"A welcome, major contribution to modern Nordic literature in translation and a pleasure to read." -- Kirkus Reviews --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling." -- Alice Munro "Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas' shadow...to read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland--he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity." -- "The Guardian" "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 habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present...All his narratives...have a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force." -- "LA Times" "One of the world's most unusual, skilled and visionary novelists." -- Jane Smiley"