Beyond: Well of COURSE Nightwatch. Though I can stare at the cover for hours. And yes I have dropped authors for different personal reasons. My father always taught me "Consider the source" and it applies in SO many areas of life. A book reads completely differently when you find out the author had a VERY serious moral flaw. You begin to see where it creeps in.
BaldFriede: I always loved words. I saw the picture books as seperate works.. the art / the words but not together. My little one who has a neuological processing disorder has always only loved the words. Even when I read to her as a baby she would trace the words with her finger.
The book that won't go away....
Independant People by Halldor Laxness. Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955.
I brought it only because of the prize. I SLOGGED through it (and I never read books that make me SLOG even "classics") but something kept me reading.. it was torture. I hated it. Page after boring page of men talking about the diseases of sheep and nothing else. I still hated it 100 pages in... it was slow, boring, pedantic, horrible... then something shifted in my brain and I was there. On an Icelandic croft pre World War 2, although it could have been 600 years before,with a handful of worm infested mangy sheep in waist deep snow in the most god forsaken landscape imaginable, following the grinding daily misery of a heartless, cruel man, Bjartur who's only aim in life is to keep this handful of sheep alive at the expense of the lives of his suffering family. As long as the sheep lived, they could die.
Laxness is famous for making you see the soul and virtues, if only a glimmer, of a souless person.
Into this book about sheep (and thats what it is
) is thrown a mix of fear for the local ancient gods and mythology that even though Bjartur refuses to acknowlege, weighs heavily in his life. And its a love story... a cruel, twisted, story of love that is so wrong, and so full of hate and retribution.
When I finished the book I immediately started it again.. and realised the pages and pages of the men talking about sheep diseases had another four, five layers to them. Everytime I read it I see more and more and more. It stays on my bedside table. Has done for years.
Its not a feelgood book. Its a hard book to recommend. I don't agree whatsoever with Bjartur's views or how he treats people or himself. I don't understand how the people around him stay (apart from necessity) or bear thier existence. But this book is in every cell of my being. It lives with me. I wish it didn't sometimes... it didn't so much as "change" my life as become part of it.
Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_People
and also reading Hans Laxness' biographical notes certainy proves his writing.
And the rest as they say is history!
