Independent People
by Halldór Laxness
A sheep farmer refuses to bend. Iceland watches.
you want to understand stubbornness as both a survival strategy and a form of self-destruction
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Bjartur of Summerhouses wants one thing — to be beholden to no one. He works his sheep farm in the Icelandic highlands through poverty, blizzards, family tragedy, and two world wars, refusing every form of help or compromise. Laxness won the Nobel Prize largely on the strength of this novel. It is Iceland's great book — a dispatch from inside a culture that survived centuries of hardship through exactly the kind of obstinate self-reliance that also makes its people impossible to live with. Hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure. One of the great unread novels in English.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Iceland • Scandinavia
- Voice
- Written by a Icelandic author
- Themes
- Generations
