Independent People (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob.

Independent People: An Epic, by Halldór Laxness (1946, Vintage ed. 1997).  Laxness (1902–1998) is Iceland’s only Nobel laureate; he won the prize for literature in 1955.  After visiting Iceland this past June, I decided I had to try a novel by its greatest author, and I easily found this translation by J.A. Thompson.  Set in the first few decades of the 20th century, this tale is about a peasant sheep farmer named Bjartur.  He has spent 18 years in some kind of servitude, and now he has saved enough money to buy a small sheep farm of his own, in a valley said to be cursed by a long-dead witch.  But Bjartur is a veritable Captain Ahab of the soil, obsessed with raising his sheep and remaining independent of all other people, and against all odds he manages to eke out a living on his marshy plot of land.  He marries unhappily, soon finding out his bride is probably carrying another man’s child, but he bears a strange tenderness towards the baby, a girl he names Asta Sollilja, or “beloved sun-lily.”  As the years go by, Bjartur’s obsession with independence costs him dearly in all his relationships, and the question looms whether his character flaws will ultimately doom him to a life of solitude and a lonely death.  I thoroughly enjoyed it—to the point that I limited myself to only a couple of chapters a day so the book would last longer.  Highly recommended.

Gods Behaving Badly (book review)

A book review from The Movie Snob

Gods Behaving Badly, by Marie Phillips (2007). I remembered hearing some good things about this novel when it came out a couple of years ago, so when I had the chance I picked it up from one of those bargain booksellers. (I think it was Daedalus–fittingly enough for a book based on Greek mythology.) What if the ancient Greek gods and goddesses were real, and what if they were living in a crumbling old flat in modern-day London? In Phillips’s novel, Apollo has a cheesy psychic show on cable TV, his sister Artemis is a dog-walker, and Dionysus runs the hippest nightclub in the neighborhood. But the centuries are taking their toll on the deities, and they are getting the uneasy feeling they might not be so immortal after all. When Apollo falls in love with a mere mortal woman named Alice (with an assist from one of Eros’s arrows), an unlikely series of events threatens disaster for everyone. A cute premise and a breezy read.