Backlisted - The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness is the subject of this episode. The book was first published in Iceland as Brekkukotsannáll in 1957, two years after Laxness was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Joining John and Andy to discuss this ideosyncratic, unforgettable novel and the remarkable life of its author - spanning nearly all of the twentieth century - is author, poet and podcaster Derek Owusu. Also in this episode, John delves into Brian Dillon's new book Suppose A Sentence, while Andy reads A Chelsea Concerto, Frances Faviell's memoir of life during the London Blitz.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)06:08 - Chelsea Concerto by Frances Faviel. 11:21 - Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon. 16:06 - The Fish Can Sing by Halldór Laxness.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights.

There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrolment and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrolment sale of Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Derek, where are you?

Where are you coming from? You look very clear. Yes, I'm in Liverpool at the moment. St. Helens. St. Helens. All right, what are you doing there? Do you live in St. Helens or are you on a sneaky COVID secure away day?

No, you know what actually happened? I was at my girlfriend's house when they announced the second lock that I didn't believe was going to happen, but they announced it and I was just kind of like, oh no, I've actually got to stay here. And she was just like, oh yes, you've got to stay here.

You've been there ever since? I've been there ever since. It's very unlikely that London's ever going to see me again. But no, it's great. It's amazing. It's a great town. It is. It's a great town it is it's a great town Liverpool

in Icelandic terms you would now be called Derek of St. Helensson or something like that something like that yeah Iceland you say Iceland

well that's where we're heading Johnny have you had something to eat yeah I have I have we made a lot of I had a friend who was clearing,

he was preparing for the opening of his pub in two weeks' time, and he had a lot of stuff in the freezer. So I fired up my smoker and we smoked some turkey and some salmon and some venison and really great sort of. So Rachel's made me the most delicious pasta with smoked turkey and kind of kale. It was really great. I thought you were just going to say you had some beans on toast, but no.

I had a proper meal washed down with a nice glass of wine. And you, Andy, have you eaten? I had a skir, which is an Icelandic yogurt. I love this method approach. I did. I did. And look, also, I'm finishing off. Can you see that?

Is that Brennivin? Rekja is a bottle of Icelandic vodka. Because their local spirit is called Brennivin, I think, which is supposed to be. You've been to Iceland, haven't you? I've never been. See that tie? From Iceland.

That is an Icelandic tartan so i've come in full national costume basically i'm eating the national you have no idea you honestly derek you have no idea by having some lumpfish caviar or something yeah you have no idea i'm do you remember i remember you when you went to iceland the first time five years ago and you came back laden with Icelandic related literature. You've been desperate to do it ever since. I'm so grateful. I'm just so grateful to Derek for choosing this book. Well, we'll talk a bit about it when we get into the show. but yeah. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in early 20th century Iceland, reclining in the garden of a small turf and stone cottage called Brekkakott, breathing in the scent of tansies, listening to the clucking of hens, and the single insistent note of a blue bottle as an old man untangles a net and stretches it out to dry on a stone dike ready for the morning's fishing. I'm John

Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we welcome a new guest to Backlisted, Derek wusu hello derrick hi derrick hey guys thanks for having me thanks for coming live from st helens yes derrick is a writer poet and podcaster in 2019 he published that reminds me a verse novel coming of age story about a young ghanaian called k the first title on Stormzy from Croydon's murky books imprint, which went on to win the 2020 Desmond Elliott Prize

and which we talked about on our summer reading episode last year, didn't we, Johnny? Yeah, in August, yeah. Tremendous book. Loved the book. Thank you. Derek was also the host of award-winning lit and pop culture podcasts, Mostly Lit,

and was both editor and contributor for the groundbreaking anthology Safe on Black British Men Reclaiming Space, published in 2019 by Trapeze. The book that Derek has chosen for us to talk about today is Fish Can Sing by the great Icelandic novelist Haldur Laxness, first published as Brekkur Kvartsanál by Helge Fjell in 1957, and published in an English translation for the first time in 1966 by Methuen and Company, and then with a new translation in 2000 by Harville Press. The translation was by Magnus Magnusson. Well, I think I want to just say something preemptively here. And John just did a great job on the original Icelandic title of this novel there. So thanks, John.

I know we have some Icelandic listeners because a few of you were tweeting about the fact that we're doing laxness on Backlisted. I'd just like to say to you and to everybody listening that I'm issuing a preemptemptive apology because first of all we may not be totally over the complete cultural history of iceland in the way that we that we'd like to be although goodness knows we've tried and also um we're trying our best with the pronunciations of some of the names here i know we won't get them quite right because they're quite hard for people from Britain to get their brains and tonsils round. But bear with us. We are huge fans of blackness, and we will be trying our very best.

Tack, Andy. Nailed it. But what have you been reading this week? Before we go fishing for lumpfish, what have you been reading this week? Before we go fishing for lumpfish, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading a book by Francis Faviel, which was published just after the Second World War. I just don't know, 1959 this was originally published. It's now been republished by Dean Street Press in their furrowed middle brow imprint. It's a memoir called the Chelsea Concerto.

Frances Faviel lived in Chelsea before and during the Blitz. She became a Red Cross volunteer when the war began. And this is a memoir of her life in Chelsea in the run-up to war, during the war as a Red Cross volunteer and as a resident. We've talked about novels set in this time period quite a lot on Backlisted. I've got a little list here. Our friend Lyssa Evans's recent novels, of course, but also Darkness Falls from the Air by Nigel Borkin, The World by Wilderness by Rose McCauley, Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, Caught by Henry Green, Fireweed by Jill Payton Walsh, Collections by Molly Pantadowns, Sylvia Townsend Warner. This is the first time that we've talked about a non-fiction title.

And in fact, many of those books, certainly Lyssa is a huge fan of a Chelsea concerto. And what you lack in novelistic structure, you gain in eyewitness reportage. And I found this totally fascinating and terrifying, a Chelsea concerto. Any sense that it was a kind of keep calm and carry on style exercise had been struck from my mind by about page 50. And there are a couple of extremely famous scenes in this book. Very, very grim. There was a documentary on BBC One a few weeks ago presented by Lucy Worsley, where they dramatised a particular attempted rescue. But of course, that doesn't do justice to Francis Faviel's prose. And I'm just going to read a little bit from quite near the end of the book. So we're in about 1944 now. Chelsea has seen the worst of the Blitz, but there are still flying bombs coming over.

Her fiancé Richard and her have just returned to their flat. Neither of us felt like going to bed. It was far too noisy and exciting. A warden raced by shouting and suddenly we heard a shout of lights lights from the street. Richard wondered if the recent near explosions had caused the blackout curtains to shift in the studio and he said I'll run up and have a look. He had scarcely gone when the lights all went out. There was a strange quiet, a dead hush, and prickles of terror went up my spine as a rustling, crackling, endless sound as of ripping, tearing paper began. I didn't know what it was and I screamed to Richard, come down, come down. Before I could hear whether or not he was coming down the stairs, things began to drop. Great masses fell, great crashes sounded all round me.

I had flung myself down by the bed, hiding Vicky, Vicky is her dachshund, under my stomach, trying thus to save her and the coming baby from harm. I buried my face in the eiderdown of the bed as the rain of debris went on falling for what seemed ages, ages. The bed was covered and so was I. I could scarcely breathe. Things fell all around my head. Some of it almost choked me as the stuff, whatever it was, reached my neck and my mouth. At last there was a comparative silence, and with great difficulty I raised my head and shook it free of heavy, choking, dusty stuff. An arm had fallen round my neck, a warm, living arm, and for one moment I thought that Richard had entered in the darkness and was holding me. But when, very,

very cautiously, I raised my hand to it, I found that it was a woman's bare arm with two rings on the third finger, and it stopped short in a sticky mess. I shook myself free of it. Vicky, who had behaved absolutely perfectly, keeping so still that she could have been dead, became excited now as she smelt the blood. I screamed again, Richard, Richard! And to my astonishment, he answered quite near me, where are you? I cried. More things had begun falling. At the bottom of the stairs, he said. Keep there. Keep still. There are more things falling. I cried and buried my head again as more debris fell all around me. At last, it appeared to have stopped. I raised my head again. I could see the sky and the searchlights, and I knew that the whole of the three upper stories of the house had gone. We've been hit, I said, one in a million, and the only feeling I was conscious of

was furious anger. That's nothing to do with World War II, is it? I mean, that's an incredible eyewitness account of something that would be happening somewhere in the world right now unfortunately so that's uh chelsea concerto by francis favier and i really recommend that if you want to discover a bit more about what it was actually like to live through the blitz john what have you been reading this week well it couldn't could not be further away from i guess that kind of intense emotional reportage. I've been reading a book by an academic who can write really, really well, Brian Dillon. Yes.

His previous book was called Essayism, which is a book of kind of interrogating the essay as a sort of a way of expression and full of wonderful stuff. This book takes it even further. It's called Suppose a Sentence. And it's basically a collection of pieces, 27 sentences. He takes 27 sentences, beginning with Shakespeare, John Donne, Sir Thomas Brown,

and going all the way through to Anne Carson, Claire Louise Bennett, Hilary Mantel. The Hilary Mantel essays, particularly your little piece, they're not quite, I'm going to read a little bit about how he structured the book. It's about a glimpse of Princess Diana's feet in a piece that Ilya Mantel wrote, a famous piece she wrote about the death of Diana in LRB.

So he takes these little windows, these little tiny pieces of meaning, and then kind of riffs on them. And he's such an interesting writer that although there was part of me that wanted to slightly fight against it because you know that idea of somebody just publishing their notebooks but i'll read you a little bit of what he says about the book why i think it works so well it works so well because he's really he's got one of those minds that's just really interesting. So he picks sentences that apparently they're not particularly, they don't strike you immediately as beautiful or even particularly meaningful,

but the way he writes about them gets you to think very differently about what the writer was trying to do. One of the things he says, this book is not about a book, about how to write a great sentence. You're not going to learn anything like that. So he says, not this, not that. The truth is I wanted to write a book that was all positives all pleasure only about good things beautiful sentences william h gas wrote are rare

as eclipses i went chasing eclipses those moments of reading when the light changes some dark luster takes over things words seem suddenly obscure even simplest sentence, and you find to have to look twice, more than twice. In some cases, I'm lagging as a reader behind translators who've been there before me, even interpreted a sentence I cannot, remaking it. I've tried to acknowledge their writerly presence. In 1853, the poet and critic Matthew Arnold proposed what he called literary touchstones, those privileged moments that constitute the best of what has been thought and written, against which the relative worth of other works can be assessed. For good reasons, this is no longer a reputable way to

think about literature, the texture of flux and design disappearing in the preservation of mere relics. So, not a treasury then, something closer, I hope, to a kind of commonplace book, product of haphazard notation, ad hoc noticing. I've tried to describe the affinity I feel for the individual sentence, perhaps also for the work it came from and the writer who composed it, but without my figuring in advance how much analysis, how much context, how much rapture or digression I would include. I wrote as it were with my nose to the page, wrote for the first time in my life without a plan of

the whole in mind, wrote from one fragment to the next, feeling for the route that affinity might take me. As for thematic connections, all I will say is that a remarkable number seem to be about death and disappearance. Marvellous. Anyway, it's a lovely book. Yeah, I suppose it's a book that writers will probably respond to most of all. But, you know, sometimes that high wire act of trying to get a clever idea, hey, I'm going to write a book about sentences.

But he's such a good writer himself. It makes you want to go back and read the writers like annie dillard and and there's a wonderful bit on beckett once you and that always seems to me to be the the great test of a book like this does it deepen your appreciation and enthusiasm just the mystery of writing so it's published by the the very excellent fitzcarraldo edition i'm sensing uh that you might want to use the word granular in relation to this particular book would i be right uh that's is there a does he does he uh does he approach each sentence in a granular way does he get down to the granular level you could indeed use that sentence if you

wanted to apparently i use precision too often as a as a as a positive quality in writing but who said that who said that no one I'm going to tell you about, but just, you know. What the fuck has he said? A listener. I love your use of precision and granular. I did not wish to imply that you overused the word granular. Speaking of granular,

sure it's time for a musical interlude of some kind. We'll be back in just a sec. Derek, you chose The Fish Can Sing by Haldor Laxness, as is traditional on this show. When did you first read this or come across this book? I remember I came across this book in Manchester Dean's Gate's Waterstones. Great store.

Yeah, and I remember exactly where it was, directly in the middle of the fiction section. They had like a little stack and it said philosophical novels, novels with philosophy in them. And Fish Can Sing was part of it. And I picked it out because I remember I read, I think I read the first paragraph. And at the time I was really kind of,

I was reading a lot of classics and the language is obviously very heavy a lot of the times. And this seemed so kind of just smooth and relaxed and the tone was very inviting and charming and I just thought to myself wow I haven't actually read something like this in ages or before I think the first paragraph where he talks about I think he says something along the lines of next to losing one's mother they say the next best thing is losing one's father as well. Something I'm obviously paraphrasing heavily here. And I just thought that's such an interesting way to start a novel. And you said you'd not encountered something like it before. Just give us a snapshot of what it was about the book that grabbed you. What is it that you think,

wow, this is the real thing. This is the real stuff. It was the gentle prose and also the fact that he was talking about things that ordinarily if someone came up to me and said, would you like to read a book that starts off about fishing for, you know, fish? And the detail that he goes into about, you know, catching fish and going out to sea with with his grandfather there's an amazing um description where he talks about the scales of the of the fishes being on the outside of the house and you know how it kind of the light hits and everything like that which just gave gives obviously for everyone you realize that maybe he meant for that to give Brecker Court kind of this

kind of magical feel because it does feel kind of mythic when you're reading it, almost like it is a kind of mythic tale that Laxness is telling. But he just writes in a way that I was just really interested. I really wanted to know about lumpfish. I ended up Googling lumpfish looking like them. Yeah, me too. What are these fishes that he's talking about, the way they dry them, the way they cure them?

I wanted to look at what Iceland looked like so I could get the real picture in my mind of kind of the churchyard and how close together the houses were and things like that. I just feel like, you know, the way I see it, it's just a great writer can talk about anything that we find mundane in just such an interesting way that you just want to carry on reading. And that's what it was like for me. I just really wanted to carry on reading over and over again even if the plot wasn't going anywhere that was obviously the book is not really like plot driven but you just really want I just really wanted to know about who he was talking about the people who stayed with him in midloft and those kind of things I just felt really I think the easiest way for me to say this is that the book is transporting as people say you know

it really took me into Iceland and it was just yeah it was a great experience and obviously rereading it there's just so many

more layers that I just didn't really realise were there the first time I read it and obviously some of the Icelandic references

of course were lost on me I tried to google a lot of things but there's actually not much on this book on Google, which I find really strange, to be honest.

He's a Nobel laureate. Yeah, we'll talk a bit about this because Laxness, as you say, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, in fact, and wrote 62 books. Yeah. But of those 62 books, about a quarter have been translated into english and the majority haven't made it out of icelandic into other languages so derrick kind of stumbled across this novel and was gripped by it and it took him it transported him and it wasn't what he was expecting at all but john you've got a specific connection with how the laxness and the fish can

sing haven't you well i was i was actually i had left Harville by the time it finally came out. I think it's acknowledged as his greatest novel. And the translation by J.A. Thompson is considered amongst translators as one of the greatest translations of anything in the 20th century. Most people probably have heard of How whole deluxiness when they look at the nobel prize list and they see his name on it and you think crikey somebody from iceland won the nobel prize and in fact that is i think like a lot of things iceland has more nobel prize winners per head of population than any other country i mean just remember reading it and being completely blown away by independent people and and rather as you said derek it's that thing of being completely transported i've read three

lexinus books now and they're all quite different although there are more i think there's probably more connection between the fish can sing and independent people that and atom station but what i would say is that it was the excitement in-house. For me, Independent People was one of these other great translated books that you thought it's ridiculous that this isn't better known. And in a funny kind of way, though, there is something about Fish Can Sing that if you were going to say to somebody, read a Hulda Laxness give them i'd probably give them this first just because i think if you get on with this you'll definitely get on with independent

people yeah that's that's interesting i mean a lot of people say is his most accessible novel obviously this is this is i'm going to start reading the atom station but what we need to ask actually is why are those three the The Atom Station, Independent People, and Fish Can Sing, the three that people mention if you say these are written over 60 novels? Funny, I know a man who knows the answer. Okay. I'm going to fill in that gap for you. I can tell you why, but I want to do that in the next segment

when we talk a bit about Laxness himself. But I thought it would be, you know, we're very fortunate. We always like to read the opening paragraph, if we can, of the featured book. And as luck would have it, we do have a recording of the author himself, first of all introducing and then reading the opening paragraph of The Fish Can Sing. So let's hear Haldur Laxness now. Vítur maður hefur sagt að næst því að missa móður sína sé fátt hotlara ungum börnum en missa föður sinn.

Þó því fari fjari að ég tæki undir þessi orð að öllu leyti, þá sæti sísta um ég að fara að bera á móti þeim. Bind. á mér að fara að bera á móti þeim. Bind. Sjálfur myndi ég orða kenningu þessa án kala út í heiminn eða kannski öllu heldur án þess sviða sem fælst í orðanum eftir hljóðan þeirra. sem fælst í orðonum eftir hljóðan þeirra. En hversu sem nannum kannat þýkja um þessa skoðun,

þá kom það nú, symsi, í minn hlut að standa uppi utan foreldri hér i heimi. Well, for anyone who didn't understand that, Derek, would you translate for us? Yes, sure. With the help of Magnus Magnussen. Thank you. A wise man once said, the next to losing his mother, there's nothing more healthy for a child than to lose his father. And though I would never subscribe to such a statement wholeheartedly, I would be the last person to reject it out of hand. For my own part, I would express such a doctrine

without any suggestion of bitterness against the world, or rather without the hurt which the mere sound of the words imply. But whatever one might think of the merits of this observation, it so happened in my own case that I had to make do without any parents at all. We're hearing you read that that is it reminds I tell you the book the novel it reminds me of it reminds me of David Copperfield it has a kind of it but it but you know no mother no father

you're going to get the life story of this young person growing up and surrounded by these larger than life characters because as you said Derek Derek, this novel doesn't really proceed on plot alone, does it? It is about scene setting, world building, and characters who come in and out of the story, or who we meet once and we never encounter again. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the things that I loved about it was, yeah,

just the characters and the setting. And, you know, people would describe them as being eccentrics, but realistically they were just ordinary people in Iceland. Everybody has their thing. Everybody has something about them that when you kind of put a magnifying glass on it, it might seem a bit odd or eccentric, but it isn't really. But yeah, no, the characters were amazing. I don't think there was one boring character in this book.

One character who I thought to myself, oh, I wonder what they're getting up to while he's narrating this story. I wonder what they're doing right now. It's true. And it feels almost like a sequence of folk tales, doesn't it? Every little chapter, there's another dimension added to Alf Grimoire, the main character's sort of sense of the world, sense of the adult world.

So much in this book to love. I mean, you really, it's one of those ones, I really didn't want it to come to an end either. So this is the back of the Harville edition, as almost published by John Mitchinson. It's not me. It's not me, but it should be quite a good blurb. Okay.

Oh, I see. We'll see. Let's see. This is the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf and stone cottage of Bjorn of Brekkakott, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland. It is the history of his boyhood and youth spent at Bjorn's home in the early years of the 20th

century, a hospitable place where strangers were welcome and often stayed for years, and where, in the midloft, Alfgrim learned philosophy and much else besides. When Alfgrim went to school, he came into contact with a whole different world in which the reigning spirit was the singer Garda Holm, whose international renown was a source of pride to his fellow countrymen. But Alfgrim's encounters with the singer only served to make him and his fame more mysterious. What do you think, Derek? We can't allow John to pass judgment on that blurb. I mean, it's difficult to talk about blurb because it's so impossible for a book like this to be summed up in a paragraph.

And obviously the way you read it as well, you know, it changes things. So for me, I wouldn't even kind of mention him going to school and that being some sort of connection to, you know, it changes things. So for me, I wouldn't even kind of mention him going to school when that being some sort of connection to, you know, Garda Home, because obviously his fascination began way before he even stepped foot into a school. So I feel like that would be a bit deceiving. But of course, I've never written a book of blood before, so I can't really pass judgment on that. But yeah.

Haven't you? Let me say a bit about laxness, because actually I want to pick up things, a couple of things that both of you have said. Like Derek, you were asking, why are these three books, Independent People, Fish Can Sing, and Atom Station,

the ones that people talk about? The answer is those are the three that happen to have been published in the UK far longer than any of his other novels. Not all his novels have been translated into English, and a couple of them have only been translated in the last five to 10 years. Now, the two things to say about Laxness and the reasons why he absolutely fascinates me is he was born in 1902 and he died in 1998. And his life story is the story of both Iceland in the 20th century and the 20th century. In literary terms, that's true.

He wrote two novels in the 1920s, At the Foot of the Sacred Peak and The Great Weaver from Kashmir, in a kind of modernist setting. He's almost the first novelist in Iceland to attempt modernism. And then in the 1930s, he switches to a different style of social realism, which is where Independent People comes from, but also a novel called Salka Valka, which I think is the great masterpiece. Not that it's very easy to read in English. If you go back to episode 14 of Backlisted, you can hear me talking about it and reading a bit from it on that, because I got a copy from an interlibrary loan. And another massive book called World Light. So in the 30s, he's writing these big, epic, social realist texts about the plight of the

working person and people in Iceland. And he was a communist, Laxness. He was never a member of the Communist Party, but he was allied with the communists. In the 1940s, he starts writing about Icelandic nationalism. He writes a novel after the Second World War, a satirical novel called Atom Station, which is about the settlement that Iceland reached with the United States after the Second World War. And one of the reasons why people only talk about independent people is after it was published in the States around the time he won the Nobel Prize, they realized that he'd also published this anti-American novel called Atom Station, and he got blacklisted and none of his other novels were translated. He's this alternative history of literature in the 20th century. When he gets to the 60s,

he's writing, first he writes Pastoral, and then he writes an experimental novel called Under the Glacier, which I read last week. It's absolutely wonderful. He's nothing like any of his other books. He's also writing short stories, and he's writing poems, seven plays, 17 volumes of essays, six volumes of memoir, two travel books, almost none of them translated into English. It's remarkable to me. His memoirs haven't been translated, which seems really odd to me. You would say that this was, he had a sort of kind of,

there's a lovely phrase that Brad Lighthouse, I might read a bit from his review, says in his 50s, he entered a stretch of broad and seemingly easeful creativity which is when he he won the nobel and he published uh the fish can sing and paradise reclaimed which is another one that's that's made it through into translation but i mean this feels very autobiographical uh fish can sing doesn't it because he wasn't he was brought up by his grandmother as well well one of the other things to say about, and you say this autobiographical, the other thing to say about Laxness and about Iceland is

Laxness is born in 1902. And in 1902, the population of Reykjavik is less than 6,000 people. And by the time he dies in 1998, the population of Reykjavik is 120,000 people. So there's a massive expansion of population in Iceland and as um Haldur Gudmundsson who's the biographer of Laxness says Iceland in the 20th century goes through in a hundred years 300 years of social development. So it goes from being a rural economy with turf, huts, and a fishing industry, to by the end of the 20th century, it's become this massive offshore financial

haven, brackets, with disastrous results shortly afterwards. And Laxness, in relation to all this development has set himself up and succeeds in speaking for the history and present of Iceland. Picking up the sagas, the idea of the sagas, Icelandic culture, the rights of the workers, the communist revolution, the Second World War, the experimental fiction of the 60s. He tries to be the 20th century. And here's the thing, he does it. He is the most incredible writer about whom we in the UK know a fraction. And this is why, Derek, I was so thrilled when you wanted to talk about The Fish Can Sing, because in a way, The Fish Can Sing is the novel that pulls in all the things we've been talking about. You know, it has that social element, but also it's about what does singing represent?

Can I ask you both what you think? What does singing represent in this novel? It's a good question. Yeah. When it came to the end of the novel novel I thought that he was just trying to say singing as you want to sing however you sing however it sounds as long as you're doing it for the right reasons and you've found I guess that he was calling it the one true note that is I guess you know as God of Homes says not singing for yourself and not singing for other people.

It's almost kind of like a singing for singing's sake. So a lot of the things that Garda Home was saying, I was kind of applying them to just artists in general, just like writers specifically, in that you want to be able to hit upon this kind of mysterious way of writing where you're not influenced by anything and you're not doing it for money you're not doing it for fame you're not doing it because people are telling you to do it do you know what I mean and and it's interesting because obviously the people at Brecker Court they don't really like putting things into words because they feel like I believe believe he says something like, experience can never be translated into words accurately. So it's almost like trying to define the one true note is, I guess, it's a useless endeavour in a way, because it's almost like, once you know it, you know it. It's

like, once you've heard it, you've heard it. I can never tell you what it is, you would have to know it for yourself. Totally with you. It's about the artist and knowing what Laxness was interested in. What is the role of the artist in the commercialized, industrialized society that was creeping up on Iceland and on the world? There's this little bit, Derek, near the end of the book. You're talking about Garda Home singing and the narrator is telling us about the singing and we've been led to believe that Garda oh I've read those 10 pages over and over again I love that bit yeah we've been led to believe that Garda Holm who's received all this funding to go away and be trained we never know if the singing is any good or not when he opens his mouth to sing. But this is so

beautiful. Listen to this. People kept on asking me, did he sing well? I reply, the world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with. Some people think that the art of singing has its origins in the whirring of the solar system as the planets hurtle through space. Others say it comes from the soughing of the wind in that ash tree called Yggdrasil. In the words of the old poem, the ancient tree sighs. Perhaps Garda Home was closer to that unfathomable ocean of unborn song than most other singers have been. I shall not compare Garda Home's singing with that of other

people who may have sung in Talia's palaces all over the world, in the Teatro Cologne, Kusnacht, St Peter's Cathedral, or was it perhaps St Petersburg, or before Mohammed ben Ali, but no one has ever heard the like of the singing I listened to in that least known of all cathedrals. And I do not believe that anyone would ever have been the same after hearing it. And indeed, the ears for which it were intended were deaf. That's so beautiful. And such a beautiful description of how purity of artistic intention can still be misunderstood by an audience if they aren't able to relate to it. It's incredible. There's a lovely thing he says

earlier in the book, quite near the beginning, when he's talking about the people who go to stay at Brecacote. And he's saying that they were all kind of quite good storytellers. And I thought this was, you know, you're talking about the different kinds of authenticity. And he kind of slightly reveals his hand here, I think, Laxness. He says, what story can it have been? The stories were innumerable, but most of them had this in common, that the method of telling them was diametrically opposed to the method we associated with Danish novels. The storyteller's own life never came into the story, let alone his opinions.

The subject matter was allowed to speak for itself. They never hurried the story, these men. Whenever they came to anything that the audience found desperately exciting, they would often start reciting genealogies at great length, and then they would launch into some digression, also in great detail. The story itself had a life of its own, cool and remote and independent of the telling, free of all odour of man, rather like nature itself, where the elements alone reign over everything. What was one little shrivelled person in some fortuitous lodging compared with the wide

world of the heroic age the world of epic with its great events that happen once and for all time and i i it's just i love that it's this idea that you're kind of plugging into this collective unconscious of storytelling that's out there and you you you are unimportant what's important is that is that these stories are to sort of go on forever but also the form of the novel takes on the form of the thing you've just described john it's like you're being told a series of mini sagas drawing on the oral tradition round the campfire in the turf hut rather than a methodical structured novel although it is a methodical structured novel it it is a methodical structured novel it just seems like it's doing something else it goes back to what derek was said at the

very beginning you picking out of it dean's gate it's like you feel strangely cradled don't you it's like here's here's somebody who really understands how to tell a story i'm not sure that i wanted to know about Lumpfish. And now I don't want to leave. I want more. I want more of this stuff. I want more Lumpfish stories, please. This is it. And I think one thing that kind of reading the book showed me was that I've got into the habit of thinking too much about what are the author's politics and what does he really think? But Laxness never gives you that because he will write one thing and you think, oh, is he inclined to believe in this kind of thing? But then he gives something else with such conviction.

And obviously from a childish perspective that you think, oh, he doesn't believe that. Maybe he believes this. And I personally thought that the moment where I thought, OK, I'm getting to the heart of his politics was, and actually when I was reading this bit, John, I thought about you when they was having arguments about cutting beards off and whether it should be done. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. There's a brilliant beard scene. Yeah, it's great.

And that whole barber war, that barber war is about the futility of local politics, isn't it? Is that one thought, you know, it was really important to be able to go and to have a shave. And the other half of the town thought it was, you know, it was a ridiculous sort of vanity and a waste of time. It was amazing. I actually Googled after. I thought, did this really happen?

But then as I got further and I heard the arguments, I thought to myself, well, this actually makes sense to be, you know, argued back and forth. Because obviously this is a different time the culture is completely different at first when i was reading i thought okay maybe this is kind of humor within the novel but it would make sense that these things would be we could be argued about because some of the arguments were put so well that they were actually starting to convince me and i thought to myself wow is it actually a bit rude to ask somebody to give to give you a shave and a haircut when you can just do it yourself well I said as well earlier that Laxness had a political consciousness and a political career

and in addition to his fiction and his his plays and his the many articles he wrote for left-wing magazines. He's also wrote the words for what's considered the Icelandic workers' anthem, which translates as the May Star. And we've got a recording here. This was a flash mob that took place at Harper, which is the enormous concert hall in Reykjavik in 2016. And what you're hearing is a load of people standing around in a large atrium as one person after another walks in to the room. You can find this on YouTube. It's spine-tingling stuff,

playing and singing until everyone is playing and singing. CHOIR SINGS Shall I tell you what they were singing? Oh, how light are your footsteps. Oh, how long I've been awaiting you. A spring snow is lashing at the window. A biting wind that winds winds but I know of one star, one star that shines and now you've finally arrived, you have come to me. These are difficult times, there's a labour dispute. I've got nothing to offer, not a scrap that I can give, just my hope and my life whether I'm awake or asleep. This one that you give me is all that I have. But tonight the winter

comes to an end for every working man. And tomorrow the May sun will shine. It is his May sun. It is our May sun. It is our chain of solidarity. For you, I bear the flag for the future of our country. You know, he's not mucking about there. He's not sitting on the fence. And when I was in Reykjavik in 2016, there were huge protests taking place in the square outside the parliament building in the centre of the city. And I stood on the balcony of the hotel room and heard a crowd of about 30,000 people singing that specific song. Laxness's desire to speak for the country, which made him as many enemies as it did friends all around the world, is still felt. And what I'm not saying is that he's a parochial writer. I don't mean that. What I mean is that the project that he undertook was to elevate the culture of Iceland to global significance, and by doing that, talk about the world.

Derek, can I ask you, what other writers did it remind you of? If we were talking about it, if you were recommending it to somebody, are there other novelists that you like that that you feel that has something in common with yeah i when i was reading him it brought to mind i guess kind of writers who just do their own thing so i really like imri curtis i think that he like just just does their own thing you can tell that they're not really thinking about what anybody is going to think of the prose or the stories or the telling or the cultural references and things like that. They're just writing, I guess, with their one true note, as it were. But also one thing that really did, and I really hate to be,

I hate to bring it back here, but Gard of Home really did remind me of Gatsby in that this kind of whole, you know, this mythical creation and that people are aspiring to be. But realistically, the dream that everybody thinks that they're living is not quite accurate. not quite accurate. Can I ask you guys, was there any particular character story that you found more interesting than all of the others? I love the supporting characters because there's so much space around all those characters. There's so much room for them to breathe. The grandmother is terrific.

There's this brilliant bit here near the beginning. I was five years old when my grandmother took out a book from her little chest and said, today we shall start to learn to read, Alf Grimur, dear. This book began with a rigmarole that goes like this. Abraham begat Isaac and Isaac begat Jacob and Jacob begat Judah and Judah begat Fares with Tamar and Faraz begat Hezron and Nehubat begat Jesse. We spent nearly all winter struggling with this rigmarole. What a terribly tedious rigmarole this is, grandmother, I said. Then my grandmother

recited this verse. The Bible sticks in my throat like an old piece of fish skin. I gulped it as quick as I could and it hasn't done me much good. When it was nearly Christmas, I said, why is this rigmarole so tedious, grandmother? It's in Hebrew, said my grandmother. So she's very clearly kind of tricking him. But I also like the idea, Derek, there's another laxness thing. Do you take our narrator at face value? He's very good at seeming to be this slight, you know, rather straightforward, simple, plain speaking man. And yet look at the situations he's describing and the characters. Yeah, absolutely. I think as well, what was amazing about the novel is that so many times I forgot that there was an older person narrating this book. So in the moments where he's describing Alf Grimma's naivete,

he doesn't interject and correct what he's believing. So for example, when the couple come to Breckercott and he's describing her as being a transcendent human being who's not of this of this plane. And talking about all of the people who are coming to heal her and all of these kind of spiritual aspects of her. The narrator doesn't interject and kind of say, well, obviously, this is ridiculous. But me being a young boy, I believed in these things. He narrates it as if to say as just as similar to the way the superintendent described things kind of like if that's what they believe if that's their truth then leave them to

i'm not going to pass judgment on it do you know i'm trying to say and i thought that was that that was an amazing um aspect of the book as well but that whole that whole sequence of and everybody getting into eastern philosophy and then basically asking him to lay on his hands on her breasts and her miraculously being cured but i there's i just thought there's a really lovely thing in that brad light has a review from the new review of books which he's talking about the amazing it connects to your bit about the grandmother who is an amazing character right how did she come by her stupendous riches where was she trained what academy bred him my grandmother said she'd learned to recognize the letters of the alphabet from an old man who'd

scratched them for her on the ice when she had to watch over the sheep during the winter so bright light as it goes on who can do justice to such a woman laxness apparently believed he could not one of the reasons she kept reappearing in each new novel of his in different guises was that he had heretofore failed to requite her appropriately. What he had given her, what had he given the world except some beautiful, imperishable books, that the world might judge otherwise, that the world might regard Laxness's accomplishments as great and regard as meagre those of the humble, dirt-poor people he memorialized, as great and regard as meagre those of the humble, dirt-poor people he memorialised,

was but one of those injustices, those skewed values with which his books are so spiritedly quarrelled. After reading and re-reading Laxness for nearly twenty years, I feel confident of two connected propositions, that he was a genius and that he felt unworthy of his subject matter. Still, he had the presence of mind to grasp that in that unworthiness lay his salvation his books remind us of how fortunate is the writer who long before he or she even thinks of picking up a pen has already learned to feel deeply hopelessly indebted it's just a really lovely idea that that that sense of him continually trying to going back to that sort of well that that early childhood and trying to capture it and to say thank you. It's really, as you say, Andy, he is actually a world writer.

The thing is, Fish Can Sing is the first laxness novel that I read. And the first time I read it, I quite liked it. And then I read Independent People, and I really liked that. And then I read Salka Valka, and I absolutely loved that. And I've been working through as much Laxness work as I can find. And I'm interested in what you were reading then, John. My appreciation for him increases every time I read more of his work. And so to go back to The Fish Can Sing, that's the second time I've read it, I thought it blew me away this time.

I had a very emotional response to it this time. I thought, God, this guy's incredible. There's so much within his universe. Yeah. The ending of this novel, honestly, just absolutely in a class of its own. I think it's so beautiful. Before we wrap up, let me just share this with you. This is the final paragraph of The Islander,

which is the biography, the only biography in English of Laxness. This seems to bring in a lot of the things that we've all been talking about today. Haldor Laxness lived for nearly a whole century. His upbringing bore the signs of the stagnant rural society of the 1800s, but there quickened within him the ambition and creative energy that drove him as a young man into the swirling modernity of Europe and America. Although he sometimes lost his way, he led his nation into the 20th century. His achievement was to create in his novels those characters that became the symbols of the nation

and marked its path, Salka Valka, Bjartur and Snæfjör, Iceland's son. In his fiction, he gave voice to the perceptions and feelings of his countrymen during the greatest uprooting in Icelandic history. His questions are classic, although some of his answers have been forgotten. In the end, what survives of laxness is the true note, when all the meaning that words can grant is gone, and beauty reigns alone. Ah, it's now time to pack away our dried lumpfish and say our farewells to Brekkakott. Huge thanks to Derek for giving us this chance to sail north

and to encounter the wonders of Laxness. To Nicky Birch for weaving our individual notes into a single coherent saga and to Unbound for the trays of cream cakes. We won't be able to leave Iceland for some time to come because of the cloud of volcanic ash hanging over the whole place. But nevertheless, while we wait and while you wait, you can download all 134 previous episodes

plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at battlelisted.fm. We're always pleased if you contact us on twitter and facebook and now in sound and pictures on instagram too you can also show your love directly by supporting our patreon patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without paid for advertising your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early, and for roughly the same cost as a fillet of fish from Bjorn of Brickacott's Barrow, they get two extra lot-listed a month. Our very own turf cottage by the sea,

where we entertain those stray bits of music, film, television and writing that have captured our imaginations in the previous week. Where we tell long-winding, saga-like stories. A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch of names are... Patrick Ryan, Ginny Waters, Claudia Watkins,

The Abbott of Unreason, Stephanie Bain, Eugenie Caron, Mark Pacitti, Helen Simpson, Kate DeGoldy, Ramona Montanez. Thank you very much, everybody. And Derek, thanks ever so much for coming in. Thank you, guys. This was great. I feel like we could have gone on for ages.

We are. We're doing another hour just for us now. You're locked in. Yeah, such a great book. Such a great choice. We'll see you next time. We're going to leave you with another historical piece of music recorded in Reykjavik by a master singer,

and we will see you next time. Thank you. Sega Legends, Sega Destruction A witness, the last of the God Men Here about Vegas Jaws I cast a rose against your soul There is not much more time to go If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts, you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early,

you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.