When an author has won a Nobel Prize, it is not unsafe to assume that his work is imbued with high seriousness and earnest purpose, for the Nobel committee has never shown much affection for comedians. The Icelander Halldor Laxness comes, therefore, as a delightful lapse from tradition. His novel The Fish Can Sing … simmers with an ironic, disrespectful mirth which gives unexpected dimensions to the themes of lost innocence and the nature of art. These themes are sober enough, but as Mr. Laxness develops them through the experiences of young Alfgrim in Reykjavik at the start of the century, they lead to … memorable absurdities….

Iceland was a Danish colony in those days, and Mr. Laxness has a great deal of fun with provincial imitations of Copenhagen manners…. The basis of Mr. Laxness' style is … Icelandic bluntness, which is not bluntness at all but a literary technique that...