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.

RÚV er með hljóðbókina; Halldór Laxness sjalfur les. ( )

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! ( )