The Great Weaver from Kashmir Review

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(More customer reviews)That epithet would describe the character, Steinn Ellethi, as he initially appears in this ungainly first novel by the Icelander Halldór Laxness, but it would equally suit the author himself. There are pages and pages of brilliant writing in The Great Weaver, of a sort that preview the originality and pungency of Laxness's later novels, but the whole book is a muddy slog through 436 pages of semi-autobiographical philosophical agony. Possibly every great novelist has to write such a book in order to learn to that 'writing' well isn't enough, and probably most great novelists have the good fortune to lose the manuscript before it's accepted for publication. Above all, dear reader, if you're unacquainted with Laxness, please don't read this novel first. Read "The Fish Could Sing" or "Iceland's Bell", and then go on to "Under the Glacier" and "The Atom Station". If any novelist ever deserved his Nobel Prize, it was Halldór Laxness, who had, as the NYT Book Review declared, "an unearthly ability to find beauty in a landscape of destitution, wisdom in a congress of fools."
Laxness was in the throes of uncertainty about his adopted Catholic religion when he wrote The Great Weaver; one wouldn't need any preface to intuit that fact, since the character Steinn wallows in spiritual turmoil. Steinn is the scion of a powerful and wealthy Icelandic family, a 'golden boy' of overweening talent who aspires to be a great poet. Part Peer Gynt, part Siddhartha, with a spicy glaze of Faust, Steinn leaves Iceland and his childhood friend Diljá to become "perfect." That's his parting explanation of himself to Diljá, the woman who will love him and be destroyed by him. Steinn is every bit as prodigious as he thinks himself to be -- of course -- and probably the most insufferable narcissistic puppy of all of literature. Eventually his quest leads him to monastic Catholicism, which he embraces with the most exquisite heretical perversity. The 'quest' is its own exegesis; Scandinavian writing, from the Viking romances to Peer Gynt to The Great Weaver, is replete with quests that double back in fated failure. Steinn's quest for perfection leads him to the conclusion that he is spiritually worthless, the worst of men, and that that sinfulness is precisely his unique claim to redemption. There's a powerful undercurrent of Catharism in the most austere and mystical forms of Catholicism -- in the life of St. Francis and his 'poveretti' followers, for instance -- and from the external point of view of the reader, Steinn's eventual rejection of the Church seems as inevitable as age. In the meantime, however, Laxness compulsively belabors his holy sinner's stages of self-knowledge in almost embarrassing detail. The novel ends, eventually, with Steinn still a disbelieving devotee of Catholic gnosis and a guest in a Carthusian monastery. Apart from being glad to say good-bye to the arrogant brat, anyone who has read Laxness's later work will be grateful for the knowledge that Laxness himself DIDN'T take the final step into the oblivion of vows.
Women readers should be warned that Steinn is Laxness's mouthpiece for the most odious misogynist rants this side of Saint Paul. On the other hand, Diljá is the one character in the novel whose fate can elicit any sympathy. I'm reminded again of Peer Gynt and of Goethe's Faust, but the redemption that those two 'pilgrims' find in the love of the Eternal Feminine is explicitly rejected -- trampled on! - by Steinn. I'm happy to report that Laxness got this misygynist putrescence out of his bloodstream in this novel, and that the women characters in his later books are as richly multi-faceted and empowered as the women in the Medieval Icelandic sagas.
One final note: if you are yourself a practicing Catholic -- I like that expression PRACTICING in all its possible senses here -- you definitely OUGHT to read this novel, turgid though it be, as a spiritual exercise. Writing it was clearly transformative for its author.

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"[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.

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