Ice is nice

>> Classic Icelandic novel The Fish Can Sing takes the sting out of winter

by JULIET WATERS

 This description of an Icelander's memories of going out fishing with his grandfather may strike a chord these days with many Montrealers: "Often there was frost and frozen snow, and the ice creaked in the night. Somewhere out in the infinite distance lay the spring, at least in God's mind, like the babies that are not yet conceived in the mother's womb."

 Normally around this time I try to read something set in Florida. During especially bitter winters I might read something set in the Sahara, or Ethiopia, anywhere that makes Montreal seem not so bad. I have developed such a spirit of resignation toward this winter, which seems to have started sometime last summer, that I chose to read The Fish Can Sing.

 Surrender is often the best strategy. Halldor Laxness' vision of the world is so unique, funny and otherworldly that I'm now optimistic about making it through another month. His minimalist imagination won't appeal to every reader, but for anyone willing to take on Seasonal Affective Disorder as a character-building experience, Laxness is worth discovering.

 Laxness, who died two years ago, is generally regarded as the undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction. A prodigy who published his first novel at 17, he won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. The Fish Can Sing, which was first published a couple of years after he won the prize, has been recently reissued and translated by Scottish game show host Magnus Magnusson.

 Everything in turn-of-the-century Iceland feels strangely reversed. People sitting down to a dinner party eat pastries before a meal of pickled whale, smoked lamb and brindelberries. This is done in deference to the old days when the only heating fuel was slow-burning peat and meals took so long to cook that it made more sense to eat dessert first. A favourite Icelandic paradox is: The fish can sing just like a bird/ And grazes on the Moorland scree/ While cattle in a lowing herd/ Roam the rolling sea.

 AlfGrimur, or Grimur as he is called, is an abandoned child who is so genuinely content with his strange but happy childhood that the opening sentence of the novel is said without a trace of bitterness. "A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father." Out of context, this line may sound astonishingly cynical. But Laxness' sense of humour is so pure that his acute sense of satire never feels misanthropic.

 Grimur's life is at once stunningly desolate and weirdly beautiful, like an eternal ice storm. He is raised by an elderly man and woman who he thinks of as his grandparents, although he later discovers that they are not only unmarried, but were never even lovers. They are known in the town simply as Bjorn and the old woman who lives with Bjorn. Together they run a free hostel for travellers, refugees, unwed mothers and whoever needs or wishes to stay there. It only occurs to Grimur later in his life that his grandmother never even had her own bed. She slept in whatever space was available.

 There is a bare-bones plot centreing around a singer, Gadar Holm, who is something like a turn-of-the-century male version of Bjork, who returns from time to time to develop a mentorship with Grimur. But mostly The Fish Can Sing follows an episodic format as eccentric guests come and go at the hostel and Iceland starts to industrialize during Grimur's life, resulting in newfound slogans for day-to-day living like "Machinery, not Alcohol!"

 Grimur's mission in life is to hit "the one true note." Laxness's legacy is that he hits the literary equivalent again and again. :

 The Fish Can Sing, by Halldor Laxness, Harvill, pb, 246pp, $22.95