The Fish Can Sing (2 page)

Entitled
Brekkukotsannáll
in Icelandic,
The Fish Can Sing
takes as its inspiration the medieval form of the chronicle—that is, a year-by-year account of the events in a given spot—a monastery or an outpost.

It is a humble form, with no pretensions to theme or development. It is, perhaps, the closest literary form to the unvarnished events of life itself, the diary of a place rather than a person. In the case of Brekkukot, a fishing outpost not far from Reykjavík, there are few events that break the mesmerizing monotony of seasonal existence.

Bjorn, the patriarch, is a fisherman who catches fish from his rowboat and sells them from a wheelbarrow each day to regular customers. His great virtue is that he ignores the precepts of capitalism entirely, and sells his fish for the same price whether they are scarce or plentiful. His companion, whom the narrator refers to only as “Grandmother,” keeps the house and takes in various stray humans, including the narrator, who is the son of a girl who had been leaving on a ship for America. With his customary wit, Laxness begins the novel, “A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father.” In other words—Reader, beware! Paradoxes abound!

Alfgrimur, the narrator and protagonist of the novel, is a happy child. His world ends at the gate of the little farm, and he feels surrounded by interesting and affectionate “characters” (in both the sociological and the literary sense). There is an anomaly in his world, though—a woman who lives nearby, Kristin, is
the mother of the most famous Icelander ever, Gardar Holm, an opera singer who travels the world, singing before kings, popes, and other luminaries. Gardar is adept at Icelandic music—thereby bringing Iceland to the greater world—but he is also adept at opera and classical music, and is particularly famous for singing Franz Schubert’s “Der Erlkonig,” an especially difficult song about a child foreseeing his own death at the hands of an “elf king” (the first syllable of Alfgrimur’s name also means “elf”). Periodically, Gardar Holm returns to Iceland from abroad, and his visits are much anticipated and celebrated by the Icelanders, especially by Gudmundur Gudmundsen (whose patronymic is spelled in the Danish rather than the Icelandic fashion), the man who owns the largest import/export company in Reykjavík, and also one of the newspapers. Gudmundur’s daughter also figures in the narrative—she is about the same age as Alfgrimur, but she is obsessed with Gardar Holm.

Alfgrimur is not without talents himself; he is soon discovered to be a good singer. One of his jobs as a boy is to sing at the funerals of unidentifiable men who have been pulled out of the sea and must be buried in the nearby churchyard. Gardar Holm acknowledges some sort of relationship to Alfgrimur, but what it is remains ambiguous. The reader is led to believe that the resemblance that others see between the two could be paternal (since Alfgrimur’s father is not named, and his patronymic is “Hansson,” meaning “his son,” a sign of illegitimacy). Alfgrimur’s grandfather and grandmother are ambitious for him. Against his will, they send him to school, and gradually his horizons expand. Though he is always drawn to the humble goodness of his earliest companions, he recognizes his obligation to leave home and fulfill his promise.

In fact, according to the website of the Laxness museum in Iceland, Halldór Laxness was contemplating fame a great deal when he first conceived
The Fish Can Sing
: “Wherever Laxness travelled, he always took along a notebook in which he jotted down his thoughts and things that seemed relevant to whatever he was working on at the time. One such notebook from the
1950s contains a statement of intent with regard to
The Fish Can Sing
: “ ‘The Hidden People,’ the ordinary, ‘unspoilt’ people—however infinitely frail from the standpoint of moral theology or other codes of ethics—the book is to be a hymn of praise to them, proof that it is precisely these people, the ordinary people, who foster all peaceful human virtues. The main character has his origin in the tranquil depths of the common people, and [the decent people] he meets in his youth have the effect of making all the glory of the world seem hollow on the day when it is offered to him—as a result of the longing he feels to return home and experience once more the tranquil depths of ordinary human existence.”

Although Laxness wrote this passage and conceived
The Fish Can Sing
while in his mid-fifties, in even his earliest writings he was preoccupied with how to live a moral life, and how personal and public morality intersect and influence one another. In the course of his long career, he embraced at least three conversions—the first was to Catholicism, in the early 1920s, after which he entered a monastery in Luxembourg for a period, only to leave upon the publication of his first novel.

After a sojourn in Hollywood, looking for work in the movies, Laxness embraced Communism, and, influenced by Marx’s analysis of capitalism, he wrote his three great realist novels of the 1930s,
Salka Valka, Independent People
, and
World Light
. In the 1940s, he wrote
Iceland’s Bell
, in which he contemplated the colonial history of Iceland at the hands of the Danes, using historical figures from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1948, he published
The Atom Station
, in which he criticized the installation of the American military base at Keflavik.

In 1952, he published one of my favorite novels,
Gerpla
, translated as
The Happy Warriors
, a mock Icelandic saga that explores (and sends up) violent militarism as a way of life.

“Sends up” is the right expression, because Halldór Laxness was a funny man, and his work is full of his characteristic paradoxical wit. There is something ridiculous, in a Laxness novel, about even the most sordid or painful experience, and there is
something silly about even the most redeeming one. But there is also something sordid about what is considered, in the larger world, “greatness.” Irony is never far from Laxness’s voice, and in part, this is owing to Icelandic literature and culture, always Laxness’s model and artistic ideal. The sagas are full of dark humor—in Laxdaela Saga, for example, men surround the sheep-tending hut of an enemy. When he spears one of them through the window, the others remark that there must be someone home.

In addition to his great novels, Laxness wrote travel pieces, commentary, a screenplay, several plays, stories, and his memoirs (though only the major novels have been translated into English). He also translated works into Icelandic. In 1963, he repudiated Communism and Stalin in a book that has not yet been translated; and subsequently, he seems to have adhered to a type of Taoist belief (which doesn’t mean that he doesn’t make fun of Eastern religion—he does, in
The Fish Can Sing)
.

One anecdote related on the Laxness Museum website is very telling. As a result of winning the Nobel Prize, Laxness received congratulatory messages, letters, and telegrams from all over the world—more, he thought, than he could possibly answer. One of these was from a work crew in Iceland. Laxness wrote,

This telegram was the only one he answered. We may be certain that he was moved by the good wishes of these humblest and most obscure of workmen. But we may also rest assured that he thought of the whole thing as a wonderful joke upon the literary world.

As it turns out in
The Fish Can Sing
, all is not as it appears with Gardar Holm, the great singer. I think that we may see Laxness’s
novel as a contemplation of himself both as a boy and as a world famous representative of Iceland who knows that all lives are more complicated than they look. What is the relationship of Gardar to Algrimur? They may be father and son, for the purposes of the plot, but for the purposes of the theme, the two of them together are the closest Laxness ever came to depicting himself.

A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its 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 implies.

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. I will not say that it was actually my good fortune – that would be putting it too strongly; but I certainly cannot call it a misfortune, at least not so far as I myself was concerned, and that was because I acquired a grandfather and a grandmother instead. It might be closer to the truth to say that the misfortune was all my father’s and my mother’s: not because I would have been a model son to them, far from it, but because parents have even more need of children than children have of parents. But that is another matter.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I must tell you that to the south of the churchyard in our future capital city of Reykjavík, just where the slope begins to level out at the southern end of the Lake, on the exact spot where Gu
mundur Gú
múnsen (the son of old Jón Gu
mundsson, the owner of Gú
múnsen’s Store) eventually built himself a fine mansion-house – on this patch of ground there once stood a little turf-and-stone cottage with two wooden gables facing east towards the Lake; and this little place was called Brekkukot.

This was where my grandfather lived, the late Björn of Brekkukot who sometimes went fishing for lumpfish in springtime; and with him lived the woman who has been closer to me
than most other women, even though I knew nothing about her: my grandmother. This little turf cottage was a free and ever-open guest-house for anyone and everyone who had need of shelter. At the time when I was coming into this world, the cottage was crowded with people who would nowadays be called refugees – people who flee their country, people who abandon their native homes and hearths in tears because conditions at home are so desperate that their children cannot survive infancy.