A magnificently humane novel about unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Ólafur Kárason who 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. 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 Halldór Laxness in this extraordinary novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Ólafur’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.
Available in English translation by Magnus Magnusson (Vintage).