Halldór Kiljan Laxness is [the] most original [of all the Icelandic writers who began to write after World War I]. Like nobody else he represents the young urban population of Reykjavík, cut loose from the secure moorings of the thousand year old farm-culture, searching vigorously for a new mode of living among the possibilities of the post-war world…. A monument to his Catholic days Vefarinn Mikli frá Kasmir … looms as a milestone of a new age in Icelandic novelistics; it is expressionistic and autobiographic, a true picture of the turmoil of the author's mind. After 1930 Laxness has described Icelandic land and people from his communistic point of view…. Laxness novels are conceived on the grand scale; the poor village girl and the independent cottage farmer emerging as heroes of monumental stature, individuals and symbols of their class at the same time. The poet, though no hero...