This isn't something I'd usually read, and even as I started reading I expected to be bored - but once I started, I was compelled to keep reading, and wasn't bored at all. An intriguing read.

Fish Can Sing by Halldor Laxness is a glimpse into Icelandic life at the beginning of the twentieth century. A mixture of profundity and simplicity, humour and sadness, it’s unlike anything I’ve read before. Recommended.

A gentle, affectionate, coming-of-age tale set in an Iceland which is on the brink of modernity and change. The pace is ambling, the characters an eccentric mix, but I liked the quiet wisdom and reticent open-heartedness of the narrator's adopted grandparents. There's a Proustian motif of time via an old clock that seems to tick out 'eternity' to the narrator's boyhood ears, and a charming air that, nevertheless, avoids the saccharine.

Halldor Laxness has a unique voice and at first I felt a couple of beats behind his humour as I felt my way into the world of this novel set in early 20th century Iceland. The story is at once personal and universal as the country confronts modernity. The characters are wonderful and the sense of a place and a people seen through the eyes of a growing boy is captivating.

Two years after being awarded the Nobel Prize, Laxness published this bildungsroman about the young Icelander Álfgrímur whose coming-of-age at the beginning of the 20th century coincides with the advancement of capitalist modernity in Iceland. Abandoned by his mother, Álfgrímur grows up with loving fostergrandparents in a cottage named Brekkukot in Reykjavik (the Icelandic original of the book is called "The Annals of Brekkukot"). His fostergrandfather Björn works as a fisherman, never demanding more money for his goods than he needs to survive, and lives values like integrity, humility and charity without making a show of it. A recurring metaphor is the old clock in the living room at Brekkukot that chimes in harmony with the church bell, and that seems to tick a four-syllable word with emphasis on alternate syllables: Eternity. But time passes.

At Brekkukot, Björn helps all kinds of people in turmoil, and large parts of the book deal with Álfgrímur meeting Icelanders and some foreigners from all walks of life. A central character is Garðar Hólm, who is allegedly a celebrated singer abroad and returns to Iceland several times - is art a calling or a profession, is it about happiness or fame, is it about truth or beauty? "People have kept on asking me", Álfgrímur recounts, "did he sing well? I reply, the world is a song, but we do not know wehether it's a good song because we have nothing to compare it with." While Álfgrimur is fascinated by the singer, he would be content to stay home in Iceland and become a fisherman like Björn, but the latter knows that industrialized fishing will change the profession and wants his fosterson to get an education - and he is willing to sacrifice the past for his future.

This is a wonderfully moving tale, full of vivid imagery and quirky characters. Brekkukot was modeled after the farm Melkot on which Laxness' parents met, now a literature landmark in Reykjavik, UNESCO's first non-English speaking City of Literature (https://bokmenntaborgin.is/en/node/7771). Icelandic literature is so unbelievably good. Just read Laxness, and then Sjón.

"But before I tell this story, I want above all to warn people against thinking that they are about to hear something epic or spectacular."

Laxness' novel offers a painfully sincere portrait of life in a rural Iceland, its hardships and all that is about to disappear by impending modernity, whilst the prose is lucid rather than nostalgic; folklore, myths and Icelandic traditions constitute the backdrop upon which the reader may meditate on life and death.