["Independent People"], laid in Iceland, tells about a man who struggles for eighteen years to get hold of enough money to buy a sheep farm and then has to struggle just as hard to keep hold of it. Since such epical efforts cannot be confined within the dimensions of the ordinary novel and since Mr. Laxness's theme is that of man against the universe, he lets himself go for four hundred and seventy pages of just about solid type. His book consequently moves at the pace of one of the livelier glaciers. I can't say that it is altogether enjoyable, particularly those long passages of somewhat murky philosophy that are as essential to an epic as the theme of man against the universe, but it's not altogether unreadable, either. Mr. Laxness's hero, it might be added, is as disagreeable a character as ever an epic was built around...