When an author has won a Nobel Prize, it is not unsafe to assume that his work is imbued with high seriousness and earnest purpose, for the Nobel committee has never shown much affection for comedians. The Icelander Halldor Laxness comes, therefore, as a delightful lapse from tradition. His novel The Fish Can Sing … simmers with an ironic, disrespectful mirth which gives unexpected dimensions to the themes of lost innocence and the nature of art. These themes are sober enough, but as Mr. Laxness develops them through the experiences of young Alfgrim in Reykjavik at the start of the century, they lead to … memorable absurdities….

Iceland was a Danish colony in those days, and Mr. Laxness has a great deal of fun with provincial imitations of Copenhagen manners…. The basis of Mr. Laxness' style is … Icelandic bluntness, which is not bluntness at all but a literary technique that goes right back to the sagas. It involves an artful, calculated, and even devious arrangement of what appear to be mere surface details, which by their juxtaposition produce meanings and emotional responses that are never mentioned in the understated text…. How things looked, what was done, and what was said are almost the entire substance of The Fish Can Sing. Toward the end, when discussion of the position and reward of the artist becomes too complicated for Alfgrim's wide-eyed bumpkin pitch, Mr. Laxness emerges briefly and warily from behind the mask, but until that point, reflection, explanation, and analysis are rigorously avoided. Nor are they missed.