#halldor laxness

[sacredwhores]

"To be able to look forward is to live."

Halldór Laxness, Independent People

[dk-thrive]

two human beings have such difficulty in understanding each other, there is nothing so tragical as two human beings

Halldór Laxness, "Independent People" (Vintage International, February 19, 2009) 

[aaronsrpgs]

"If one wants to steal, dear boy," said the pastor, "then for God's sake one should never steal from the rich. A rich man has a hundred peats, and then suddenly he has only ninety-nine left: one of them has been stolen. He won't forget that even on his deathbed. A poor man has only one peat and is just as poor if it's stolen; and by the next day he has forgotten all about it. The wealthy man will inevitably get you into trouble if you steal from him; the poor man doesn't even bother to mention it. That's why all genuine thieves have the good sense to steal from the poor. The only really dangerous thing to do in Iceland is to steal from the rich, and the only really profitable thing to do in Iceland is to steal from the poor, dear boy."

- from World Light by one of the great socialist novelists, Halldór Laxness; written in 1938

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

Have you read Independent People: An Epic by Halldór Laxness (orig. Sjálfstætt fólk, 1935)?

yes

no

I didn't finish it

I've never heard of it

Voting ended onDec 13, 2023

[red-ibis-red]

the incomprehensible labyrinth of fate

—Halldór Laxness, Independent People

[stopandlook]

Iceland. The scene reminds me of Halldór Laxness’s book Independent People.

[beegotten]

Top 5 Books to Read This Year

Tagged by the excellent @xserpx​ (much appreciated!) 😘

1. The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg - SO. Funny story about this book: I first found out about it during a nonfiction sale period at my bookstore and I asked my The First Law server about nonfictions to read, and one particular member gave me this idiosyncratic recommendation that I had little idea of the magnitude of until she sold me on it on the basis of  Menocchio’s life being a microhistory of larger cultural/mental histories at work.

But the biggest draws, for me, personally? Was that she said the books excellently illuminated an entirely different time period of mindset, how alien and different it was from our current one, but with enough humanity and curiosity to retain what recognizably made them similar to us and that Menocchio was treated like he was the main character. This educated lowborn peasant not only had a working mind as a given, but that he had a fascinating belief system that led him to be declared a heretic by the Inquisition and a historian thought he deserved enough merit to write a whole book on. 

And the more I dug into the premise of this book, the more I realized this was tailor-made to be precisely my kind of shit. So many fantasy novels lack the interiority or agency of the lowborn peasantry, so a nonfiction that peeled at the layers of a lowborn man, treated his mind and beliefs as worthy of consideration and genuine theological thought... gods, it’s an amazing rec. Checking around, it seems like it’s a one-of-a-kind sort of historical text,  so I truly hope it lives up to the hype I was given.

2. Scenes of Clerical Life by George Eliot - The amusing irony to me is that, despite me having recced Eliot’s Middlemarch to two other people in the The First Law server we share, and gotten them invested enough to finish, and finish hard enough to say that they loved it, I haven’t cracked open a single George Eliot book (at this point, not from lack of having, I bought both the Oxford edition and the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Middlemarch alone).

That’s not from lack of accolades, a teacher twitter whose reading tastes I trust recced it to me as the best novel he’s ever read, and from what I heard of its themes and how it balances the why of a communication with the how being just as important, the smaller domestic touches to it, and the sheer scope of characterization it promises (I’ve got an interesting vantage point with Middlemarch, I have recced it, and thus I am told of its virtues by people I know and trust). But I don’t want to start off with Eliot’s best work. I want to start off with her shorter-form works first, hence, Scenes of Clerical Life, then her other works that I own, so I can build up to the swell of Middlemarch.

(It also doesn’t hurt that Scenes of Clerical Life focuses on religion and clergymen, and the countryside and smaller lives in the scope of greater events, considering my fantasy veers towards attending the little people more and my Croatian-inspired story deals with questions of faith as well, so three birds with one stone.)

3. The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker - The Golem and the Jinni was a book that became more than the first foot in the door of a phase of fantasy for me that primarily consisted of domestic fantasies after Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings’ moments of slice-of-life. I checked it out from a list of more domestic/mundane fantasies list and I dearly loved the meandering, patient pace of it, how much Chava and Ahmad’s struggles were that of connection and how to deal with inhumane loneliness against the backdrop of so much humanity. That the narrative preoccupied itself with Chava and Ahmad interacting with their communities, rather than needing to be railroaded into action or a plot, was something I hope the author never gives up on, for it’s a sorely missing part of fantasy (in fact, when the book did railroad into a confrontation with an asshole, I enjoyed it less).

So the sequel’s virtues are self-evident to me, the reviews even suggested it was better than the prior book, the pace just as meandering and slow, if not slower, and the author not skipping a step in terms of focusing on the interpersonal relationships rather than action. But, now, I have different reasons for checking it out, beyond being a fan of this series: to scratch at the itch of humanity through the eyes of inhumanity, considering I’m working with a dragon character and despite their inherited knowledge and memories, still having the innocence and questions of why humanity does this or that, just like Chava and Ahmad both had in the first book. How the inhumane interact with humans has become a fascinating stretch of theme for me via writing dragons, and I’m looking forward to this book to study ways to improve my writing there.

It’s slow, it’s got non-humans treated with complexity, it’s a series of books that deals with the immigrant experience and diaspora, both of the supernatural and the Jewish nature, it interacts with questions of community and how we treat our fellow people, it’s full of slice-of-life passages, which is something I also want to depict in my fantasy, and the interpersonal relationships are first and foremost the important aspects of them. It’s very much comfortable and what I want out of my fantasy.

4. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - same teacher twitter as the above really dug this book, and someone else I know is reading it, but if The Golem and the Jinni was a comfort read, this feels more geared towards a bracing punch of a book, especially given our current COVID-19 pandemic. I’m not going to mince words: a good chunk of world’s, especially the US, reaction to COVID-19 has been several mixtures of fatal embarrassment and part of that is the bitter realization that most people, both in charge and on the ground, don’t see responsibility towards their fellow person as an inherent quality. Have I grown more cynical through that? I was already pretty cynical, so not more so, but also because there are also plenty of people who do see connections to their fellow people as an inherent duty and condition for our humanity. Thus, why I want to read this book: survival is insufficient, because if we live for ourselves, if we are bereft of others, what are we? Oh, as the book is quoted as saying: Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

A quieter apocalypse feels more like my vibe, especially in the sense that I feel most people, in the wake of an apocalypse, wouldn’t go with the worst-case scenario that post-apocalyptic fiction has taught us about barbaric rapists, petty warlords, and thieves by gunpoint. Those are the worst case lessons, the people fiction endeavors to teach us to avoid being, the thunder and boom and villains of genre fiction. But what happens if our focus isn’t on external human terrors, but more existential questions and concerns after the mortal deaths of so many? Station Eleven seems to be a novel that seems interested in questioning how our humanity endures, how we do not die spiritually past our mortal deaths, how our memories remain resilient, how our works survive past pandemic and societal collapse.

It’s been in my library for quite a while now, and Station Eleven is one of those books that I wish to tackle outside my cozy fantasy wheelhouse. I have not read this, not because the existence of COVID-19 made it too real, but because I now want a post-apocalypse book that refuses to revel in the dark and naked nihilism of its barren genre landscape, choosing to highlight human connections and meaning past our mass-destruction.

5. Tower of Fools by Andrzej Sapkowski - So. Another anecdote: I just bought Witcher 3 a few days ago. Really, all three games. Now, granted, I haven’t been living under a rock. I’ve watched clips, scenes, and know the broad scope of the game’s plot and was interested in it, but digging deeper, what interested me was the Polish influence with the series. Sapkowski does not strike me an unintelligent writer at all, he clearly knows what he’s trying to do and subvert and comment on. Which is to say, when I say I haven’t bought a single Witcher book at all, it says something about what I’ve heard of its translation issues and Sapkowski’s feelings on his Witcher series (though I doubt he’d be much happier that I prefer to read his Hussite Trilogy first as much as I gave him money to begin with. You do you, Sapkowski).

Now, I didn’t follow his works enough to know about the Hussite Trilogy’s existence until @autoapocrypha recced it to me, but from what I’ve researched myself, it really seems like Sapkowski poured a ton of details and love and thought into this world than his Witcher world. It’s a historical fantasy world, full of religious extremism, war being utter hell, costs of violence, and supernatural creatures lurking in the corners, and thus, is perfect research fodder for my Croatian-inspired The Folk Devils of Hrvatska, which incidentally slots into similar themes and setting that the Hussite Trilogy seems to play with. That, and I really do want to get into the fuss of Sapkowski in the brass tacks and such. 

There’s an amazing amount of thematic and unique history to be studied from the Eastern European portion of the world, the infighting, the nationalism, the religious extremism and near-constant strife of war littering the land, full of colonial bastards trying to pull a game of musical chairs with the little people underfoot being stomped on with every pissing contest between rulers. It’s an idiosyncratic space of land I absolutely want to study and want even more of in the general fantasy landscape, given where Sapkowski’s interests lie.

Honorable mentions, because I couldn’t localize to top 5 books (this list was originally over ten!!!):

The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune - Found family with supernatural characters? Domestic peace? All living in the same area with no clear-cut bad guy to railroad the plot? Yes, please.

Independent People by Halldór Laxness - Excellent research fodder for the interiority and struggles of the lowborn farmers and trying to carve out a living beyond serving masters with no romanticism at all.

The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant - Another slice-of-life book that pays attentions to the connections that we share with others, especially in the same proximity of space.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke - Clarke’s leaner and potentially better novel over her debut one? One that @books-and-doodles described as having a protagonist similar to Fitz? INJECT THIS INTO MY VEINS.

The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang - slight research fodder (more to do with pacing and forefronting YA elements before whamming readers into the brutal stuff), but also non-European and woman-written grimdark? 👍

Tagging: @vera-dauriac, @autoapocrypha, @insecticidalfeminism, @doublehex​, @xillionart, @random-jot, @jumpydr4gon, @bloody-wonder, and @mytly4 and whoever else that is following me and wishes to do this tag (I’d like to read your posts, so please tag me! :D)

[dare-g]

Books 11 through 20 of the year