Perhaps no Western country has been so deeply absorbed in its own past as Iceland, where the sagas are still popular literature. A number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, particularly the Scandinavian Naturalists, have been attracted by the narrative power and the complete objectivity of these family sagas. But whereas a few writers—Selma Lagerlöf, Knut Hamsun, and Sigrid Undset among them—have successfully extracted certain stylistic features from the sagas and incorporated them into modern novels, most attempts to imitate the sagas have only resulted in slightly comic pastiches. Nobel Prize-winner Halldor Laxness is the one writer who has been able to resurrect the saga and make it into a viable narrative form. The Fish Can Sing … is a perfect illustration of the stylistic synthesis he has achieved….

Alfgrim Hansson, the narrator of The Fish Can Sing, begins to unfold the story of his childhood and...