Independent People

THERE is a strange quality that seems inseparable from Scandinavian writings — somber, pitched in a minor key, harsh, and, at first glance, cold and colorless as the light of an Arctic false dawn. This quality is inherent in Sigrid Undset’s works, in the Finn Sillanpää’s The Maid Silja. It is, unlike humor, exportable, as in Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth, that extraordinary NorwegianAmerican novel. Yet this seeming drabness is deceptive. The lowering tones of false dawn slowly vanish to reveal a rich, warm life that is none the less real for all its neutral tints.

Now out of Iceland comes a strange story, vibrant and alive under its sinister overtones, a book as somber and harsh as anything by Undset or Sillanpää. Independent People, by Hallóor Laxness, tells of the struggle of an Iceland crofter to achieve self-sufficiency, of his obsession for independence, a craving so deep that in his pursuit of it he becomes a slave to his ideal.

The hero, Bjartur, after eighteen years of working for another man, is at last able to buy a tract of land that is popularly supposed to lie under an ancient, blasting curse. He fights that curse while denying it, fights starvation, fights the plagues that decimate his allimportant sheep. To his high goal are sacrificed two wives and many children. No outside help is possible during the long struggle, for to accept the smallest thing from another person is, in Bjartur’s mind, the end of true freedom.

For a time Bjartur flourishes. There is an unwholesome wave of prosperity as World War I rages. Then comes collapse. Bjartur is wiped out and, as the story ends, is making for another barren, stubborn tract to which he has a claim through marriage.

Every step of the long fight, every success, every failure, flows through these pages with bitter relentlessness, a dour inevitability. It is the age-old story of the peasant against the world, and through the author’s skill, it achieves a rare timelessness and universality. It might well be placed, in date, in the dim pre-Christian days when the curse was first laid on Bjartur’s land. It is with a real shock that one comes upon mention of an automobile, of ships sailing to America, of the coming of Communism. Geographically, the peasant-world theme is so closely woven that with a few changes in nomenclature and external conditions, Bjartur might be a neighbor of Wang Lung, the farmer of The Good Earth.

Bitter and somber as the story is, there is a rare beauty in its telling, a beauty as surprising as the authentic strain of poetry that lies in the shoving, battering Icelander, the master of “Summerhouses.” It is a joy to find that such a book has a translator worthy of it. J. A. Thompson draws rich chords and harmonies as he renders the original Icelandic into English.

BRUCE LANCASTER