World Light

Title: World Light
Author: Halldor Laxness
Fiction: 1710790
ISBN: 9780375727573
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2002
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Edition: Reprint
Number of Pages: 624
Section: Fiction | Literary
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description: A magnificently humane novel from the acclaimed Icelandic Nobel Prize winner: as an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet.

The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet's life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness.

As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this extraordinary novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf's ambition drives him onward--and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women--World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.