SALKA VALKA

A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer.

Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland, though no one, rich or poor, seems keen on keeping up hygiene. As Salka grows up, she experiences all the unhappy turns of a Bergman film (and Laxness began this book as a screenplay): sexual abuse, violence, betrayal, suicide. And always the smell of fish. Sigurlína wants little other than enough to eat and a place in the Salvation Army, which figures strongly throughout Laxness’ four-part novel as the only anchor to which she can cling, though in the end it proves just as useless as any other. Salka, meanwhile, is born to rebel. On entering school, asked who Iceland’s ruler is (in those days, the king of Denmark via an appointed minister), she responds, “No one’s going to rule over me!” Alas, the volcano of a man called Steinþór Steinsson, Bluto to Sigurlína’s Olive Oyl, has different ideas: “When it came right down to it,” Salka decides, “Steinþór Steinsson was the devil.” There’s a poetry to Laxness’ depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship: “Out in the night, she had no Mama,” Salka thinks. “Out in the night was only the girl, Sigurlína Jónsdóttir, and she was not her mother.” But there’s also some jarring language, as when Steinþór berates a cleric for being the most contentious man he’s ever encountered, “despite my having had to associate with both negroes and sodomites.” The words speak ill of Steinþór, but they mark Laxness’ novel as being a century old, and on every page it reads like it.

Of minor interest against Laxness’ best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.