The Fish Can Sing (Vintage International) - Softcover

Laxness, Halldor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307386058 ISBN 13: 9780307386052

Publisher: Vintage, 2008

Synopsis

The Fish Can Sing is one of Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness’s most beloved novels, a poignant coming-of-age tale marked with his peculiar blend of light irony and dark humor.

The orphan Alfgrimur has spent an idyllic childhood sheltered in the simple turf cottage of a generous and eccentric elderly couple. Alfgrimur dreams only of becoming a fisherman like his adoptive grandfather, until he meets Iceland's biggest celebrity. The opera singer Gardar Holm’s international fame is a source of tremendous pride to tiny, insecure Iceland, though no one there has ever heard him sing. A mysterious man who mostly avoids his homeland and repeatedly fails to perform for his adoring countrymen, Gardar takes a particular interest in Alfgrimur’s budding musical talent and urges him to seek out the world beyond the one he knows and loves. But as Alfgrimur discovers that Gardar is not what he seems, he begins to confront the challenge of finding his own path without turning his back on where he came from.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson.

A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocative tale.

Halldór Laxness's wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim, an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stone cottage of Bjorn of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what is now Reykjavík. It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents' home in the early years of the twentieth century, a hospitable place where dignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfish to a Bible had a fixed price that never changed.

Halldór Laxness was born near Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1902. He died in 1998. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

About the Author:

Halldor Laxness was born near Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he was seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he wrote more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Laxness died in Iceland in 1998.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0307386058
• ISBN 13: 9780307386052
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272