ANY NOVEL WHICH HAS as its first sentence “A wise man once said that next to losing its mother, there is nothing more healthy for a child than to lose its father” immediately stamps the author as one above the ordinary. From those words, enough to make all good people blink, or at least sit up and think, Halldor Laxness’s The Fish Can Sing (Methuen, 1966) grows, and turns deeper and deeper, leading the reader into a new, entirely convincing world—a small world, mostly on the outskirts of Reykjavik, as if that matters, where memorable events unfold, concentrating on a small group of indelible characters. It is a novel (a world) that transmits something of the wonder of life, its strangeness, its goodness, occasions for stubbornness, and the stoicism of people—of people everywhere—at times very funny, which further deepens the “human-ness.” It is written in a calm manner, to just the right length. The Fish Can Sing has been out of print for about thirty years. Perhaps the title is the trouble—a publisher’s stumbling block? Is there a slightly frosty condescension towards anything written in a place as small and sparse as Iceland, better known for producing cod? Inevitably though, such a work of wonder will, as this small recommendation shows, attract readers, and give this work of art its “second life.”
I would like to see Thomas Bernhard’s 1965 first novel, Frost, translated and placed on the shelves of bookstores everywhere. Of course I haven’t actually read it—it’s in German—but by now it must be plain to even the most casual page-turner that anything by Bernhard is worth reading. There will always be something there. He is fearless, far from trivial, very strong and urgent in what he says. Although Bernhard writes in the first person, his novels are mercifully not self-confessional, let alone melodramatic or breathless, and that’s refreshing enough. He also is appallingly funny. The one weakness is that after putting down a Thomas Bernhard book most other novels seem feeble and unnecessary. It would be interesting to see in his first work, Frost, how it all began.
If this survey is confined to the twentieth century, Stendhal does not qualify; yet his self-obsession (although he was extremely wary of the first-person “I”) is peculiarly modern. Besides, it is a scandal that The Private Diaries of Stendhal (Gollanz) has been out of print for verging on fifty years; to my knowledge there has never even been a paperback. As always the reader is quickly involved in Stendhal’s happiness, or rather, his quest for it. In part, this explains the marvellous intimacy of style, a tossed-off quality, as though he is confiding, not really composing, a book. And it is as if we readers are actually looking over his shoulder.
“I’m undertaking to write the history of my life day by day. I don’t know whether I’ll have the fortitude to carry out this plan, which I already started in Paris. There’s a mistake in French already; there will be a lot more, because I’m making it a rule not to stand on ceremony and never to erase …”
He is forever scrutinizing his emotions. Much of his diary is spent analyzing his progress in seducing such and such a woman in society, usually where he went wrong. And there is an amazing scene in Moscow, with Napoleon, looking on as the old city is torched by the retreating Russians, and Stendhal interrupting his description to record a toothache.