The man who brought Iceland in from the cold

The Great Weaver From Kashmir

A Novel

Halldor Laxness

Translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

Archipelago Books: 446 pp., $26

Americans are sometimes not too sure where or what Iceland is, but for the literary, it is a sort of holy land -- a small population (300,000 for the whole country), a harsh and obscure geography on the edge of the Arctic, that has nevertheless produced a major European literature for a thousand years. An argument might be made that only the language (old Norse, craggy and wildly inflected) and the literature have kept the country alive -- and mostly independent -- for a millennium.

But one difficulty in owning this distinguished literary ancestry is that your writers go on forever imitating the glories of the Middle Ages, neglecting the world around them -- the modern, whether language, style or subject. So it was in Iceland in 1900. Nobel Prize-winning novelist Halldor Laxness was born there on a farm outside Reykjavik in 1902 and lived so long (until 1998) that his life encompassed the entire 20th century. He did his best to get "the whole catastrophe," as Zorba the Greek says, into more than 60 books -- from 1919 until almost the end. "The Great Weaver From Kashmir" was the young Laxness' bulldozer to clear the first road into the 20th century. Icelandic writers assure me that whatever foreigners might think of this fascinating but shaggy beast of a book, they understand that it made modern literature possible in Iceland. You could now write past the Sagas, whatever their noble history.

After a long disappearance from print in English, Laxness is back in force on American bookstore shelves. "Independent People," his most famous work, reappeared in 1997 after a 41-year absence, followed in this decade by six more major novels and now a seventh: "The Great Weaver From Kashmir," published in 1927 but Englished now for the first time by Philip Roughton. Readers can see what he was like as a young writer before he quite became the Nobel genius. The seeds of Laxness' style, his view of the world, his irony, his humor -- and his power to wring the heart -- are all there, but like bird chicks, they've not quite assumed their full adult feathers, their size or their grown-up wisdom.