Independent People

One thing I like to do when I travel far away is read a book about the place I'm going. My thought process is always that I'll read the book to learn a bit about the place and its culture, possibly right there on the flight over. Invariably, I end up starting the book before leaving and then putting off the rest of it until I return home. That's what happened when I dared to attempt James Michener's Hawaii on a trip to Hawaii, and it's what happened just recently when I tried to tackle Halldór Laxness's Independent People.

I had never heard of this book or its author until I went to Google with a string of queries like "best Icelandic book." Suffice it to say, this book almost universally holds that distinction - though many kind people from the Internet also recommended the medieval Icelandic sagas. Turns out, Laxness is a Nobel laureate and Independent People is by far his most acclaimed novel. Some people have called it one of the greatest books of the twentieth century. So what makes it so special?

The book was written in the early 1930s and takes place roughly from 1895 to 1920 or so. It's more or less the story of a stubborn farmer named Bjartur who believes that the greatest thing you can be in life is independent - self-reliant, so to speak. Keep in mind, this is Iceland in the early 20th century, one of the poorest and most desolate places on earth. Bjartur lives a lifestyle that would put any deep woods New Hampshire libertarian to shame. The man staunchly refuses any favors or gifts offered to him by neighbors and other would-be creditors. He suffers profusely, toiling away on a rocky, shitty farm, trying to keep his sheep fed and uninfected by parasites. His house is a one-room hovel. He scoffs at the idea of getting a cow, since sheep provide more meat relative to how much grass they consume, and also wool. Early on in the novel, Bjartur spends several days out in a blizzard looking for one lost sheep. He's pretty much insane.

Now, all this would make for a good comedy, in which we all laugh at Bjartur for his steadfast refusal to make any decisions that aren't in his best economic interest - and it often does. But the book is also darkly tragic. Bjartur has a wife to care for, after all - and then a second wife, once the first one dies of malnutrition. He's got lots of kids, too, though most of them die within their first year, and the sons that make it to early adulthood tend to bolt for America as soon as they can. His pride and his principles are literally killing his own family, and none of them can do anything about it.

Those are just the cliff notes; this is is a deep book with plenty more to offer. It's also complex. Sometimes it seems like Laxness thinks Bjartur is deeply noble and altruistic, and the practice of Icelandic shepherding is rustic and charming and good. Other times, it's plainly clear that Bjartur is a proud fool; his morals are deeply and scathingly satirized, and the sheep farm is depicted as a miserable and terrible place to carve out a living. Laxness was a socialist, and Bjartur clearly isn't, but does Laxness take pity on Bjartur as a victim of materialistic tendencies, or does he see him as an emblem of everything wrong with the concept of capitalism in the first place? Or is it a little of each? The story is ultimately a tragedy, and despite its setting and period, it's a timeless one; its ending easily serves as a direct analogy to the 2007 housing market crash.

Some have called this book the Icelandic Les Misérables, and that makes sense; it's an epic, decades-spanning tale of misery with bits and pieces of history and culture interspersed. Others have called it the Moby-Dick of sheep-farming. That fits too; both books are about obsessive men who ultimately doom everyone around them with their own hubris, and Independent People has plenty of passages on the mundanities of various sheep parasites. At the very least, Independent People does seem to be the quintessential Icelandic novel. There's pride, there's dry humor, there's misery, and there are sheep. It's a long and dense book, clocking in somewhere around 210 to 240 thousand words (Moby-Dick has around 208 thousand) and on top of its length, I can't say it was an easy read. It's not something I'd rush to recommend to many people I know, but I'm glad I read it all the same. Maybe I'll revisit Laxness again some day; there's no way the rest of his books can be this long!