Independent People
by Halldór Laxness
Summary
Bjartur of Summerhouses spends eighteen years as another man's shepherd to earn the price of his own small croft in the Icelandic countryside, and once he finally owns it he treats independence as the only value worth any sacrifice, including the people closest to him. He marries twice, first Rósa and then Finna, and fathers several sons and a daughter, Ásta Sóllilja, whom he raises with real tenderness even as his stubbornness slowly starves the whole household of comfort. When a postwar economic collapse ruins the price of sheep, Bjartur cannot repay the loan he took to build a better house, and the bank takes Summerhouses outright, undoing eighteen years of labor in a single stroke.
His children scatter as the debts close in. One son, Helgi, vanishes on the moor in a storm; another, Nonni, is sent to America; and Bjartur is left with almost no one still willing to share his idea of what a free life costs. The novel's closing chapters bring him back to Ásta Sóllilja, now a mother herself and seriously ill with tuberculosis, and the two set out together toward an uncertain future, neither of them any longer independent in the way Bjartur spent his whole life demanding.
Laxness writes Iceland's farms, weather and folk sagas into a story that stays tender toward Bjartur's courage even while it stays unsparing about what that courage costs everyone around him, refusing to let his hero's stubbornness read as either pure heroism or pure foolishness. It suits a reader willing to spend real time with a difficult, often unlikable protagonist, since the novel's sympathy for Bjartur only deepens the more clearly it shows what his idea of independence actually demanded of his family.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Halldór Laxness the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature for his vivid epic power, which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland, and critics have since placed him in the company of Cervantes, Zola, Tolstoy and Hamsun. Independent People, published in two parts in 1934 and 1935 as Sjálfstætt fólk, is the novel most responsible for that comparison, and its 1946 English translation became a Book of the Month Club selection in the United States, introducing Laxness to hundreds of thousands of readers who had never encountered Icelandic literature before.
Laxness remains Iceland's only Nobel laureate in literature. His outspoken socialist politics made him a difficult figure for American audiences to embrace during the Cold War years that followed his prize, and access to the United States grew harder for him for a time as a result. The novel has outlasted that period's politics: Annie Dillard, reviewing the 1997 reissue in the New York Times, called it a mythic tale crossed with Marx, and it remains the book most credited with bringing Icelandic fiction to international attention.