Iceland's grand master of literature.(Book review)

Halldor Gudmundson. The Islander: A Biography of Halldor Laxness. Trans. Philip Roughton. London: Quercus Publishing, 2008. 400 pages.

Nobel Prize winning Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness was rescued from obscurity by novelist and academic Brad Leithauser with the publication of "A Small County's Great Book" in The New York Review of Books in 1995. Leithhauser then lobbied his publisher, which resulted in Vintage International reissuing Laxness's epic novel Independent People in January 1997. The novel received long overdue accolades both from academia and the reading public. Laxness had finally entered the literary canon and is described in both mainstream and academic publications as one of the greatest novelist of the twentieth century. Although acknowledged as one of the literary greats, little is known about Halldor Laxness outside his native Iceland, where he is lionized and canonized but often criticized by some because of his outspoken political views. The new English translation of Halldor Gudmundson's The Islander: A Biography of Halldor Laxness is a welcome and sorely needed addition to the Laxness revival in English. The only Laxness biography previously available in English was a slim volume by Peter Hallburg published by Twayne Publishers in 1971 as part of their World Authors Series. Hallberg was a contemporary of Laxness and interviewed him on several occasions, but the biography is more of an overview of Laxness's literary accomplishments and does little to explain the complex character of the writer.

Gudmundson has accomplished more than merely writing a chronicle of the life of Laxness. The writers that surround Laxness in the early part of the 20th century are a who's who of contemporary Icelandic literature that includes Jon Helgason, Johann Jonsson, and Thorbergur Thortharson. As in a Laxness novel, one of the protagonists in the biography is Iceland, a small island nation that is transformed in Laxness's lifetime from a country of turf dwellings to a thriving twentieth-century infrastructure. Laxness had an epiphany while living in the United States in the late '20s, and he wrote to his fiancee, "I have lived through a number of instructive adventures here which has taught me to judge my own worth in relation to my nationality. I am an Icelander, the complete ...