World Light
Olafur Karason is a parish pauper on a farm in the north of Iceland, beaten by the household and worked past his strength, and certain that he is a poet and that beauty is coming to him. It arrives in increments, alongside a marriage he cannot manage, a scandal over a girl and a prison sentence. Laxness built the four parts on the surviving diaries of Magnus Hjaltason Magnusson, a folk poet who died destitute, and made him the vessel for a question about what art costs the people nearest it.
Open World Light in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Attributes
Genre
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 45% · 13 shared
- 39% · 11 shared
- 39% · 10 shared
- 39% · 9 shared
- 38% · 12 shared
- 38% · 11 shared