A book before visiting Iceland
Reading a book related to an upcoming trip is always a best practice. What if Iceland is your next destination?
The preparation of a trip involves different practical activities: ticket booking, accommodation selection, itinerary planning and so on. We sometimes don’t consider preparing our minds too, but this is as important as booking your flights. Why not boost the knowledge of a new place beforehand? Reading a book before your departure is an extremely good way to do it. It doesn’t matter whether it is a novel or the economic history of the country, as long as it is somehow connected to the destination.
When I traveled to the land of Ice and Volcanos, I had already read the pleasant and easy A Traveler’s Guide to Icelandic Folk Tales by Jón R. Hjálmarsson, a sort of simplified and modern version of the Poetic Edda, a collection of ancient nordic anonymous poems.
However, the book I would like to suggest here is probably the most famous Icelandic novel, Independent People by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness.
Laxness spent his childhood in a farm near Reykjavik, growing up in an environment soaked with references to folklore fairy tales. He was particularly good at creating realistic characters, highlighting and exaggerating some traits. This is particularly recognizable in Independent People.
Rural life in extreme conditions
This is what it is all about. 600 pages narrating the tough life of the main character, Bjartur, in an undefined time between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The rich descriptions of Icelandic atmospheres can be intimidating at first, but they are perfect to describe Bjartur’s world and temper.
The story takes place in a not-so-defined area in the South West of the island, which is now the most touristic region of Iceland.
Shortly afterward it started raining, very innocently at first, but the sky was packed tight with cloud and gradually the drops grew bigger and heavier […] And at the bottom of this unfathomed ocean of teeming rain sat the little house and its one neurotic woman.
In such a harsh environment, Bjartur seeks independence with the same self-denial with which Marcel Proust looked for the lost time. His concept of being independent becomes soon his religion. He is willing to sacrifice everything for it, even his children.
Bjartur goes through several misadventures, numerous seasons of poor harvest, sheep illnesses. He constantly fights against everything and everyone to be “independent”. You will end up feeling a sort of empathy for him. Despite his attempts to show himself rude and cold, he will tug at your heart.
You will find few historical facts in Independent People. The whole story is around one person, his family and his struggles to survive. What you find is how a hostile environment shapes the nature of its inhabitants.
The harshness of nature is a recurrent thematic in Icelandic authors.
Nature prevails over a relatively small population and has strongly forged the temper and customs of people over the centuries.
It was pretty miserable wretches that minded at all whether they were wet or dry. He could not understand why such people had been born. “It’s nothing but damned eccentricity to want to be dry” he would say. “I’ve been wet more than half my life and never been a whit the worse for it”.
While admiring those landscapes, I couldn’t avoid thinking about the long, descriptive pages of the book. Reading it before the trip raised my expectations even higher, and eventually, I was not disappointed.
Conclusion
Independent People gives you many beautiful, well-written pages of Icelandic nature, an insight into the hard life of Icelander inhabitants of one century ago and a character that you will end up to love.
I have to write a disclaimer now. If you travel to Iceland in the summer, don’t expect to meet many local people. Statistically, 90% of the people around you will be foreigners. So, go there if you are interested in extraordinary landscapes. If you are not, you could be disappointed.
