Under the Glacier Read Free Page A

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.”
    What is this, if not a theory of spirituality and a theory of literature?
    Obviously, the spiritual goings-on at Glacier have long since left Christianity behind. (Pastor Jón holds that all the gods people worship are equally good, that is, equally defective.) Clearly, there is much more than the order of nature. But is there any role for the gods—and religion? The impudent lightness with which the deep questions are raised in Under the Glacier is remote from the gravitas with which they figure in Russian and in German literature. This is a novel of immense charm that flirts with being a spoof. It is a satire on religion, full of amusing New Age mumbo jumbo. It’s a book of ideas, like no other Laxness ever wrote.
    Laxness did not believe in the supernatural. Surely he did believe in the cruelty of life—the laughter that is all that remains of the woman, Úa, to whom Embi had surrendered himself, and who has vanished. What transpired may seem like a dream, which is to say that the quest novel concludes with the obligatory return to reality. Embi is not to escape this morose destiny.
    “Your emissary crept away with his duffel bag in the middle of the laughter,” Embi concludes his report to the bishop; so the novel ends. “I was a little frightened and I ran as hard as I could back the way I had come. I was hoping that I would find the main road again.” Under the Glacier is a marvelous novel about the most ambitious questions, but since it is a novel it is also a journey that must end, leaving the reader dazzled, provoked, and, if Laxness’s novel has done its job, perhaps not quite as eager as Embi to find the main road again.
    Susan Sontag
New York City
December 2004

1
     
    The Bishop Wants an Emissary
     
    The bishop summoned the undersigned to his presence yesterday evening. He offered me snuff. Thanks all the same, but it makes me sneeze, I said.
    Bishop: Good gracious! Well I never! In the old days all young theologians took snuff.
    Undersigned: Oh, I’m not much of a theologian. Hardly more than in name, really.
    Bishop: I can’t offer you coffee, I’m afraid, because madam is not at home. Even bishops’ wives don’t stay home in the evenings any more: society’s going to pieces nowadays. Well now, my boy, you seem to be a nice young fellow. I’ve had my eye on you since last year, when you wrote up the minutes of the synod for us. It was a masterpiece, the way you got all their drivel down, word for word. We’ve never had a theologian who knew shorthand before. And you also know how to handle that phonograph or whatever it’s called.
    Undersigned: We call it a tape recorder. Phonograph is better.
    Bishop: All this gramophone business nowadays, heavens above! Can you also do television? That’s even more fantastic! Just like the cinema—after two minutes I’m sound asleep. Where on earth did you learn all this stuff?
    Undersigned: Oh, there’s nothing much to making a tape recording, really. I got some practise as a casual worker in radio. But I’ve never done television.
    Bishop: Never mind. Tape will do us. And shorthand. It’s amazing how people can learn to scribble these rats’-tails! A bit like Arabic. It’s about time you got ordained! But no doubt you’ve got a steady job?
    Undersigned: I’ve done some tuition in languages. And a little in arithmetic.
    Bishop: I see, good at languages too!
    Undersigned: Well, I’ve got a smattering of those five or six languages you need for matriculation; and a little bit of Spanish because I took a group of tourists to Majorca once and did some preparation for that.
    Bishop: And the theology, everything all right there, is that not so?
    Undersigned: I suppose so. I’m not really much of a believer, though.
    Bishop: A rationalist? That’s not so good! One wants to watch that sort of