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large in Europe and America their particular Icelandic refraction.
    Laxness had himself turned to socialism during a two-year stay in America in the late 1920s, which not surprisingly put him at odds with many sectors of his society, and this third book puts on display the two very different strains of his writing sensibility. The passionate rhetoric of Örn carries no sarcastic undertones: “He who doesn’t choose justice isn’t human. I have little fondness for that pity which the coward calls love . . . What is love? If a loving person sees someone’s eye being gouged out, he howls as if his own eye were being gouged out. On the other hand he isn’t moved at all if he sees powerful liars utterly rob a whole people of their sight and thereby their good sense as well” (408).
    But there is a deep division in this author, for he asks us to heed the unmistakable passion of Ólafur, too. When he is roused to speech at a public meeting, he declares that “whoever is a poet and a scholar loves the world more than all others do, even though he has never owned a share in a boat, yes, and not even managed to be classed as a quarryman. The fact is that it is much more difficult to be a poet and write poetry about the world than it is to be a man and live out in the world. You hump rocks for next to no pay and have lost your livelihood to thieves, but the poet is the emotion of the world, and it is in the poet that all men suffer” (301). Is this a contradiction or is there a strange fusion of the transpersonal, a deep compatibility between the views of the political idealist and those of the martyr poet?
    If Laxness lets the political struggle resolve the tumult of concrete circumstance—a nod to the determining power of concrete circumstances and Marxian materialism—his working through of the opposition between the world and the spirit is a good deal more ambiguous and suggestive.
    This latter conflict is given its final and most wrenching twist in “The Beauty of the Heavens,” the last book of
World Light.
As the section opens, Ólafur and Jarþrúður have relocated to the remote community of Bervík. They are now married. Ólafur’s last-ditch effort to dissolve the unhappy relationship and send Jarþrúður away has failed and he has concluded that for better or worse—mostly worse—they are fated to be together. He now tries to salvage a life for himself by working as a district schoolmaster. But it is this very engagement that leads to his undoing. Staying the night at the home of one of his pupils, Ólafur ends up getting into the girl’s bed, and in short order his indiscretion is discovered. He is accused of sexual assault, tried, convicted, and sent away to the capital city, Reykjavík, to serve out a prison sentence. The most unworldly of men—here is a true Dostoevskian touch—finally has his face pushed down into the vile muck of the world. He is guilty and he must pay, and there is not a vestige of uplift to be found.
    But Laxness, ever maneuvering his oppositions and tensions, has in fact set the poet up for his tragic apotheosis. If the crime was carnal— the result of his desperate yearning for womanly solace, even if in the bed of a precocious adolescent—the final release will be overwhelmingly spiritual. Spiritual
and
romantic, I should say. In his last days of confinement, when he has done plumbing abjection, coming to know and befriend some of the vilest of his country’s citizens, he has a prophetic dream in which his admired poet Sigurður Breiðfjörd appears before him in a golden chariot: “And he spoke four words. He spoke one mysterious name. This name echoed through that myth-like dream, and in a flash it was woven with letters of fire across the soul’s heaven: ‘Her name is Bera’ ” (559).
    Soon after, when Ólafur is preparing to board the ship that will return him to his village, he sees a young woman waiting in the crowd, and is instantly smitten. He recognizes the hand