The Great Weaver from Kashmir

The Great Weaver from Kashmir is Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness' first major novel, the book that propelled Icelandic literature into the modern world. Shortly after World War One, Steinn Elliði, a young philosopher-poet dandy, leaves the physical and cultural confines of Iceland's shores for mainland Europe, seeking to become the most perfect man on earth. His journey leads us through a huge range of moral, philosophical, religious, political, and social realms, from hedonism to socialism to aestheticism to Benedictine monasticism, exploring, as Laxness puts it, the far-ranging variety in the life of a soul, with the swings on a pendulum oscillating between angel and devil. Upon his return to Iceland, Steinn finds himself more conflicted than before, torn between love of the beauty and traditions of his homeland, longing and regret for his great adolescent love, Diljá, and his newfound monastic ideal, forcing him to make choices with fateful consequences. The Great Weaver from Kashmir is as much a domestic parlor drama as it is a novel of ideas; it can be seen as the downward spiral of an antihero or an exploration of idealism and loss; it is at once an inward-looking and daring early novel and a modern epic spun by a superior craftsman. Published when Laxness was only twenty-five years old, The Great Weaver from Kashmir's radical experimentation created a stir in Iceland. Appearing in English now for the first time, The Great Weaver is much more than a first major work by a literary master--it is a remarkable modernist classic written literally on the cultural and geographical fringes of modern Europe.
About the Author: Halldór Laxness (1902-1998) is the undisputed master of modern Icelandic fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland. His body of work includes novels, essays, poems, plays, stories, and memoirs: more than sixty books in all. His works available in English include Independent People, The Fish Can Sing, World Light, Under the Glacier, Iceland's Bell, and Paradise Reclaimed. Philip Roughton's translation of Iceland's Bell received the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2001 and second prize in the 2000 BCLA John Dryden Translation Competition. His translation of Halldór Guðmundsson's The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness was recently released in the United Kingdom.