Far and away the best book about Icelandic sheep farmers I've ever read. 
 Gudbjartur Jonsson, or Bjartur for short, has spent nearly two decades of his life toiling away for a richer farmer, and his saved up just enough to make a payment on a barren patch of land, which he renames 'Summer houses', or Sumarhusum. His ambition is to become an independent person - rendered in Icelandic as something like 'self-standing folk', or Sjalfstaett folk. His aim is to be dependent on no one else for anything. It conjures up the American ideal of the Wild West or the Midwestern homesteaders, of taking what seems to be raw and empty land and cultivating it from an empty wilderness, making one's own fortune. It is tantalizing, a waking dream, it's always almost there. 
 Bjartur is a complex and intriguing figure, and he's also a stubborn ass. He has a personality like sandpaper, and his only real companion is his dog. He's not as aloof to some of the other smallholders, but distrusts almost everything else - the stories about fairies and curses, the church, the town, dreams of America. He has the endearing habit of reciting poetry, and he treasures the old sagas. 
 To be fair, not all of this isolation is of his own making. You could easily think this was the Iceland of the 9th century, when the Norse settlers first came, instead of the 19th. The book even begins with the legend of the fiend Kolumkilli, who made a devil's bargain with the demon Gunnvor. Bjartur lives in a sod house for most of the book. The land is hard-scrabble, poor for farming, only fit for sheep grazing, and he cannot afford a cow. Only later in the book do we see a single car. The only real improvement we see is when some noble got himself shot in some country Bjartur doesn't recognize, continental Europe is slaughtering each other, and they're buying scarce wool at higher prices. 
 But Bjardur's distrust for all social bonds, anything like community, becomes an act of consistent self-harm in such a forbidding landscape. Indeed, he nearly dies in the early chapters of the book after nearly drowning in an icy river. There are so oblique and heady references to socialism in the later chapters of the book, but Laxness uses these, among other motifs, as a stand-in for compassion and community, which Bjartur steadfastly rejects. 
 Laxness has given us an intriguing story, one of a different world in a land out of time, where the crofts of grass and volcanic earth are a character unto themselves, where the sheep and men and dogs fight to live, yet a world that is populated with humans only too familiar.