Bjartur of Summerhouses - An Icelandic Sisyphus

References

• 1997 . How Proust Can Change Your Life , London : Picador . The whole book of Alain De Botton is an attempt to prove the truth of his tide. I don't know how many readers would agree with him, but I have known of at least one person who told me that if it were not for Proust (whom she read continuously during many years) she would have committed suicide. And in his Introduction to Independent People, Brad Leithauser agrees with Alain de Botton. He mentions a number of novelists who each have found one book as being closer to them than any other: for one it is Knut Hamsun's Mysteries, for another Alain Foumier's Legrand Meaulnes, for a third the Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne, and finally for himself it is Independent People.
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• 1998 . "John Hawkes, Novelist, is Dead," . International Herald Tribune , 19 May : 3 However, some contemporary, avant-garde, or experimental novelists would definitely condemn all these as being really superfluous. As one highly praised author has put it, "I began to write fiction on die assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, [my italics] and having once abandoned diese familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of fiction or structure was really all that remained. And structure--verbal and psychological coherence--is still my largest concern as a writer.", Tuesday,. But we may well ask why totality of structure and verbal and psychological coherence can be found only in experimental novelists, when in fact they are to be found in most classical epics and modern great novels--from Homer to Tolstoy.
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• McKinley , Jesse , ed. 12 June 1998 . "Warm Nights in Cold Reykjavik: City Gets Hot When the Summer Sun Goes Down" ” . In International Herald Tribune 12 June , leisure section, 10
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• Chatwin , Bruce . 1977 . In Patagonia , London : Jonathan Cape .
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• See Mary Williams Walsh, "Iceland Sees.Com Peril: Internet Terminology Conquering Youth," International Herald Tribune, 1 July 1998.Iceland, you must first understand, is a tough, proud, island nation with language-reservation instincts that put the Académie française to shame. Icelandic may be spoken by fewer than half a million people worldwide, but you should never mistake it for a beleaguered minority tongue. On the contrary: up until now, Iceland could boast a minority-language success story nearly unique in the world. The French may be fighting a losing battle with such creeping barbarisms as "Ie hot dog." Germany may have succumbed to "das Midlifecrisis." But centuries of Icelandic isolation and vigilance have preserved a national grammar, vocabulary and spelling that are virtually identical to what the Norwegian Vikings spoke when they settled this land in the ninth century. Startling though it may sound to an American who has struggled with the Middle English of Chaucer, any Olof Sixpack here can curl up with a Saga--written a good century before The Canterbury Tales--and understand every word.
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• Chatwin , Bruce . 1983 . On the Black Hill , London : Picador . I have found a great similarity between this novel and that of,. Written almost forty years later, it is the story of the life of Welsh farmers from before the end of the nineteenth century to the end of World War II, spanning almost a whole century. But the similarity is striking. The hard life of Welsh farmers, in this case that of Amos Jones and Mary his wife, his twin sons, Lewis and Benjamin and his daughter Rebecca, in their endless struggle for attaining some kind of bearable life and livelihood; the daily backbreaking toil, the privations, the harsh climate, the daily difficulties for obtaining the fodder for their flock, the fight against the cold, winds, storms, the quarrels and fights against poor and envious neighbors, are the same as those suffered by Bjartur and his family. But whereas Lewis and Benjamin Jones do finally manage to buy their homestead, "The Vision," on the Black Hill, they too are at end swindled by their sister Rebecca and her son, their good-for-nothing grandson Kevin. But at least they will die, at peace, in the house where they were born and which they built and enlarged, surrounded by the fields and pastures and flocks they slowly acquired and loved all their life. But not so Bjartur of Summerhouses.
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• Kundera , Milan . 1988 . The An of the Novel, trans. from the French by Linda Asher , 44 New York : Harper & Row, Perennial Library .
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