Under The Glacier

On Susan Sontag’s point of view, UNDER THE GLACIER is a novel that is a smorgasbord of every kind of novel – allegory, farce, science fiction, philosophical novel, and dream novel. Indeed it is, and I say: Wow!

Using reportage as template to tell the story, this stunning and impressive novel centers on the journey of a young theology student who had been assigned task by the bishop of Iceland to look into and, subsequently, report on the curious happenings at a remote rural town around Snaefellsjökull. If you read, or even if you have just watched the film adaptation of, Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" you’ll recall that Snaefellsjökull is the extinct volcano through which the explorer Dr. Otto Lidenbrock descends in. These strange goings-on included the pastor’s boarding up the local church and leaving it to decay, his refusal to perform baptism, his giving permission bury a corpse in the glacier, his non-withdrawal of his salary for twenty years, and his turning into a handyman, e.g., shoeing horses. In this journalistic adventure, the student learned, and tried to unearth the truth, about stranger and sometimes absurd stories which added mystique to the town, like people who had turned into salmon, a woman who had risen from the dead to bake bread for the pallbearers, etc.

Under The Glacier is the first book by the 1958 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, Halldór Laxness, which I’ve read. I can’t wait to read his other book (The Fish Can Sing), which I have on my shelf.

{March 8, 2009}