Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness. Boston. 1936. Houghton Mifflin. The Danish Edition, Translated From The Original Icelandic By Gunnar Gunnarsson Was First Published In 1934. This Edition, Translated From The Danish By F. H. Lyon, Has Been Revised By The Author. 429 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
SALKA VALKA was Laxness's breakthrough novel and reflected his Socialistic views which marked his novels in the 1930s and 1940s. The story depicted a young woman, Salka, and a small fishing community. Evil enters into the community in the form of merchants and fishing entrepreneurs and is pitted against labor movement. The book gained a huge success in England. The Evening Standard wrote that Greta Garbo would be the perfect Salka in its film adaptation.
Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness. London. 1936. George Allen & Unwin.
And now... 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.
HALLDOR LAXNESS winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. Born in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, his college education was begun in his homeland and continued abroad with the French Benedictines in Luxembourg and the Jesuits in London. Mr. Laxness is the author of twelve full-scale novels. Many of these have been published in twenty-five to thirty languages and have been best sellers in many different countries. INDEPENDENT PEOPLE, one of his five novels published in English, was a best seller in this country in 1946. He is also the author of five dramas, a book of poetry, and several volumes of essays. Halldor Laxness was also vice president, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, of the Italian-sponsored Community of European Writers.