Salka Valka

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“This is a remarkable achievement and will hopefully lead to a revival of interest in an oft-overlooked literary genius.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review

A fresh translation of Nobel Prize–winning author Halldór Laxness’s modernist masterpiece, Salka Valka.

A feminist coming of age tale, an elegy to the plight of the working class and the corrosive effects of social and economic inequality, and a poetic window into the arrival of modernity in a tiny industrial town, Salka Valka is a novel of epic proportions, living and breathing with its expansive cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos.

On a mid-winter night, an eleven-year-old Salvör and her unmarried mother Sigurlína disembark at the remote, run-down fishing village of Óseyri, where life is “lived in fish and consists of fish.” The two women struggle to make their way amidst the domineering, salt-worn men of the town and their unsolicited attention, and, after Sigurlína’s untimely death, Salvör pays for her funeral and walks home alone, precipitating her coming of age as a daring, strong-willed young woman who chops off her hair, earns her own wages, educates herself through political and philosophical texts, and, most significantly, becomes an advocate for the town’s working class, ultimately organizing a local chapter of the seamen’s union.

“Nowhere in Laxness’s novels is the conflict between the shining ideal of socialism and the dignity of individual people on plainer display than in Salka Valka… It never even occurs to Salka that the bastards might grind her down.” –- Salvatore Scibona, The New Yorker“[Laxness’s] novels from the 1930s—Salka Valka in particular—brim with life, humor, devastation. Laxness detonates some sentences like little bombs . . . Others he lets expand and accumulate to reveal an almost Dickensian delight in people and their idiosyncrasies . . . I find his descriptions of the natural world incomparably moving . . . The novel is a singular work of social realism.”
–Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books

“Salka Valka is a wonderful exposure to Iceland’s troubled past and to the Icelandic sensibility that comes from making the best of things even when there isn’t much to be made. Laxness’s characters are rough and honest, and Salka Valka is one of the most empathetic portraits of a girl and a woman that I’ve read by a male author.”
–Jane Smiley, Washington Post

“This is a better novel (richer, deeper) than anything else you’re likely to meet this year. Its people are as real as you or me—as are its shorebirds and its blizzards and its dreams and its cows.”
–Brad Leithauser, Wall Street Journal

“A gripping wonder, and Laxness’s most sustained piece of narrative drama . . . Even in moments of high drama, [Philip Roughton] moves along with calm assurance, tossing off Laxness’s inventive and always spot-on descriptions as though they were commonplace, as when, on a cliff, the puffins “squatted with the dignity of church officials in front of their burrows.” He captures Laxness’s singular dour-droll tone with uncanny grace . . . Despite [Laxness’s] mischievous show of ease, he is giving his book everything he has in the hope that it will exceed him.”
– Salvatore Scibona, New Yorker

“A brooding novel of boreal discontentments by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic writer. Sigurlína Jónsdóttir has always been down on her luck. She decides to leave the frozen north coast of Iceland with her 11-year-old daughter, Salvör Valgerður, or Salka, whose father is unknown to her—and to Sigurlína, a sometime prostitute, as well. They get just a few miles south to a ramshackle fishing village, where they discover the manifold class divisions of early-20th-century Iceland. . .  There’s a poetry to Laxness’s depiction of a frayed mother-daughter relationship . . . [Salka Valka is] full of his trademark intersections of politics and religion.”
-– Kirkus Reviews

“This is a remarkable achievement and will hopefully lead to a revival of interest in an oft-overlooked literary genius.”
-– Publishers Weekly, starred review

“By turns caustic and lyrical, funny and forlorn . . . [an] undeniable success both as a literary achievement and an expression of [Laxness’s] most deeply held beliefs . . . [Salka Valka and Independent People] represent the fullest expression of how Laxness saw society and the people for whom he wanted to transform it—those surviving beneath the mire of capital, alone in the world, together.”
–Charlie Lee, The Baffler

“Laxness somehow blends epic form with the day-to-day realism of loan negotiations and herring and haircuts. He is a humorist and a visionary, a critical eye and an open heart. Salka Valka is a marvel, a pleasure, and a masterpiece.” 
–Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

“First published in 1931-32, this freshly translated masterpiece is an Icelandic Grapes of Wrath, focusing on the plight of struggling fishing families in a tiny village, particularly on the hardships facing women like Salka, who, alone without a family, works and educates herself, becoming an effective seamen’s union organizer . . . Absorbing, inspiring, surprisingly humorous–a great read.”
–Lisa Howorth, Square Books

“I dedicate this valedictory as I turn the page on my bookselling career to Halldór Laxness . . . Laxness won the Nobel Prize for writing books like Salka Valka, in which he brings us cheek by caring jowl with a bull-headed orphan girl in an isolated, impoverished Icelandic fishing village, about as far from Brooklyn as one can imagine. Laxness is the ideal.”
–Ezra Goldstein, Community Bookstore

“Laxness’ small-town tale depicts a world where life is difficult, but the novel never sinks into deep gloom; there’s a variety of resilient spirit here – with Salka Valka’s particularly pronounced and strong . . . a very fine novel, and a wonderful character-portrait of a remarkable figure.”
–Michael Orthofer, Complete Review

“Laxness is a true poet with language . . . [He] achieves a certain richness with his sublime and painterly landscapes and earnest portraits of ‘insignificant’ people living through a significant historical moment.”
–Hannah Weber, Words Without Borders

“Doubtless, modern-day feminists will see in Salka an admirable example of female fortitude and resolve. And certainly, she is that. But she’s also much more. She is the ultimate realist, and she applies her clear-eyed vision with equal intensity to the price of fish as to the price love will exact on her heart.”
–Patricia Schultheis, Washington Independent Review of Books

“The Icelandic novel from the interwar period has lost none of its relevance, and Philip Roughton’s sensitive but vigorous translation for Archipelago Books is a lucky chance. Laxness’ portrayal of Salka’s coming of age is empathetic and tactful; his depiction of Óseyri’s development from a remote fishermen’s village to a place that cannot escape globalisation and the new ideologies it brings is forceful and poignant . . . Laxness watches Salka closely as she leads her solitary life and makes us experience every emotion, every glimpse of happiness, and all her sorrow as if it were our own.”
–Sarah Fengler, Oxonian Review

“The novel couldn’t be more relevant to 2022 . . . In the current political climate in many quarters of the United States, this book might even be banned—its descriptions of the natural world alone can make one “uncomfortable,” and it presents serious political discussions . . . There is joy, however, and it is the joy of most good novels: the reading from each moment to the next. Laxness’s attention to detail and how it resonates is everywhere.”
–Rick Henry, Rain Taxi Review of Books

“Salka Valka is full of conversions: The beleaguered find Jesus; drunks dry out; the rural boy puts on city clothes and tries to impress the wealthy merchant’s daughter. Everyone, at one point or another, seems to make a fresh start. Then the other shoe drops . . . Laxness’s heroes, such as they are, persist in their quiet strangeness, in their dynamic push and pull with the forces around them, loving and struggling and almost hating, living on through each permutation.”
–Jack Hanson, The Nation

Halldór Laxness (1902-1998) is the undisputed master of modern Icelandic fiction. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955 “for his vivid epic power which has renewed the great narrative art of Iceland.” His body of work includes novels, essays, poems, plays, stories, and memoirs: more than sixty books in all. His works available in English include Independent People, The Fish Can Sing, World Light, Under the Glacier, Iceland’s Bell, and Paradise Reclaimed.
Philip Roughton is an award-winning translator of Icelandic literature. His translations include works by many of Iceland’s best-known writers, including Laxness, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Bergsveinn Birgisson, Steinunn Sigurðardóttir, and others. He was  awarded the 2015 American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Competition Prize, for his translation of Laxness’ novel Gerpla (Wayward Heroes), the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize for 2016, for his translation of Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s The Heart of Man, and an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship for 2017.Chapter 1
 
The coastal steamer attends faithfully to its course, slipping down the middle of the fjord between the mountains, taking its bearings from the stars and peaks and arriving on schedule at Óseyri in Axlarfjörður, its horn blasting through the blowing snow.  In the first-class smokers’ lounge, two smartly-dressed travelers from Reykjavík are discussing the village’s faint gleams of light.  Their conversation goes something like this:
 
“When sailing on such a cold and bleak winter’s night along these shores, you get the impression that nothing in the world could be more insignificant and meaningless than such a small village under such high mountains.  How do people live in such a place?  And how do they die?  What do they say to each other when they wake in the morning?  How do they look at each other on Sundays?  And what does the priest feel when he steps into the pulpit at Christmas and Easter?  I don’t mean what does he say, but what, in all honesty, does he think?  Does he see how pointless it all is?  And what do the merchant’s daughters think about before going to sleep?  Yes, what sorts of joys and what sorts of sorrows in fact thrive around those dim glimmers from their little oil lamps?  I’m certain that in such places, people’s conviction of the futility of existence is reflected in each other’s eyes.  Surely, everyone must admit that it’s absolutely useless to live in such a place, there being no low ground here except for that little valley, which apparently owes its bottom entirely to the river’s sediments.  All culture, all human contentment, are created on level ground.  In a place that’s impossible to escape, and where there’s never any hope of meeting strangers, nothing can ever be expected, either.  What would happen, for instance, if the priest’s son stopped fancying the merchant’s daughter?  Yes, what would happen?  I’m just asking.”
 
But now a boat is launched from shore and several hoarse, gruff men with beards and moustaches seize their chance to come alongside the steamer.
 
“Down with the mail and passengers!” they roar, as if fomenting a frightful revolt.
 
A traveling salesman from the south pushes his otter-fur hat down over his ears, buttons up his coat, and carefully climbs down the rope ladder into the boat.  A mailbag, half full, is handed down to the boatmen.  Nothing more?
 
“Yes!” someone calls from the deck above.  “We’ve got a woman with a girl here in third class.  She says she’s going ashore.  Don’t leave without them.  They’re on their way now.”
 
“Well, we don’t have any orders from the merchant Jóhann Bogesen about waiting here all night for some wretch of a woman.  The passengers ought to be ready,” complained the head boatman.
 
From deck came the reply:  “We couldn’t get the woman out of her bunk any sooner.  Seasickness has left her dizzy and cramping.”
 
“Well, it’s none of our concern how seasick she’s been.  We have no orders from Jóhann Bogesen about that.”
 
Despite no one being able to cite any orders from Jóhann Bogesen, the woman appeared a few moments later, along with her child.  The child was bundled quite well in woolen wraps, while the woman herself was pathetically ill-equipped for winter journeys at these northern latitudes, wearing an old, faded, ready-made coat that was far too small for her, dirty cotton stockings and shabby boots that would normally have been laced up to mid-calf, except that now one of the laces was broken, leaving half the shaft hanging loosely against her leg.  Around her head she had tied a paltry cloth.  In one hand she held the hand of her child, and in the other a small sack containing her worldly possessions.
 
She stared fearfully at the boat as it bobbed up and down in the swell.
 
“Down with you, woman!” said the men.
 
“God help us, Salka, if we’re supposed to go down there.”
 
“Well, it’s pointless hanging about there like shark bait in the shade,” said the men.
 
One of the steamer’s crewmembers gave the child a hand in starting down the rope ladder, and a boatman climbed halfway up it and helped her descend into the boat.
 
“Mama, I made it,” said the child.  “It was terribly fun!”
 
Then they passed the woman down in the same manner.  She was heavy and broad-waisted, with stocky legs and beefy loins; in short, quite a corpulent woman.  Her face was gray and peaked from her discomfort and vomiting, while her hands were all red and swollen, like pickled meat, freshly boiled.
 
Mother and daughter were seated on a thwart opposite one of the rowers.  The woman held her sack snug in her lap, to keep it from getting wet.  It was just an ordinary, hundred-pound gunny sack that appeared to contain a small coffer and perhaps a few scraps of clothing.  The waves rose and fell, the empty boat rocked mercilessly and the woman stared fearfully into the darkness, while the girl at her side felt safe as could be.  As the boat rose on the next wave, the girl asked her mother:  “Mama, why are we going ashore here?  Why aren’t we continuing south?”
 
The woman clung desperately to the thwart as the boat slid into the next trough, turned her anguished face away from the spray and blowing snow, and finally replied:  “We’ll try staying here for a while before going south in the spring.”
 
“Why aren’t we going south straightaway, as you said?  I’d been so looking forward to going to Reykjavik.”
 
At a glance, the most peculiar thing about this girl was her deep voice, which sounded almost like a man’s.  She had the nervous habit of screwing up her eyes and mouth, both when she spoke and when she said nothing.  She would occasionally toss her head and could never keep her legs and feet still; her whole body roiled with unruly vitality.
 
“Ever since we left, I’ve been looking forward to coming to Reykjavík and seeing those big painted houses and those pretty rooms with pictures on the walls, as you spoke of, Mama.  I want to live in such a room.  And everyone in their Sunday best, Mama, always.  Or maybe it isn’t true, then?”
 
Yes, it’s true, but we can’t go any farther just now, Salka dear.  I’m so unwell.  We’ll stay here for the winter, and try to find something to occupy us.  Then in the spring, we’ll go south to all the fine weather.”
 
“So the weather is always fine in the south?  No, Mama, we should go on now.  It’s only five more days….”
 
“I’m so unwell.  And it will make no difference to us if we wait here until the spring.  I know that we’ll make it together, as we’ve always done.  Don’t be angry with your mother, even if she’s unable to go to Reykjavík straightaway with her darling Salka.  We must always be good friends.”
 
“Yes, Mama, but it’s still a terrible pity.”
 
Then the rower opposite them spoke up, looking at the girl:  “We must walk in the
 
ways of God.”
 
The girl looked at him in the dull glow of the lantern in the stern, scowled and said nothing.  And at this pious declaration, the two travelers’ talk about their destination came to an end.  When it seemed to the rower that his remark had fallen on deaf ears, it was as if he felt he ought to find some excuse for having stuck his nose into the private affairs of his passengers.
 
“Well, that’s not to say that I’m recommending this poor little village to strangers.  For I do not declare of my own accord, but rather, by the wisdom of the Word, that it is our dear Lord who determines where we lay down to sleep at night.  It is true; this village is rather pathetic.  I have now been here, either in the valley or the village, for forty-seven years, and in that time, nothing has ever happened.  Yet God has not forgotten us.  He has sent us the blessed Salvation Army of our Lord Jesus Christ to give us the opportunity to rejoice in our Redeemer.  Before, we had only the dean, but he is old and frail now.  And no matter how miserable and useless life may seem to be in a place such as this, it is impossible to deny that wherever souls bend their knees before the cross of Jesus Christ, there we find a true Canaan of God’s glory.  I don’t suppose you’re already saved?”
 
The woman thought things over for several moments as the boat continued splashing uncomfortably through the choppy waves of the inner fjord, before answering:  “No, but I hope that God will help me and show me the mercy of bringing me work, so that I can provide for myself and my girl.  You don’t suppose there’s any work to be had here in the village for a time?”
 
“What’s your name?”  the man asked.
 
“It’s Sigurlína.”
 
The man was silent for a few moments, as if weighing the possibility of a woman with such a name finding work there.
 
“What a pesky storm this is,” said the man.
 
“Hey, Mama,” said the girl.  “I’m sure I would have eaten more soup if we’d had more time.  And more salt meat.”
 
“She’s uppity enough, the girl,” said the man.  “Might I ask, are you a widow?”
 
“No.”
 
“Might I ask, why aren’t you continuing to Reykjavík, then?”
 
“I’m hoping that God is here in Óseyri in Axlarfjörður, no less than in Reykjavík,” said the woman, thereby beating the man at his own game.
 
“Do you have any kin here?”
 
“No, but I’m hoping I can find somewhere to stay tonight.  I can pay, you see.”
 
“You ought to be saved,” the man said.  “By the way, I don’t know whether the Army takes in women.”
 
They were only a few oar-strokes away from land.
 
“Would you please be so helpful as to point me the way to the Army?”
 
“I suppose I could bring you there,” said the man, “after we’re done unloading the steamer.”
 
The traveling salesman from first class made a few witty remarks as he stepped onto the quay, and then strode off and disappeared.  The woman, however, waited at the end of the quay, holding her sack in one hand and her child’s hand in the other, until the rower was ready to bring her to the Salvation Army headquarters.  Never has a more insignificant woman stepped ashore in a more insignificant village.  Finally, he signaled to them to follow him.
 
 
 US

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