• Salka Valka
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Archipelago Books

Salka Valka

Salka Valka

by Halldór Laxness, translated from the Icelandic by Philip Roughton

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From Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness

On a 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 struggle to make their way amidst the rough, salt-worn men of the town. 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 soon becomes an advocate for the town’s working class, organizing a local chapter of the seamen’s union. 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 vibrant cast of characters, filled with tenderness, humor, and remarkable pathos.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861245
Pages: 630
Publication Date:

Praise

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

[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

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

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