Independent People by Halldór Laxness (translated from the Icelandic by J.A. Thompson)

Fiction, 1934 and 1935

There are few things that fill the soul of man with greater disappointment than to wake up when everyone else is asleep, especially if it happens to be very early in the morning. Not before one is awake does one realize how far one’s dreams have transcended reality.

Published in the nineteen-thirties, this pinpoint precise novel of rural hardship and human bullheadedness was centrally responsible for Icelandic author Halldór Laxness snagging the Nobel Prize in literature some twenty years later. Laxness’s narrative has sweep and intimacy at the same time as it traces the shifting fates of Bjartur, a sheep farmer, and his family. The storytelling is dense in a way that feels like Laxness wrote it with historical endurance in mind, but the personality of the writing is crisp enough that it never really feels like a slog. In the latter half, Laxness really slashes away at the capriciousness of capitalism, and that commentary is more than earned in the smartly dispensed details that precede it. In every way, Independent People has weight.

Ten Steps to Nanette by Hannah Gadsby

Nonfiction, 2022

Unbeknownst to me at the time, there was a name for the root cause of my life-skill shortage, but I was too busy mopping around boxes and not paying bills to take time out to learn about “executive function” and how I didn’t have any. Don’t panic if you don’t know what executive function is, you will learn all about it when I do.

It makes sense that Hannah Gadsby’s book is framed around the personal and professional journey to Nanette, the powerhouse standup show that deservedly won her a worldwide audience (and vicious blowback from a predictable array of proudly regressive dipshits). The “memoirish situation” identified in the subtitle of Ten Steps to Nanette is a more accurate promise of what’s in these pages. Gadsby transfers some of her onstage inventiveness to the structure of several portions of the book, and her established voice is resonant throughout. For me, the recollections of her childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood are less engaging than the portions when she really digs into her own artistry, especially around the fraught, courageous process of shaping that breakthrough work of art. When the steps to Nanette are most discernible, the book is at its most affecting.