The Great Weaver From Kashmir (1927)

“Icelandic writers assure me that whatever foreigners might think of this fascinating but shaggy beast of a book, they understand that it made modern literature possible in Iceland. You could now write past the Sagas, whatever their noble history. … this book is, before anything else, a romance: boy and girl inseparable since childhood, girl first neglected, then rejected, not for a lover but for the Catholic Church and for vaulting intellectual ambition… Laxness makes a duke’s mixture of styles and techniques to pursue his narrative. The book begins with straightforward third-person narrative, proceeds with an exchange of letters, then a picaresque travel narrative with shifting voices and points of view, then dream sequences and more. ... The Great Weaver generates great excitement (a kind of breathless speed) that reminds me of the mad energy of On the Road … a sort of Icelandic The Great Gatsby in reverse: Jimmie Gatz, North Dakota farm boy, goes to the city to get rich and pursue his romantic vision of Daisy -- Steinn, however, falls in love with the Virgin Mary and poverty to escape his middle-class roots. Same story in reverse?”

“Shortly after World War I, Steinn, a young Icelandic poet-philosopher, heads abroad to make himself “the most perfect man on earth” and perceive “glory on the visage of things.” Leaving behind his homeland and would-be sweetheart, Diljá, for Europe, Steinn proves a master of any doctrine he cares to take up, but fails to satisfy his longing for perfection. His “aesthetic soul” leads Steinn to embrace communism while abandoning his own mother, and later to join the order of the Benedictine monks at the expense of worldly intimacy. Much of Steinn’s agony stems from the fact that his quest for perfection is solipsistic; even in his most pious phase, he shows utter disregard for people, including Diljá and his own family. Though he’s destined to fall from the get-go, it’s intriguing to see how Laxness’s antihero dives into manifold ideologies, achieving essentially the same result each time.”

“The Great Weaver From Kashmir marked a watershed in Icelandic fiction and migt be interpreted as his Divine Comedy: pointedly divided into one hundred chapters and bearing an epigraph from Dante‘s „Paradiso,“ it records its young protagonist‘s own heaven, hell, and purgatory. A Laxness described it: „My way to earthly interests took me through the futility of the Heavens...”