Salka Valka

December 15, 2021
A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic writer. Sigurl�na J�nsd�ttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salv�r Valger�ur, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her--and to Sigurl�na, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland, though no one, rich or poor, seems keen on keeping up hygiene. As Salka grows up, she experiences all the unhappy turns of a Bergman film (and Laxness began this book as a screenplay): sexual abuse, violence, betrayal, suicide. And always the smell of fish. Sigurl�na wants little other than enough to eat and a place in the Salvation Army, which figures strongly throughout Laxness' four-part novel as the only anchor to which she can cling, though in the end it proves just as useless as any other. Salka, meanwhile, is born to rebel. On entering school, asked who Iceland's ruler is (in those days, the king of Denmark via an appointed minister), she responds, "No one's going to rule over me!" Alas, the volcano of a man called Stein��r Steinsson, Bluto to Sigurl�na's Olive Oyl, has different ideas: "When it came right down to it," Salka decides, "Stein��r Steinsson was the devil." There's a poetry to Laxness' depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship: "Out in the night, she had no Mama," Salka thinks. "Out in the night was only the girl, Sigurl�na J�nsd�ttir, and she was not her mother." But there's also some jarring language, as when Stein��r berates a cleric for being the most contentious man he's ever encountered, "despite my having had to associate with both negroes and sodomites." The words speak ill of Stein��r, but they mark Laxness' novel as being a century old, and on every page it reads like it. Of minor interest against Laxness' best-known works, but full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.

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Starred review from January 31, 2022
This resonant story by Nobel laureate Laxness (The Atom Station), first published in 1931, follows a girl’s coming of age amid poverty and social upheaval. Salka Valka is the child of a single mother growing up in a poor fishing village with little education or social support. She’s tough and determined, though, and defies the town’s norms as she educates herself, dresses in pants, enters the fishing industry, and organizes a union. Laxness tackles such tough social themes as abuse, stigma, sexism, and economic inequality, as Salka must consistently spurn the sexual advances of her unprincipled stepfather, deal with bullying from other villagers, and square her romance with an idealistic local man with her political engagement and desire for independence. Laxness (1902–1998) demonstrates a keen eye for details, with lyrical descriptions of the book’s setting, where “human life is all in fish and from fish.” Laxness also treats his characters with compassion; for example, while Salka’s mother is weak and frequently neglects her daughter, the reader learns enough about her to understand her perspective. This is a remarkable achievement and will hopefully lead to a revival of interest in an oft-overlooked literary genius.