The Atom Station

Halldór Laxness · 1948 CE · Novel · Nordic · Contemporary

Ugla comes down from a valley in the north to keep house for a member of parliament in Reykjavik and to learn the harmonium from an organist whose rooms are full of anarchists, thieves and a god nobody will name. In parliament her employer is arranging the sale of the country to a foreign power for an airbase, while the bones of the national poet are shipped home from Denmark by way of compensation. Published the year Iceland joined the Atlantic pact, it was read at the time as a party pamphlet and has outlasted the argument.

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