Sn?fells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead. But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world and where Creation itself is a work in progress. What is the emissary to make, for example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses? Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced “ooh-a,” which is what men invariably sputter upon seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept? Piling improbability on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.6935Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Old Norse, Old Icelandic, Icelandic, Faroese literatures Modern West Scandinavian; Modern Icelandic Modern Icelandic fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |