Friday, July 22, 2011

“The Swan, a picaresque novel about childhood, breathes the Icelandic landscape from every line. But please: do not read it as an “Icelandic novel”, as an exotic oddity. Gudberger Bergsson is a great European novelist. His art is primarily inspired not by some sociological or historical, still less a geographical, curiosity, but by an existential quest, a real existential insistence, which places his book at the very centre of what could (in my view) be termed the modernity of the novel.”

Milan Kundera, "The Secret of Ages of Life (Guðberger Bergsson: The Swan)" in Encounters, pg. 28

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