Resumo de Independent People

Having worked for many years for others, Bjartur has saved
enough to take up the lease on a sheep farm of his own, albeit in a valley
reputed to be haunted. And on his little croft of Summerhouses he endures the
deaths of two wives, attacks on his sheep, the vagaries of weather and
international wool and mutton prices, and the loss of children, to emigration
to America
as well as to death. Bjartur is cantankerous, unbending, and fiercely
independent, spurning assistance or charity. He mistrusts innovation, wary of
cooperatives and other radical notions and preferring the -old Rimes
(the Icelandic sagas) to new-fangled forms of literature; he trusts only in his
sheep, his dog, and his horse; and he relaxes a little only with his peers,
other small independent farmers. If he has a soft spot it is for his daughter
Asta Solilja, but when she falls pregnant they are estranged.

Though he is not in many ways an attractive character, Bjartur engages our
sympathies and gives Independent People both its center and its
holding power ? he is a genuinely unforgettable figure. Some passages switch to
other perspectives, notably those of his children: a young child''s perspective
on waking, a teenage girl''s first journey to town, and a young man''s calf love. In his lyrical descriptions of landscapes and his feel
for human relationships with them, and in his portrait of poverty and the grim
struggle to stay out of debt, Laxness is reminiscent of Thomas Hardy. In other
places he steps back and comments in Tolstoyan fashion on the politics and
economics of Iceland
and the nature of labor and man''s place in the world ? with some hints of his
(communist) politics, though he is never didactic. That may sound off-putting,
but Independent People is neither grim nor heavy going: it is imbued
with a warm humor, sardonic but at the same time embracing of humanity ? and in
some parts it has us almost laughing out loud.

Independent People is a glorious novel, clever and entertaining but
also deeply felt and moving. It was published in two parts in 1934 and 1935; in
1955 Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his vivid
epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.

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