There are wonderful scenes where the characters talk obliquely about the past that shackles them and the destiny that constrains them. Without having re-read it, I would venture that Independent People is even better on re-reading. I don't think spoilers are to be regretted when it comes to Independent People, and if you find out elsewhere how the story runs, you will not enjoy the book any less. I should probably stop with the plot summary right there. He brings with him a wife who seems mighty reluctant about Summerhouses and about Bjartur – with good reason, because she is pregnant with the Bailiff's grandchild, fruit of her brief fling with the Bailiff's imperious son Ingolfur Arnarson. Bjartur moves into the homestead, long called Winterhouses, and renames it Summerhouses in a fit of rhetorical optimism. The farmstead comes cheap because it's accursed. He'd been part apprentice, part foster child, and as the novel opens, he's finally saved enough money to buy a farmstead from his mentor. The hero of Independent People is Bjartur, who has grown up a shepherd on the estate of the local Bailiff. But if any of them are better than Independent People, they are pretty outrageously magnificent books indeed. Laxness wrote several similar books in the 1930s and 40s, including Salka Valka, World Light, and Iceland's Bell, and I have not read those. I am not sure whether Independent People by Halldór Laxness is the great Icelandic novel. Lection home authors titles dates links about

Sjálfstætt fólk by Halldór Laxness