"Oláfur wanted to become a poet, to write about the sun, the sun that is far away from us, but still sheds its light inside of us. But the sun, he was told, is not something to write about. How could he know, he replied most of the time when he was taken for wicked, when he had not attended school.
Oláfur is a solitary boy, brought up by a foster family, abused and overworked, when he only wanted to stay by the shore and look at the blue sky above him. Life was tough, he was poor, he was alone, he hardly had any friend, but in verses he was able to release his sorrow.
This is a sad story. A story that will move you in the end, if you have the patience to go through all those 600 pages of the novel. Oláfur's modesty, simplicity, and wretchedness does not bring him any luck and he will not turn out to be the Icelandic poet as he had always dreamt.
Laxness' novel is tedious and not easy to read all the time. Even though he is mainly focusing on Oláfur, much is left to be said, or guessed, about his personality. Dialogs are scarce and the reader gets to know the protagonist rather from his poems, than from an psychological portait that is not always very well outlined in the book. To,e and again references are made to various characters from the Icelandic sagas, which I am not familiar with, and in spite of the explanatory notes, I still could not really get the metaphors and thereby relate to them.
The style of the story is a bit like the weather in Iceland. It is either nice and then you can enjoy the wonderful things that it has to offer, or it is bad, cold and dark, fumbling through blindess all around. To me, Laxness is either writing meaningful chapters, with much to tell, describing in detail the people, or the nature around, or he is confusing the reader with magical elements that seem misplaced in such a realistic novel (to me, at least), combined with humorous cues, or philosophical learnings that brought up in the most unexpected way, so that many times you do not know if you got it all right.
In a nutshell it is not an easy novel, and it wont become gripping or enthralling by no means. You should let yourself immerse into it and make the effort to understand it. It is a bit like Oláfur himself, misunderstood most of the times, hard to get to and not in the least, complicated. "
