Word: halldor
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...fictional Erlendur's success has spawned a wave of young crime novelists in Iceland. Until Indridason, Icelandic literature consisted primarily of medieval sagas and the somber novels of Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness. Indridason has overcome the skepticism of local critics by taking pains to remain credible to his compatriots: "There are no car chases or explosions. It has to be small scale. You couldn't have five or six murders...
...number one, blowing right by Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, too. Jonathan Franzen begins straight up the middle, with The Brothers Karamazov, but turns a sharp corner at #9 with The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead, and another at #10 with Independent People by Halldor Laxness. The quintessentially American Tom Wolfe starts by reeling off four French classics in a row. Norman Mailer revives John Dos Passos's out-of-fashion U.S.A. trilogy for his #6 (and shows uncharacteristic forebearance by leaving his own works off the list). And so on. (At times one reads...
...DIED. HALLDOR LAXNESS, 95, Iceland's most famous man of letters and 1955 Nobel prizewinner; in Reykjavik...
Only someone who is certifiable would put his name on a prefix column for the Nobel Prize in Literature: but then a fail without football drives men to desperation Would you have picked Icelander Halldor Lawness in '55' Know any couplets by Giosue Carducci '06 Put 'em o n postcard and send 'em in Or how about recent history. Can you even name a bookstore, which carries two books by Vicent Aleixandre '77' In fact. If you knew anything at all about Elias Canetti '81 before last year and your name isn't Susan Sontag...
...thing that brown rats do to each other in a locked room. Seeing its horrors, we conceive of it as history gone mad, the reptilian brain taking over, the savage part of us wading through gore wearing ivory-handled pistols: war as a picnic of cannibals. The Icelandic author Halldor Laxness found the murderous fascination of war in the Old Norse texts of Scaldic poetry, the hymns of the "kill spree." The poets were particular about the best light and color for battle: "The hour before daybreak is all right because it lends to the crimson of liquid blood...