Cherchez la Femme

Under the Glacier a novel by Haldor Laxness.  With an introduction by Susan Sontag (thank God).  Vintage.  240 pp.  $17.00  ***1/2

I have to admit that Susan Sontag made more sense of this novel than I did.

I actually finished the book with no idea what the hell was going on.  Fortunately I had the Sontag introduction, and it made some sense of things.  Also made me feel woefully uneducated.  But it brought closure to my experience.

The novel concerns a young man who is sent to the hinterlands of Iceland to look into disturbing rumors about a local church.  It is the Bishop who sends him, so our narrator refers to himself either as the undersigned (as if this were a legal document) or the Emissary of the Bishop, Embi for short.  He never gives us his name or mentions his qualifications.  I’m not sure he has any.

What he finds is indeed disturbing.  The church is closed tight, and seems to have been closed for years, in extreme disrepair.  The minister is not around, apparently spends most of his time doing repair work around the city, rather than tending to the souls of his parishioners.  Another building has taken over the grounds of the church, and seems to have usurped it, but it too is closed.  Furthermore, the people that Embi encounters seem remarkably unhelpful.  The local woman caretaker offers him bad coffee and a gargantuan selection of cakes.  There is apparently some kind of Icelandic joke about coffee and cake.  Although Embi is there for days, she never offers him any other nourishment.  If you’re worried about this young man keeping body and soul together (as I was), you wonder what he’s surviving on.

There are also rumors about the minister and his wife, from whom he is separated.  There is a rumor about a body having been buried out in a huge glacier near the town.  And three other men are occupying the grounds, doing religious rites that seem vaguely Eastern (though to this practicing Buddhist they made no sense).  There is vague and wild talk about the minister’s wife, and her apparently supernatural powers, her relationship to these other men, and the fact that she might actually be four different women, or perhaps one being able to inhabit four locations.

All of this is funny in a Kafkaesque, Marx Brothers way.  Embi can eat all the cake he wants!  Though unfortunately the coffee is terrible, and the cake ain’t all that good either, and there’s no real food, only cake.  At first these incongruities are hilarious, and Laxness writes simply and beautifully.  But when absolutely everything is incongruous, and nobody gives a straight answer, and there’s no normal to measure the incongruities against, they’re not funny anymore.  You’re in never never land.

Roughly fifty pages from the end, after what could be described as plot developments (though that would be an exaggeration), someone retrieves an object from the glacier, which turns out to be a salmon encased in ice, and at the same time a woman shows up (maybe Laxness had read As I Lay Dying, with the famous observation by Vardaman “My mother is a fish”) or perhaps I should say, the woman, the mysterious person or people that we’ve been hearing about all along.  Suddenly, from an emotional standpoint, everything seems to fall into place.  It isn’t that she has the answers, exactly, it’s that she is the answer, this eternal woman (who also has a chronological age, 52 years) who seems to know all the men, who has worked in a brothel and also been a nun, and with whom Embi immediately falls in love.  It’s not that the ending is more coherent than the rest of the book, but it’s somehow more satisfying.  I would almost (but not quite) reread the novel to arrive at those last fifty pages again.  By the end I was content.

In her introduction, Sontag (who seems to have read every book ever written) points out that the word novel is not that helpful a descriptive term, since it can be applied to so many different kinds of books.  Hence various categories of fiction, which she proceeds to name, rather fascinatingly: Science fiction, tale/fable/allegory, philosophical novel, dream novel, visionary novel, literature of fantasy, wisdom lit, spoof, sexual turn-on.  I’m sure she doesn’t mean that list to be all inclusive.

But she sees Under the Glacier as occupying several of those categories, science fiction (there is an illusion early on to Journey to the Center of the Earth, which began in this same locale), philosophical novel, dream novel, comic novel.  She lets us know that Laxness—who won the Nobel Prize—normally wrote much more realistic novels about poor Icelandic farmers, and that this wild fantasy was a one-off for him, after he had grown interested in Taoism (an interest I share, though I don’t find much evidence of his interest in this novel).

Then she draws our attention to the Bishop’s instructions as he sends Embi off:

“Don’t be personal—be dry! . . . Write in the third person as much as possible.   . . . No verifying! . . . Don’t forget that few people are likely to tell more than a small part of the truth: no one tells much of the truth, let alone the whole truth. . . . When people talk they reveal themselves, whether they’re lying or telling the truth. . . . Remember, any lie you are told, even deliberately, is often a more significant fact than a truth told in all sincerity.  Don’t correct them, and don’t try to interpret them either.”

Sontag’s comment on all this: “What is this, if not a theory of spirituality and a theory of literature?”

Hmm.  Words to ponder.

I can’t honestly say I recommend this book, but if you do read it, read the Introduction first.  Sontag is a good companion on this journey.