A Parish Chronicle

“Now, reading and rereading Philip Roughton’s masterful rendering of A Parish Chronicle, I’m spellbound by Laxness’s signature humor, as well-defined by its light-footed quirkiness as by its polar darkness . . . Respect and sympathy shines through most clearly and efficiently in A Parish Chronicle.” —Jason Gordy Walker, Asymptote

“I’m currently reading and enjoying A Parish Chronicle, by the Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, which just came out in English for the first time. It’s about sheepherders and a stubborn church that just won’t quit. It is, as I’m sure you can already guess, hilarious.” —Lauren Harris, The New Yorker

“We enter into the lives and stories of locals—bedridden Finnbjörg, long-suffering Ash-Lakí—folklore of Icelandic daily life that looms meaningfully yet ambiguously over the frame narrative of the church chronicle . . . Laxness was a genius . . . In terms of bringing uniquely to life a strange and mystical world, and enriching that world with pathos, he is unmatched.” —The Literarian Gazette

“The book’s thoroughgoing sense of fun has everything to do with its narrative voice . . . It’s the sense of ease and familiarity with which Laxness weaves his various narrative strands that lends the novel a timeless air, so much so that you wouldn’t be mistaken if you came away feeling like a cast of new myths has just taken shape before your eyes.” —Eric Bies, Asymptote

“This book is my first encounter with Halldór Laxness and I am inclined to think it is as good a place to start as any. Especially with the excellent introduction to the varied and shifting nature of the Icelandic master’s oeuvre . . . The narrative tone of A Parish Chronicle rests on an irresistible sly, understated humour that runs throughout . . . a thoroughly entertaining story.” —Joseph Schreiber, Rough Ghosts

“A Parish Chronicle draws on all Laxness’ signature themes: Icelandic culture and tradition; the ambivalent inheritance of the Sagas; small lives lived against the merciless current of history. His wry, laconic voice is as unmistakable here as it is inimitable . . . [Laxness] turns his attention to the ephemera of the everyday, burnishing them in memory so that—like the Mosfell church—they are never fully lost but always ripe for resurrection.” —Justin Taylor, Harvard Review

“The book is filled with some of the strangest characters Laxness ever gave us (and there are many, believe me), and with events that on the surface are so mundane that they would normally not demand attention, let alone be written about. Yet Laxness’s able hand pushes the pen until they are infused with tender mystery that makes us care for them all.” —Sjón, 4Columns

“In Laxness, the boundary collapses between inward and outward. Nowhere is this more on display than in the novel A Parish Chronicle . . . Surely one of the reasons A Parish Chronicle feels like a high-fidelity representation of Laxness’s soul is because he grew up [in Mosfell Valley] and knows the history in the marrow of his bones . . . I can think of no better introduction to the entire oeuvre of Laxness.” —Will Chancellor, The Brooklyn Rail

“A seamless mix of folklore and quotidian details . . . Readers will be transported.” —Publishers Weekly

“This is a better novel (richer, deeper) than anything else you’re likely to meet this year. Its people are as real as you or me— as are its shorebirds and its blizzards and its dreams and its cows.”— Brad Leithauser on Salka Valka, Wall Street Journal

“A gripping wonder, and Laxness’s most sustained piece of narrative drama . . . Even in moments of high drama, [Philip Roughton] moves along with calm assurance, tossing off Laxness’s inventive and always spot-on descriptions as though they were commonplace, as when, on a cliff, the puffins ‘squatted with the dignity of church officials in front of their burrows.’ He captures Laxness’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace . . . Despite [Laxness’s] mischievous show of ease, he is giving his book everything he has in the hope that it will exceed him.”—Salvatore Scibona on Salka Valka, The New Yorker

“[Laxness’s] novels from the 1930s—Salka Valka in particular—brim with life, humor, devastation. Laxness detonates some sentences like little bombs . . . Others he lets expand and accumulate to reveal an almost Dickensian delight in people and their idiosyncrasies . . . I find his descriptions of the natural world incomparably moving . . . The novel is a singular work of social realism.”— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books

“Laxness somehow blends epic form with the day-to-day realism of loan negotiations and herring and haircuts. He is a humorist and a visionary, a critical eye and an open heart. Salka Valka is a marvel, a pleasure, and a masterpiece.”— Rivka Galchen on Salka Valka

“A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer. Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland . . . There’s a poetry to Laxness’s depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship . . . [Salka Valka is] full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Laxness’ small-town tale depicts a world where life is difficult, but the novel never sinks into deep gloom; there’s a variety of resilient spirit here – with Salka Valka’s particularly pronounced and strong . . . a very fine novel, and a wonderful character-portrait of a remarkable figure.”—Michael Orthofer on Salka Valka, Complete Review

“Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.”—Alice Munro

“Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas’ shadow…to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.”—The Guardian

“Science fiction. Table, fable, allegory. Philosophical novel. Dream novel. Visionary novel. Literature of fantasy. Wisdom lit. Spoof. Sexual turn-on. Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries′ perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories. The only novel I know that fits into all of them is Halldór Laxness′s wildly original, morose, uproarious Under the Glacier.” —Susan Sontag

“More than any other novel I know, Iceland′s Bell recreates a world Pieter Brueghel would have felt right at home, not merely in its fascination with bumblers (petty thieves, purblind watchmen) and grotesques (faceless lepers, hanging corpses), but also in its unearthly ability to find beauty in a landscape of destitution, wisdom in a congress of fools.” —The New York Times Book Review

“One quality that makes Laxness’s novels so morally uplifting is their air of tender but urgent gratitude. While his tone can vary widely from book to book…the reader consistently feels that the books are conceived in a spirit of homage; they are some of the world’s most substantial thank-you notes.”—Brad Leithauser, The New York Review of Books

“Laxness habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present…[A]ll his narratives…have a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force.”—Richard Rayner, LA Times

“One of the world’s most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists.”— Jane Smiley