THE FISH CAN SING
by Halldór Laxness & translated by Magnus Magnusson
A welcome reissue of the 1955 Nobel laureate's 1957 novel about an abandoned boy's embattled growth to manhood in an Icelandic village, complicated by his kinship with generations of fisherfolk and his fixation on an internationally famous opera singer. This lively bildungsroman—which dramatizes with considerable variety and humor the ideal of community and the phenomenon of a "backward" country's mixed feelings toward the outside world and "progress"—is enriched by a bountiful gallery of sharply drawn eccentric characters. Altogether, one of this great writer's most unusual and attractive books.