Readers familiar with Laxness’s earlier works shouldn’t overlook this fascinating appendage to them. Those unfamiliar might...
Christian doctrine gets a riotous, increasingly cryptic comeuppance in the Icelandic Nobel laureate’s whimsical 1968 novel, previously unavailable in the US.
It’s narrated by “unordained priestling” Embi, sent by the Bishop of Iceland to investigate unseemly activities rumored to be ongoing at the remote parish of Snaefellsjoküll Glacier, tended by unconventional minister Jon Primus—who shoes horses and repairs machinery while letting his church fall into ruin and failing to give the dead Christian burial, among other abominations. Embi’s report documents his meetings with the unflappable pastor, and with the local and itinerant eccentrics who comprise his isolated little world. These include: pastoral housekeeper Miss Hnallpora, who plies the emissary with cakes while recalling her vision of a golden-fleeced “fairy ram”; querulous builder and sometime poet Jodinus Alfberg; a trio of “Winter-Pasture Shepherds” who quote Buddhist wisdom while pursuing suspiciously unspiritual agendas; and the self-styled patron saint of the community “at Glacier,” Professor Doctor Godman (!) Syngmann. He’s a Falstaffian Christ-figure, an entrepreneur and philosopher devoted to saving humanity through the practices of “epagogics” and “cosmobiology” (which he explains in deliriously funny conversations with the obliging Pastor). When Syngmann dies, and the issue of proper burial is (so to speak) reborn, Embi falls into the quasi-maternal clutches of middle-aged siren Gudrun Saemundsdottir, who drops by claiming to be Pastor Primus’s long-absent wife (and Syngmann’s adopted daughter), revealing her own lavishly picaresque history, and explaining to the distracted Embi logical connections between Catholicism and brothel-keeping, while carrying him off “to the end of the world.” Embi recovers; but whether this impishly chaotic novel does depends on how you read it. Is it an overextended anticlerical joke, a boisterous folk comedy, or, indeed, both?
Readers familiar with Laxness’s earlier works shouldn’t overlook this fascinating appendage to them. Those unfamiliar might do better to begin with Independent People or World Light.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-3441-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...
Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.
Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.
Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a victim's dark violence, with a lyrical insistence and a clear sense of the time when a beleaguered peoples' "only grace...was the grace they could imagine."Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987
ISBN: 9781400033416
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
