Overview

Darkly funny and surprising novel about superstition and religion in an isolated Icelandic town. With an introduction from Susan Sontag. 'Wildly original, morose, uproarious... It is also one of the funniest books ever written' Susan Sontag A naive young man is sent by the bishop of Iceland to investigate a small town that has reportedly lost its faith. The church is boarded up and the errant pastor lives with a woman who is not his wife. He has also allowed a corpse to be lodged in the glacier. So the rumours go. What he discovers is a community that regards itself as the centre of the world - earthly yet otherworldly, banal yet astonishing. Brimming with humour, mystery, and the supernatural this is a surprising and moving novel from the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN SONTAG

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9781784877613

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One of the world's most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists. -Jane Smiley Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling. -Alice Munro The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor-oblique, stylized and childlike-that can be found in no other contemporary writer. -The Atlantic Monthly One of the world's most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists. -Jane Smiley A marvelous novel about the most ambitious questionsE. It is also one of the funniest books ever written.: --Susan Sontag, from the Introduction The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor-oblique, stylized and childlike-that can be found in no other contemporary writer. -The Atlantic Monthly Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling. -Alice Munro

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Halld r Laxness (Author) Halld r Laxness (1908-98) was born near Reykjavik, Iceland. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and one of the outstanding novelists of the twentieth-century, he wrote more than sixty books. Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955. Susan Sontag (Introducer) Susan Sontag is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover and In America which won the National Book Award, 2000. She is also the author of I, etcetera, a collection of stories; several plays, including Alice in Bed; and five works of non-fiction, among them On Photography and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. She died in 2004.

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