The Great Weaver from Kashmir

"[The protagonist's] grand, egotistical journey begins with art and ends with God, taking a path marked out by tormented disquisitions on all manner of existential questions."—New York Times Book Review

“Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the saga’s shadow. . . . To read Laxness is also to understand why he haunts Iceland—he writes the unearthly prose of a poet cased in the perfection of a shell of plot, wit, and clarity.”—Guardian

“Laxness is a poet who writes at the edge of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot: He takes a Tolstoyan overview, he weaves in a Waugh-like humor: it is not possible to be unimpressed.”—Daily Telegraph

“Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.”—Alice Munro

Halldór Laxness’ first major novel propels Iceland into the modern world. A young poet leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland’s shores for the jumbled world of post-WWI Europe. His journey leads the reader through a huge range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, exploring, as Laxness expressed it, the “far-ranging variety in the life of a soul, with the swings of a pendulum oscillating between angel and devil.” Published when Laxness was twenty-five years old, The Great Weaver from Kashmir’s radical experimentation caused a stir in Iceland.

Halldór Laxness is the master of modern Icelandic fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 for his “vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.”

Philip Roughton’s translations include Laxness’ Iceland’s Bell, for which he won the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2001.