Paradise Reclaimed.

LAXNESS, Halldor.

Item Number: 116886

London: Methuen and Co, 1962.

First edition in English of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the title page to French ambassador Mr. Strauss. Near fine in a near fine dust jacket. Translated from the Icelandic by Magnus Magnusson. Uncommon signed and inscribed.

The quixotic hero of this long-lost classic is Steinar of Hlidar, a generous but very poor man who lives peacefully on a tiny farm in nineteenth-century Iceland with his wife and two adoring young children. But when he impulsively offers his children's beloved pure-white pony to the visiting King of Denmark, he sets in motion a chain of disastrous events that leaves his family in ruins and himself at the other end of the earth, optimistically building a home for them among the devout polygamists in the Promised Land of Utah. By the time the broken family is reunited, Laxness has spun his trademark blend of compassion and comically brutal satire into a moving and spellbinding enchantment, composed equally of elements of fable and folklore and of the most humble truths. "The qualities of the sagas pervade his writing, and particularly a kind of humor--oblique, stylized and childlike--that can be found in no other contemporary writer" (Atlantic).