The Fish Can Sing

Alfgrimur is raised by an elderly couple in a turf cottage on the edge of Reykjavik, in a household that takes in anyone who needs a bed, and grows up in the shadow of Gardar Holm, the singer Iceland has decided is world-famous. Laxness won the Nobel Prize two years before publishing it, and the novel is quietly devastating about national myth-making and what it costs the people asked to embody it.