Skip to main content

Buchmesse Challenge review for February: The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness

Icelandic title: Brekkukotsannáll (Literally “Annals of Brekkukot”) 
Genre: Literary fiction, historical
Year of publication: 1957
Setting & time: Reykjavik area, Iceland; beginning of the 20th century.

This novel by Iceland's only Nobel prize-winner, the first he published after winning the prize, boasts what is the most memorable opening sentence I have ever read in a novel:

"A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father."



Álfgrímur (the narrator of the story) is a young boy abandoned by his mother and raised by his foster-grandparents at Brekkukot, a small house in what is now nearly the center of Reykjavik but was, at the time of the story, one of a small cluster of buildings separate from the commercial and administrative center of town. The house is a haven for people who are down on their luck and acts as a sort of social center for the community and a counterpoint for the bakery which becomes the other centre of Álfgrímur’s life. His plans to become a fisherman begin to change when Garðar Hólm, a world-famous Icelandic singer (who may or may not be anything of the sort), returns to his homeland and awakens Álfgrímur’s interest in singing, but also brings about his inevitable loss of innocence.

I vacillated between reviewing a new (to me) Laxness novel and one I had read before for this challenge, but finally I decided to choose one of my two Laxness favourites, Iceland’s Bell (Íslandsklukkan) or The Fish Can Sing (Brekkukotsannáll). I eventually decided to write about The Fish Can Sing, since it takes place during an era of history that I am interested in. The belle epoque was in full swing in Europe, but while it covers a belle epoque of sorts in the life of the narrator the story of The Fish Can Sing couldn't in other respects be farther away from the grand flowering of culture and science that was taking place across the sea.

The Fish Can Sing is first and foremost a lovely coming of age novel with all the contrasting of experience vs. innocence (and the loss thereof) that this entails, but it is also a mediation on the difference between the pastoral and the cosmopolitan and a somewhat nostalgic snapshot of a less complicated era that is forever gone. On the surface it is a simple story, but there is much going on under that surface. The narrative is more character-driven than plot-based, the prose is simple, beautiful and unpretentious (which can unfortunately not be said of all of Laxness’ novels), and while it hasn’t received the attention that Independent People has, it is thought by some to be Laxness’ true masterpiece. 5 stars.

Below you will find a list of languages it has been translated into,latest edition given in all cases. Some are lamentably translations of translations, but at least the German and Scandinavian editions are translated from the original Icelandic.

Arabic (Hin Tghni Ala'smak; Lebanon, 2010)
Bulgarian (Letopis Na Stopanstvoto Brekukot; 1964)
Czech (Rybí Koncert; 1978)
Danish (År Og Dage I Brattekåd; 1973)
Dutch (Het Visconcert; 2004)
Finnish (Lapsuuden Maisema; 1960
German (Das Fischkonzert; 2002)
Greenlandic (Aallartup Allattugai; 1984)
Hebrew (Gam Ha-Dag Yasir; 1976)
Hungarian (Az Éneklö Hal; 1962)
Italian (Il Concerto Dei Pesci; 2007)
Norwegian (Brekkukotkrønike; 2000)
Polish (Czysty Ton; 1966)
Portugese (Os Peixes Também Sabem Cantar; 2010)
Russian (Brekkukotskaja Letopis, 1954)
Swedish (Tidens Gång I Backstugan; 1967)


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more