good morning everyone and welcome to another edition of What Are You Reading Right Now?, where your hoddler-in-chief takes the literary pulse of the commentariat.
I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since our last check in, but I’m bumping this one up because I’ve recently finished Halldor Laxness’s Icelandic epic Independent People. The last time we checked in I openly wondered if this was something I’d be able to complete, but I report today that I stuck with it.
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And I’m glad I did. This was a difficult one to get through, but when the momentum built, it really built, particularly as we entered the book’s final third. By then, our protagonist Bjartur Summerhouses is a prosperous man because of the war, he’s building a house and has many sheep that people are willing to spend. But he’s done so at the cost of pushing away almost all of his children.
The war inevitably ends, and the walls close in on Bjartur. He, like many Icelanders, fall into deep debt. And the economic independence he spent his entire life to achieve reduced to dust. The book ends somewhat warmly with him reuniting with his daughter (but leaving his son), and moving to another home in Iceland’s north.
It’s a harsh lesson in the extremes that this character endured and made his children and wives endure. And although it ends warmly enough, it doesn’t seem like a happy ending. That’s the rough life that Bjartur lived. Laxness’s writing is incredible, although there were many points where the book felt laborious.
So now I move on to my next adventure. I thought I’d up the ante with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead. It’s been years since I last picked up a Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground), and thought I should revisit the famed Russian writer.
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There’s something about this one that drew me to it. I know it isn’t considered one of Dostoevsky’s classics, but I thought it would be a fascinating insight into the conditions that made him, and pushed him to write his most acclaimed works.
The House of the Dead is semi-fictional in the sense that the main character is a fictional version of Dostoevsky, who was sentenced to four years of hard labour at a Siberian prison camp. From what I gather from the foreword, the book touches on the cruelties and horrors Dostoevsky experienced while he was imprisoned, although some of his fellow prisoners he found to be decent people.
I’m early on in this book, and looking forward to finishing it. But after this it might be time to give myself a palate cleanser with something lighter (an Agatha Christie perhaps? Who knows, I’ll figure it out).
Fitzie’s track of the day: So Fresh, So Clean, by Outkast
And now for your links:
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Football London: “Five things spotted in Tottenham training as Roberto De Zerbi drops hint and six players absent”
Independent: “‘The aura has gone’: Inside Thomas Tuchel’s fight to prevent England mutiny”
The Telegraph: “World record 53 red cards shown in Brazilian youth match”
BBC: “An island in mourning: Tenerife processes death of De Miguel”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com
