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World Light

por Halldór Laxness

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Séries: Heimsljós (omnibus)

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326579,223 (4.08)48
As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason 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, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. 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 Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.… (mais)
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Mostrando 5 de 5
Not bad, but not quite at the level of Independent People or Iceland's Bell, for the pretty straightforward reason that it's much harder to care about a mediocre poet than it is to care about the people in Laxness' other two doorstops. ( )
  stillatim | Oct 23, 2020 |
Once in a while almost out of the blue I get to read a novel that speaks to me in ways that make me think again about people and the world in which I live. It is usually a novel where the landscape is as important as the characters, where the atmosphere created by the book is so all encompassing that even when I am not reading I seem to be living in that other world. Thomas Mann’s [The Magic Mountain] immediately springs to mind as a novel with that much power and to a lesser extent D. H. Lawrence’s [The Plumed Serpent]. But it is [The Magic Mountain] that World Light resembles in so many ways and in my estimation may even equal that book in the quality of it’s achievement, but I will need to read it at least twice more before I can be sure.

“He was a foster child, and therefore the life in his heart was a separate life, a different blood without relationship to others. He was not part of anything, he was on the outside, and there was often an emptiness around him”

With the story of Olafur Kárason the folk-poet hero of World Light; Laxness transports us to the rugged, unforgiving landscape and people of Iceland at the beginning of the 20thy century. His struggles with poverty, illness and the encroachment of a slowly changing society in the harsh but beautiful landscape are enlightened by his poetic soul and his determination not to do harm to any person. Not doing harm in many respects means not doing much, being almost like a sponge content to let things happen: Olafur Kárason retreats into an inner world, but a world that is shaped by his observations and connections with nature, his poetry and his visions of paradise.

Published originally in four parts: book one is entitled the "Revelation of the Deity." As a baby Olafur is taken by his mother in a sack to a remote homestead, where it is hoped that he will grow into becoming a useful worker on the near subsistence level farm. He is not wanted and cannot cope with the physical demands, his solace from the beatings and abuse is the natural world around him and later from stories from the Icelandic Sagas. He never has enough to eat and starts to hallucinate at the extremes of physical exertion, he is occasionally shown kindness by Magina the obese daughter of the house and it is through her that he gets occasional glimpses of books and of poetry. He eventually collapses into a semi coma and is put to bed upstairs in the barn where he spends the next four years waiting for the sunbeam to light up the low wooden ceiling above him. His foster family give up on him and arrange for him to be moved on. Reimar sometime postman and poet collects him and transports him on a stretcher to a fishing station but on the way calls in at the house of Porunn of Kambar who it is alleged has curative powers through her allegiance with one of the Hidden People. Olafur is restored to health.

Book Two is "The Palace of the Summerland". Olafur is now on his own and after begging for food and a roof over his head he determines to scrape together a living from writing poems, love letters and eulogy’s for others. He is now pitched into village life and manages to form an acquaintance with the manager Petur Prihross who agrees he can squat in an abandoned large house on the shoreline. He struggles to survive; there is little charity and kindness among the people who look upon Olafur as a burden on the Parish. He inevitably gets involved in the local politics through Prihross who is a man that has ten ideas before breakfast, mostly concerned with how he can enrich himself at the expense of the locals and there are dealings with the corrupt politician Juel J Juel. Olafur becomes friends with a poetess whose husband works as a labourer for Prihross and forms a connection with Vegmey a strong minded woman who would have Olafur, but leaves suddenly with a fisherman to set up house. Olafur had at some point promised to marry a woman some fifteen years older than him and cannot say no when she asks him live with her. The dealings and corruption of village life contrasts with Olafurs efforts to find beauty in everything and everyone around him.

Book three is “The House of the Poet”. Olafur lives with his wife in a shack above the village. They have children, but the boy has died of consumption and Olafur spends much of his time nursing his daughter who is also dying of the same disease. Olafur to a large extent is ruled by his wife who is the main bread winner, but they are still living below the poverty line. The corruption at the fishing station has led to the forming of a trade union who are at loggerheads with Petur Prihross and his Icelandic Nationalist party. Olafur gets drawn into the dispute, but all he wants to do is to escape the village life. He takes every opportunity to roam about the countryside to listen to his “Voice” and to write poetry and books. Book three highlights the claims of the world against the claims of the spirit.

Book Four is “the Beauty of the Heavens” Olafur and his wife have relocated to the remote village of Bervik. Olafur finds meagre employment at the local school, but is treated harshly when he encourages one of the pupils to follow his own muse and go to college. Bad weather forces him to stay the night at the house of one of his female pupils. He has sex with her and finds himself arrested. He is sent to prison for a year in the South of the country and on his release he meets a young woman on the ferry. He has dreamt that he will meet a Bera and that he should follow his inclinations. He calls the young woman Bera and on the long journey north they have a relationship. Olafur has found love and his spiritual longings have become tyrannical in him and spur him to action. The lovers part at journeys end where they discover that they live in valleys separated by a huge high mountain glacier. They agree to meet on the glacier………..

There are passages in the book where Olafur is at pains to point out exactly for what he is searching and other times when he bites his tongue, determined not to cause offence. His journey though life is largely a spiritual one where he must balance the needs of others with his own. He says to his friend Riemar the poet:

“ Every man is his own world” My world is my law, your world is yours. I love one girl but haven’t found her, but am tied to my wife through compassion, which is perhaps stronger than love. My whole life is like the mind of a man who has lost his way on a fogbound mountain”

The four books represent the the four essential stages or passages in the life of Olafur Karason. In all its stages life is hard and mean, especially for a would be poet who has no mind to earn a living doing anything else. However hard the knocks; Olafur looks for something beyond, he has moments of extreme happiness, his spiritual life enables him to cope on a more worldly level. Laxness convinces when he ties this spiritual questing to the beauty in the landscape and later to the chance of love. Solitude and the consolation of illuminating moments are central themes to this novel as is the meanness of spirit in many of the characters that see Olafur as a wretched shirker. There are themes of corruption and nationalism as well as spritualism and religion, but they are all looked at through the out-of-step mind and eyes of Olafur the folk-poet, his views and reactions to events continue to throw curves. It is as though we, the readers are being forced to see things a little differently.

The novel was originally published in 1937 and has been translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Manusson originally in 1969. Halldor Laxness is a nobel prize winning author. His novel does take a long time to tell its story, but I am convinced that when I re-read I will find nothing that is not relevant to the book as a whole. Blown away by this book and a five star read. ( )
8 vote baswood | Aug 26, 2016 |
This is a really hard one to rate. Just when you think it'll fall into Romanticism, you're thankfully pulled up short. ( )
  KatrinkaV | May 13, 2016 |
Een dichter heeft het moeilijk in IJsland, ook al wordt de dichtkunst daar hoog gewaardeerd. De hoofdpersoon van World Light wordt als baby door zijn moeder weggegeven. Hij groeit op bij een gezin op een kleine boerderij aan een fjord. Hij is ziekelijk,, maar hij wordt wel geacht te werken voor de kost. Bovendien vechten de twee broers uit het gezin hun machtsstrijd via de jongen uit. Hij ligt een paar jaar op bed, tot er iemand langs komt die ook gedichten maakt en die hem wil meenemen naar een ander dorp. Onderweg komen ze langs een vrouw die contact heeft met de andere wereld, en zij geneest de dichter Olaf Karason. Omdat hij geen inkomsten heeft, leeft hij op kosten van het dorp, en dat beperkt de mogelijkheden sterk. Hij krijgt een vrouw die geweldig tegen hem opziet, maar die in de loop van de tijd dat anders gaat zien. Olaf probeert een paar keer weg te gaan bij haar, zonder succes. Hij blijft in de armoede en in de kortzichtige machtsstrijd van de mensen met geld, verlangen naar schoonheid. Dat komt hem nog duur te staan. Uiteindelijk gaat hij de pure schoonheid tegemoet.
In het boek geeft Laxness kritiek op de bekrompenheid van de IJslanders en laat hij de bittere armoede zien die veel IJslanders in de jaren 50 van de 20e eeuw nog kennen.
  wannabook08 | May 15, 2013 |
I love Sven Birkerts’ description of Laxness’s huge literary presence:

"World Light, like any of Laxness’s works…is but a boulder in a rockslide, one small part of what might be seen as a compulsive lifelong quest to fix a world to the page."

This novel chronicles the life of a poet and mystic, an enigmatic man who calls himself Ólafur Kárason of Ljósavík. The story is based upon the life of an actual poet, and is filled with lyrical names that roll off the tongue or tickle the senses: Fótur-undir-Fótaræti, Þórunn of Kambar, and Júel J. Júel.

Ólafur’s childhood is bleak. His mother abandoned him, and he lives with an ignorant, cruel family that treats him like, well, a dog. He is plagued by terrible health. The vague maladies that aflict him make him unable to be a useful, contributing member of the family, and thus he is more and more despised .

There are occasional bright spots to Ólafur’s youth, however. First, a mystical faith awakens within him at an early age, and throughout his life he finds himself transfigured by beauty and by an intimate understanding of the higher realm.

Also, a surprising development is that one of the daughters of the family surreptitiously reads to him, and Ólafur discovers the world of words, books, poetry. His growing love of poetry gives his life meaning and unwavering purpose.

When it appears that Ólafur will never regain his health, his “family” has him carted off to some remote area where an erotic, witch-like woman cures him by a laying on of her hands (or something like that). As he regains health, Ólafur finds his destiny as The Poet. The novel ebbs and flows around the conflicting demands of the life of an artist—one who is in this world but not of it. His great sensitivity to beauty, to words, and to a higher being are gifts beyond value, yet they don’t prepare him for life. “Ólafur Kárason had always kept to himself and did not interfere in other people’s affairs; it sometimes also happened that he was not very familiar with his own affairs.”

The sensibility of the poet is an enigma to the one person who remains with him most of his life. His wife first meets him when he is young, ill, and impressionable. She is successful in making him feel an obligation to her, and although she was is an older, worn-out woman, who has no understanding at all of art or poetry, Ólafur honors his commitment to her. She becomes his Intended, and later his wife, the mother of his children, his ball and chain. Their relationship brings nothing but misery to either of them, but The Poet never successfully breaks it off:

"Had he, who had chosen her for his lot, the right to punish her—for shortcomings she couldn’t help?...he felt pity for this one more keenly than ever before, and the pity fettered him more than any love could. She was a representative of that humanity with which he himself was inextricably bound up, burdened with emotions, sensitive and sorrowful in its quest for a way out of the darkness and the severity of its origins. Was one to despise and betray this humanity, one’s own humanity, because its instinctive quest for something finer and more beautiful hadn’t succeeded?"

This books is much more than the story of a man, The Poet (although the story of The Poet is magnificent indeed). The story also has elements of the societal changes taking place in the early 20th, and religion, spiritualism, feminism. As the books draws to a close, Ólafur goes to meet his true love atop a glacier. As bleak as his life may be, his quest for the beautiful, divine, and eternal never ends. Ólafur is a flawed character in a flawed world, yet his odd world vision enables us to find a unique and unforgettable beauty, as well as hope. ( )
  darienduke | Jul 29, 2008 |
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Nome do autorPapelTipo de autorObra?Estado
Halldór Laxnessautor principaltodas as ediçõescalculado
Birkerts, SvenIntroduçãoautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado
Magnusson, MagnusTradutorautor secundárioalgumas ediçõesconfirmado

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As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural Iceland, Olaf Karason 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, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. 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 Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing environment and even the most unpromising human vessel.

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