For the first two thirds of the book, we are cast headlong into a confused world of materialistic politicians, posturing socialists, and over-precious intellectuals. This mirrors the perplexity that the young Ugla finds when she leaves the North of Iceland to live in Reykjavik as the serving girl to a powerful member of parliament.

I could have laid the book aside, but I had read Laxness before and was curious to see where he would take me. Ugla becomes pregnant and returns to her family in the country to have her child and think things through and, in her words, "to become a person." From crazy Reykjavik, we suddenly find ourselves in the clear light of the great Sagas of the 13th century. Here there are no harsh moral judgments; and even the Lutheran pastor refers to Gunnar of Hlidarendi in NJAL'S SAGA as being on the same plane as the Good Book.

As a hardened Saga fiend, I was enthralled. Here was an Icelander saying that the answer to the topsy turvy world of Cold War Europe was to look at the past and within onseself -- to follow the God who, by definition, was the one left over when all the other ones have been named.

Ugla finds her way in the end -- even if she traced a great circle in the process. Like G K Chesterton, Laxness is a great optimist; and he left this reader with a smile and the resolve to read more of his works.

The scent of garlic permeates this book, to such an extent that it becomes quite visceral and at times -- amazing for such a bulbhead as myself -- even nauseating. Both time and space are fragmented by the writer as he weaves back and forth among his stories of garlic farmers pitted against local corruption and their own at times cruel family traditions.

The central event in the book is an invasion and trashing by an angry mob of the local governmental offices. We do not see this event occur until the end of the book, yet it colors every moment in the lives of the Fang and Gao families of Paradise County. It is understandable that the Beijing government would suppress a novel that shows most of its local officials to be bloated satraps and its policement to be little better than thugs, applying cattle prods to their prisoners and beating them mercilessly.

Equally villainous, however, are the Fang family, who force their daughter to marry an old man in a three-in-one arranged marriage that guarantees that their crippled eldest son also gets a bride. In a grisly scene, the marriage deal finally goes through after both the daughter and her fiance commit suicide: Their bodies are dug up, their remains are mixed together, and they are re-interred in a single coffin.

This is not a pleasant book to read: It takes a strong stomach, especially in the prison episodes. At the same time, it is, I feel, an important book that is beautifully written.

Another coffee table paperweight? Not by a long shot! I am planning a trip to Iceland and have been reading fairly intensively in the subject. When I began reading this book, I did not expect to learn much. What a pleasant surprise! I spent a whole Sunday poring through it and was surprised at how excellent the text is -- and how well Jon Kracauer's superb photographs supplements it.

David Roberts digs deep into the sagas, quoting from such relatively abstruse sources as GIMLI'S SAGA, GRETTIR'S SAGA, and BARD'S SAGA. The helpful bibliography lists a number of works I never knew existed, including a book by Sir Richard Francis Burton, the African explorer, about a summer he spent in Iceland as well as a number of rare travel books written by Europeans going back as far as the 18th century. One thing unique about this book is that Roberts and Kracauer visit many out-of-the-way places mentioned in the sagas, such as the almost inaccessible Isle of Drangey, where Grettir the Strong met his death.

If you hope to visit Iceland, get this book first. It will give you not only an excellent background in the sagas but an awe for this isolated land that is so close and yet so far.

"Come grow old with me / The best is yet to be..."

Browning's lines from "Rabbi Ben Ezra" apply nicely to O'Brian's great Aubrey/Maturin series (although I understand that the last couple of volumes in the series are not quite up to the standard). Partly because so few writers can create vital and interesting characters any more, O'Brian stands out with his correct Tory Naval captain (Jack Aubrey) and his British intelligence agent/scientist friend (Stephen Maturin), who show here that they can age gracefully.

But don't begin here. You have to have read the series in order to understand their tangled love and financial relationships and how the situation in THE COMMODORE came to be. If you have read the others through THE WINE DARK SEA, you are in for a real treat.

Aubrey and Maturin combat pro-Napoleonic forces at home and abroad. In the process, they deliver crippling blows to the West African slave trade and prevent a French landing in support of Irish independence.

Now that he has risen in the ranks, Aubrey must deal with issues raised by an incompetent spit-and-polish commander like Captain Thomas and by an otherwise talented sodomite in the person of Captain Duff whose officers rebel against favoritism shown to his catamites. Throughout the book, our heroes are uncertain of the welcome they will receive from their wives and families -- yet they are driven onward for King and Country.

Imagine a society in which someone gets really cheesed off about his neighbor and decides to bushwhack him, and maybe his whole family and his servants while they're at it. Forget the police, forget the army. There isn't any. If you're unhappy about this, you try to get your favorite chieftain to intervene. Of course you'd better have a whole bunch of armed followers to show that you mean business. You can bet the murderer will too as a matter of course. How you come off in this hypothetical society depends on how much influence you wield on your neighbors. If you're willing to go to bat for them -- and vice versa -- your power will increase. Unless, of course, someone decides to swing an axe at your hatrack in the meantime.

This is Medieval Iceland in the 13th century, when this and all the other great sagas were written. The EYRBYGGJA is one of the best of the sagas -- provided that you can handle all the genealogies. (Virtually all the people in the saga were real people; and many of today's Icelanders can trace their families back almost 1,000 years.)

If there is any hero in the EYRBYGGJA, it is Snorri the Priest. He manages to maintain his power despite several threats that unfold during the several generations of this story. At times, as in the case of the feud with Arnkel, Snorri seems to be in the wrong. But he is consistently faithful to his friends and therefore has no problem raising the forces to back up his position. His life bridges the conversion to Christianity in the year 1000: Snorri proves his adaptability by going from a priest of Thor to an advocate of the new religion. In all the Icelandic sagas I've read, most of the characters do not seem to be wholeheartedly committed to either the old or the new religion; but all are superstitious about the restless dead, which brings me to one of the most fascinating aspects of this saga: the ghost episodes that seem to proliferate. I particularly like Thorolf Twist-Foot, a disagreeable old man who keeps coming back from the dead and causing trouble -- which Snorri deals with in most inimitable fashion by holding an ancient legal proceeding called a "door court" to expel them.

My only criticism: This book needed a good set of maps for following the action. The lone map provided is inadequate.

Having read Alain de Botton's highly amusing Proust book, I expected no less from CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY; and I was not disappointed. Five philosophers (Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche) and one giant of literature (Montaigne) are enlisted to help us deal with such universal problems as popularity, sexual rejection, poverty, and inadequacy.

Curiously, none of these philosophers (with the possible exception of Epicurus) led happy lives. Seneca was ordered by his pupil Nero to commit suicide; Montaigne was tortured to the point of distraction by kidney stones; and Nietzsche went mad. De Botton, however, shows how each one exhibited great common sense on at least one area in their lives.

The upshot of all this advice is to consider that others have it worse, buck up, and forge ahead despite all the obstacles. Not quite what Buddha discovered beneath the Bodhi Tree, but in this era of chicken soup for whatever ails you, it's a step up. Unlike most self-help books, this one instead of bloating two paragraphs into a 100,000-word book, leaves you hungry for more. Particularly useful are the notes in back, directing the reader to the sources and presumably further enlightenment.

I was a little put out that de Botton left out all mention of Boethius, whose CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY was one of the most influential books of the last 1,500 years and is still a very worthy book for accomplishing the same goals. As a skeptic, I was also disappointed that Lucian of Samosata was omitted. Oh, well, you can't criticise a book for what it was not. De Botton's selection is highly individual and, what is more, it works.

We Americans don't really stray far from Western Europe in our knowledge of history. But from its very beginnings, Islam presented a clear and palpable threat to the West. Spain had already succumbed, and France was threatened by the Moors. Most shocking, the Holy Land was occupied by Turks. (Think of the response if we were to occupy Mecca and Medina!)

Europe responded by the Crusades, about which we know a little, and with the military monastic orders such as the Knights Templar and Knights of St John Hospitaller, about whom we know next to nothing. These were men who lived a monastic (or at least semi-monastic) life and who acted as Christendom's shock troops in the war against the Saracen.

The Crusader kingdoms of the Middle East finally fell after 300 years of constant strife, but the idea caught on in Spain in the drive to expel the Moors and in Prussia against the surrounding Northern Slav Pagans.

Perhaps the most stirring tale Seward tells is of the strife between the Knights of St John, having been expelled by the Turks from Rhodes, recovering brilliantly in the siege of Malta in 1565. After demolishing a force of 30,000 with only 6,000 men, the Knights ever after became known as the Knights of Malta.

Other reviewers have complained that this is a difficult book. It has to be: Almost a thousand years are covered, not to mention a score of countries. Think of it as a very dense appetizer to lead you further into what is surely one of the most exciting epochs of our history.

I could not help but think while reading this novel of a Frank Capra film from the 1930s entitled YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU about an eccentric household headed by Lionel Barrymore full of amiable zanies who stump the frenetic world around them.

Laxness, Iceland's only Nobelist, writes of a young orphan named Alfgrim who may or may not be a relative of the great opera singer Gardar Holm, who also hails from Brekkukot, where the old lumpfisherman Bjork maintains a rambling house on the outskirts of what was to become the country's new capital, Reykjavik. This house is filled with lodgers who get to stay rent-free for no other reason than that they ask.

Alfgrim keeps crossing paths with Gardar Holm and the young woman who wants to become the singer's lover. For some reason, the singer always cancels his appointments to the chagrin of his sponsors and fans; and the young woman, Blaer Gudmunsen, is always given the slip. The unhappy Holm is in stark contrast to Alfgrim, who maintains his balance by being suspicious of fame and content with a future of gathering lumpfish.

In the end, this is an feel-good work of considerable artistry, with a masterful, rich sense of characterization. The translation by Magnus Magnusson is excellent, as befits the man who at one and the same time is both one of the best translators of Icelandic Sagas and the TV host of BBC's MASTERMIND and WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYHOW?

This is a large, seemingly amorphous anti-novel composed of hundreds of stories -- but no characters who are named. There is no character development, no denoument: In a word, the unities of Aristotle are trashed.

But SOUL MOUNTAIN is a veritable Everest among books. I spent a month savoring it slowly. Each day brought new spiritual and picaresque episodes. Interspersed is a story of a difficult relationship that begins in Wuyizhen in the early episodes and lurches forward and backward until it ends in a strange stand-off toward the end. Gao avoids the big cities and travels along the southern mountain regions of China, frequently in areas not populated by the majority Han population, in search of Linshan, or soul mountain.

Does he make it? Yes ... and no! It was always just across the river all the time (in a manner of speaking). Gao laments in advance the destruction about to be wreaked by the building of the projected Three Gorges dam. His China is in the course of assimilation into the Han culture, so he seeks the folkways of minority populations, the poetry, music, festivals, and religious observances.

"Even I can't distinguish how much is experience," writes Gao, "and how much is dreams within my memories and impressions, so how can you distinguish between what I have experienced and what are figments of my imagination? And in the end is it necessary to make such distinctions? In any case, they aren't of any significance whatsoever."

He's right, too. This is a book that transforms the reader. All that is asked of the reader is to shed his plausibilist prejudices and drift in the stream. The ride is well worth it!

The twilight world of the great Icelandic sagas can be difficult for an outsider to understand. We are so fixated on the values of the Western European mainland that it is easy for us to overlook Iceland's many contributions. The great 13th century sagas like Burnt Njal, Laxdaela, and Egil are high water marks of medieval literature -- far more sophisticated than the Arthurian fantasies circulating in Britain and France at the time.

To read and understand these sagas properly, one requires a key. And this is precisely the value of Byock's work: It places the sagas in a societal context and shows us that -- while Europe was stuck in a feudal rut -- Iceland was a unique republic in which power was distributed among many 30-50 chieftains. If a chieftain failed to be responsive, a landowner could change his allegiance to another, irrespective of his location. Because there were no standing armies in the time of the sagas, it was the responsiveness of the chieftain in assisting with disputes that was the prime determinant of his power, and not brute force.

Byock shows us how the system worked by a series of helpful extended examples taken directly from the sagas. These are by far the best parts of the book. Read this book, and you will see that at the heart of the great sagas are tales of how conflicts were resolved, sometimes over a period of many generations. Although many lives were lost, the fabric of society remained whole and relatively undisturbed because a consensus was finally reached.

I look forward to reading Byock's other Icelandic book on Feud in the Icelandic Saga.