World Light (Vintage International) - Softcover

Laxness, Halldor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727574 ISBN 13: 9780375727573

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2002

Synopsis

As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation: the belief that one day he will be a great poet. The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet's life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness.
As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf's ambition drives him onward-and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women-World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.

About this title

Review:

"[Laxness is] a poet who writes to the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: He takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in an Evelyn Waugh-like humor: it is not possible to be unimpressed." -- Daily Telegraph (London)

"[An author of] compassionate, scathing novels." -Annie Dillard, The New York Times Book Review

"[Laxness is] a poet who writes to the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: He takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in an Evelyn Waugh-like humor: it is not possible to be unimpressed." -- Daily Telegraph (London)

"Laxness is a brilliant writer." --The Washington Post

Synopsis:

This dense, mystical novel features the sort of quixotic anti-hero Laxness specializes in - in this case, a failed poet named Olaf Karason. Olaf is an outsider in a society that admires poetry, but scorns poets. The narrative takes him on a series of adventures both miraculous and brutally realistic, as he searches for beauty amid the squalor and ugliness of his life in rural Iceland. After being released from prison he falls in love with a young girl he idealizes as his image of poetic beauty, but having found what he'd been searching for, in seeking to possess her he destroys her. Woven throughout WORLD LIGHT is Laxness's usual gallery of vivid characters, and his signature combination of brutality and tenderness, his ultimately compassionate satire.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375727574
• ISBN 13: 9780375727573
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624