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Halldor Laxness

Salka Valka Hardcover – June 1, 1963

by Halldor Laxness (Author), F. H. Lyon (Translator)

3.0 5 ratings

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Print length

432 pages
Language

English
Publisher

George Allen and Unwin
Publication date

June 1, 1963
ISBN-10

0048230308
ISBN-13

978-0048230300
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ George Allen and Unwin; 2nd Revised edition (June 1, 1963)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0048230308
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0048230300
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds

Customer Reviews:
3.0 5 ratings

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P. Lindquist

It's in Turkish

Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2021

Verified Purchase

As a long-time fan of this author I was exciting that a new version of his early work was available. This is in the Turkish language. So buy it if you can read in this tongue. I understand that a new English translation will be coming out in the next year.

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SCC

Tremendous Early Work from Nobel Laureate

Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2017

This is a novel about fish. And love. And, surprisingly, gender and feminism. Salka is an unlikely heroine, homely, coarse and ignorant; but not stupid. She is in possession of a vitality which cannot be defeated. Salka’s struggle to find her place in a hostile world—a fickle mother, faithless lovers and lack of any real friends—is the common thread woven throughout the work. The book has a complicated mix of sub-themes: illegitimacy, incest, class, domestic abuse, infant mortality, hypocrisy, poverty, Socialism, Capitalism, and Christianity. As a novel of Social Realism, it can be ranked with the finest of Dickens, or even Zola’s Germinal. Sprinkled throughout is Icelandic folk wisdom, dark humor, fatalism and a strong sense of the absurd.

4 people found this helpful

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Bob Newman

Love and Icelandic politics actually do mix

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2001

The title of Bergman's film, "Through a Glass Darkly" comes to mind, not only because it, like this novel, is Scandinavian, but because I felt that I was reading SALKA VALKA through an encrusted window. My edition, first published in England before WW II, was translated from the Danish which in turn had been translated from the original Icelandic. The book certainly impressed me, but I wonder how much more vibrant and immediate it could have been if it were a) translated directly and b) not couched in prewar, middle class British idiom, which, whether you like it or not, is somewhat remote from Massachusetts some 65 years later. I was not enamoured of mistakes like the use of `commissary' for `commissar' either...perhaps Soviet terminology was exotic for English translators in those days (or perhaps it's another example of dialect differences.)
SALKA VALKA is much more than a character study of the woman whose nickname is the title of the novel. It is an attempt by Laxness to write a love story in the context of social revolution. That change, which rocked Iceland as deeply as any of the revolutions that took place elsewhere with more blood and drama, overthrew the centuries of grinding poverty that had oppressed the farmers and fishermen of that bleak but beautiful northern land. The end of the monopolistic merchants---who bought and exported all the fish, owned the only store, and paid no wages, only allowing workers to withdraw goods against accounts---ushered in modern Iceland, one of the healthiest, best educated, and well-housed nations of our times. Perhaps such books have been written with more outward drama---one thinks of Zola's "Germinal", Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath", and Sholokhov's "And Quiet Flows the Don"---some with greater ideological content than others. This is a political novel as well as being a kind of documentation of `how the steel was tempered' in the Icelandic context. I may deliver myself of the comment that if Laxness had written in a Communist society, he never would have been allowed the shades of character, the wry humor, the outright political incorrectness (from a Marxist point of view) that we find in SALKA VALKA. Since he did not live in such a society, the characters are well drawn, (all are real human beings with frailties, contradictions, and abrupt turns of behavior; not at all like the cardboard heroes of the Social Realism novels) the harsh natural environment vivid, and the love story sensitive. Indeed, the last chapter is one of the most touching I have read in a long time. I recommend this novel whole-heartedly---it is down to earth and avoids maudlin scenes at all costs--- but I advise readers to see if they can get a better translation. Laxness won the Nobel Prize in 1955. Now I know why.

14 people found this helpful

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imbaa@hotmail.com

How amazing and real!

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 1999

I really enjoyed this book it really makes you feel as one of these poor people living in the middle of nowere. How does it really feel not even to have propper clothes and live basicly by the artitic circle. I've been there and today people are very modern, but just before the WW2 it was like any other 3td world country except it is very cold! And the houses these poor people lived in, mud huts! Ok in Africa but over there where it basicly does not go over 0 in winter and 10 in summer. You have to read it its just so fullfilling, I read it in one night. How is seems as because the climate is so cold, peoples feelings mirror it.

6 people found this helpful

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