FISH CAN SING

A childhood in Iceland is the background to this powerful and evocativetale. Halldor Laxness' wistfully tender novel tells the tale of Alfgrim,an abandoned child, whose mother gave birth to him in the turf-and-stonecottage of Bjom of Brekkukot, the fisherman, on the outskirts of what isnow Reykjavik. It evokes his boyhood and youth, spent at his grandparents'home in the early years of the twentieth century, an hospitable place wheredignified understatement was the norm and where everything from a lumpfishto a bible had a fixed price which never changed.