With his narrative skill and vivid style [Halldór Laxness] has done more than any modern novelist to renew Icelandic prose. Indeed, he dominated the literary scene in Iceland from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. In his heyday he was an odd mixture of a universal creative genius and a partisan essayist propagating radical socialism and revolution. However, he made a point of separating his art and his social and political preaching, with the result that his novels are largely free from those tendencies which often mar the works of socially conscious writers. He has a surprisingly large range of styles and subjects, so that no two of his novels resemble one another in anything but their felicity of expression and power of character portrayal. A large number of his characters have become as much household figures in Iceland as the old saga heroes or, say...