On a winter night, an eleven-year-old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína disembark at the remote, run-down fishing village of Óseyri, where life is “lived in fish and consists of fish.” The two struggle to make their way amidst the rough, salt-worn men of the town.
After Sigurlína’s untimely death, Salvör pays for her funeral and walks home alone, precipitating her coming of age as a daring, strong-willed young woman who chops off her hair, earns her own wages, educates herself through political and philosophical texts, and soon becomes an advocate for the town’s working class, organizing a local chapter of the seamen’s union.
A feminist coming-of-age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town, Salka Valka is a novel of epic proportions, living and breathing with its vibrant cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos.
Salka Valka was republished in the US and UK, in a new translation by Philip Roughton, in 2022.
“This is a better novel (richer, deeper) than anything else you’re likely to meet this year. Its people are as real as you or me— as are its shorebirds and its blizzards and its dreams and its cows.” BRAD LEITHAUSER, WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Laxness is a beacon in twentieth-century literature, a writer of splendid originality, wit, and feeling.” ALICE MUNRO
“Salka Valka is my favorite Halldór Laxness book.” ANNIE PROULX
“…a gripping wonder…” SALVATORE SCIBOMA, THE NEW YORKER
“This is a remarkable achievement and will hopefully lead to a revival of interest in an oft-overlooked literary genius.” PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW
“By turns caustic and lyrical, funny and forlorn . . . [an] undeniable success both as a literary achievement and an expression of [Laxness’s] most deeply held beliefs . . . [Salka Valka and Independent People] represent the fullest expression of how Laxness saw society and the people for whom he wanted to transform it—those surviving beneath the mire of capital, alone in the world, together.” CHARLIE LEE, THE BAFFLER
“Laxness is a poet who writes to the edges of the pages, a visionary who allows us a plot.”
DAILY TELEGRAPH
“Laxness was a genius.” NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Doubtless, modern-day feminists will see in Salka an admirable example of female fortitude and resolve. And certainly, she is that. But she’s also much more. She is the ultimate realist, and she applies her clear-eyed vision with equal intensity to the price of fish as to the price love will exact on her heart.” PATRICIA SCHILTHEIS, WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The novel couldn’t be more relevant to 2022 . . . In the current political climate in many quarters of the United States, this book might even be banned—its descriptions of the natural world alone can make one “uncomfortable,” and it presents serious political discussions . . . There is joy, however, and it is the joy of most good novels: the reading from each moment to the next. Laxness’s attention to detail and how it resonates is everywhere.” RICK HENRY, RAIN TAXI REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Salka Valka is full of conversions: The beleaguered find Jesus; drunks dry out; the rural boy puts on city clothes and tries to impress the wealthy merchant’s daughter. Everyone, at one point or another, seems to make a fresh start. Then the other shoe drops . . . Laxness’s heroes, such as they are, persist in their quiet strangeness, in their dynamic push and pull with the forces around them, loving and struggling and almost hating, living on through each permutation.” JACK HANSON, THE NATION
“A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer. Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland. . . There’s a poetry to Laxness’s depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship . . . [Salka Valka is] full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.” KIRKUS REVIEWS
“Laxness somehow blends epic form with the day-to-day realism of loan negotiations and herring and haircuts. He is a humorist and a visionary, a critical eye and an open heart. Salka Valka is a marvel, a pleasure, and a masterpiece.” RIVKA GALCHEN, author of EVERY KNOWS YOUR MOTHER IS A WITCH
“Salka Valka is a wonderful exposure to Iceland’s troubled past and to the Icelandic sensibility that comes from making the best of things even when there isn’t much to be made. Laxness’s characters are rough and honest, and Salka Valka is one of the most empathetic portraits of a girl and a woman that I’ve read by a male author.” JANE SMILEY, WASHINGTON POST
“Salka belongs to the ‘humble of the earth’ but she is also, like Laxness, unwilling to to dissolve herself into them. For in her sovereign ego lies the capacities to doubt, to point, to laugh. And if nothing else, Laxness’s prose sings rights through with laughter.” BEN LIBMAN, SIDECAR, US
“… replete from cover to cover with the beauty of perfection…”
EVENING STANDARD
“Laxness brought the Icelandic novel out from the sagas’ 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.” THE GUARDIAN
(1902-1998) is the undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction and considered one of the greatest European novelists of the twentieth century. Born near Reykjavik in Iceland on 23 April 1902, Halldór Laxness began writing at a young age: his first More about the author
