A sheep farmer builds his croft on a cursed hillside in Iceland and declares himself beholden to no man, no government, no god. Halldór Laxness published this novel in 1934, and it is at once a monument to stubbornness and a devastating anatomy of what independence costs when it hardens into an absolute. Bjartur of Summerhouses endures blizzards, debt, and the ruin of his children with a pride so total it cannot tell heroism from cruelty. The prose moves between folk-saga grandeur and sharp modern irony, and the landscape is rendered with a beauty that never softens its indifference. It is the great corrective to every pastoral fantasy, a book in which freedom and solitude are revealed, at last, as the same barren field.