Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece,
a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop
of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the
pastor at Snaefells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying
the dead.

But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction counts only
as a mild eccentricity in a community that regards itself as the center of the world
and where Creation itself is a work in progress.

What is the emissary to make, for
example, of the boarded-up church? What about the mysterious building that has sprung
up alongside it? Or the fact that Pastor Primus spends most of his time shoeing horses?
Or that his wife, Ua (pronounced ooh-a, which is what men invariably sputter upon
seeing her), is rumored never to have bathed, eaten, or slept?

Piling improbability
on top of improbability, Under the Glacier overflows with comedy both wild and deadpan
as it conjures a phantasmagoria as beguiling as it is profound.