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Product Description
A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocative tale. Halldor Laxness' wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stone cottage of Bjom of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavik. It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents' home in the early years of the twentieth century, an hospitable place where dignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfish to a bible had a fixed price which never changed.
From the Back Cover
'It is a novel (a world) that transmits something of the wonder of life, its strangeness, its goodness, ocassions for stubbornness, and the stoicism of people - people everywhere.' Murray Bail
A tender coming of age story of a boy and a nation, dragged unwillingly into the modern world.
Abandoned as a baby, Alfgrimur is content to spend his days as a fisherman living in the turf cottage outside Reykjavik with the elderly couple he calls grandmother and grandfather. There he shares the mid-loft with a motley bunch of eccentrics and philosophers who find refuge in the simple respect for their fellow men that is the ethos at Brekkukot. But the narrow horizon's of Alfgrimur's idyllic childhood are challenged when he starts school and meets Iceland's most famous singer, the mysterious Gardar Holm. Garder encourages him to aim for the 'one true note', but how can he attain it withough leaving behind the world that he loves?
'This weird and wonderful novel ... is Laxness at his best: a reminder of the mad hilarity of the Icelandic sensibility. An unforgettable voice.' Nicholas Shakespeare
'Laxness's view of a child's bounded universe has humour and a light touch.' Isobel Montgomery, Guardian