The Fish Can Sing, by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson
"The smoke from my grandmother's chimney went straight up into the sky on this calm, clear, late-summer morning of eternity."
The more astute among you will remember from my summer recap newsletter that I started this book but never finished it, not even close.
Then I went to Iceland and had this marvelous vacation and I just wanted more of it, more of the feeling that I had there, on that little island, and I kept thinking about this book, and I realized I missed the characters and decided to pick it back up again.
And, well. I was still bored. I still found the episodic setup a challenge to my attention span, and I still found the black, crude humor and the post war coming of age plot a little outside my wheelhouse.
But I stuck with it, hoping for a payoff. And while ol’ Halldór left it very, very late, the payoff came in the last few pages, as the story melted into a sea of melancholy that one almost didn’t see coming. And you realize it is a story of a place, a single small holding on the edge of a town becoming a city, more than it is a story of a boy becoming a man. The boy grows up, and is forced to reckon with all that had happened there at that farm, and in a most unexpected way. The ending left me feeling hallowed out like only the best books with the best endings can make me feel.
I’m not sure if it’s for everyone. And I really was very, very bored for large chunks of it. But I can see why this is considered a classic, and that that boredom was, well, kind of on purpose. Like real life, nothing much happens day to day — slow good luck is best, as the protagonist’s grandmother says — but the days add up and keep adding up and then all of sudden you face a wall of memory and time and you realize all that could be — or is already — lost. It’s a tricky conceit and a tricky concept, but Laxness was a Nobel winner and considered a genius for a reason, and he pulls it off beautifully, without a single wasted word.
I loved it. I’m glad it’s over.
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Next up: the new Knausgaard! Just out today!
Thanks for reading!