World Light-Fast Shipping

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 oneconsolation, the belief that one day he will be a great poet.

The indifference andcontempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, forin Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over theensuing 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 ambitiondrives him onward—and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur,and several susceptible women—World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit cansurvive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising humanvessel.