Salka Valka
Halldor Laxness, trans. by Philip Roughton
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Salka Valka
Halldor Laxness, trans. by Philip Roughton
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
A second translation arrives as an affirmation of enduring value and an implicit admission of shortcoming: We didn’t do you justice the first time around.
[Laxness'] first attempt to integrate his sense of socialism’s liberatory promise into a cohesive artistic vision.
Readers who’ve never heard of this fierce, crude, uncompromising, independent, isolated, enterprising, vulnerable daughter of Iceland’s frigid sea and narrow fjords will meet a character who would be as at home at today’s #MeToo rallies as she was nearly a century ago in the tiny village of Óseyr.
Laxness explores Salka’s inner life and the social and economic circumstances of the village as both change over the course of about 20 years. Her story is long and somber, but Laxness is adept at putting in some amusing observations.
Laxness' novel is a rich portrait of this simple -- and not so simple -- girl and woman, a remarkably stable pole -- and, in many ways, a model -- for and in a changing world.
One gets the sense that Laxness’s view of a feminist socialist heroine may simply, at this point in his career, have been ‘a woman in pants’—or, in other words, a woman taking on the role of a man.
Resonant.