The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2003, Qupperneq 52

94
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 58 #2
lambs; trying to control a horse with a yen
for freedom; and taking his friends, the
lambs, to slaughter.
Waiting for the South Wind is a trea-
sure trove of colourful characters, living
and dead. Valli’s great-grandfather, Johann
Bessason who scared off a polar bear with a
red-hot iron and whose beard was so long
that he used it for a bridle. Land’s End
Bjorg, fisherwoman, avant-garde poet, and
spell-caster. Valli’s ancestor, Pastor
Reykjalm, whose love of wine, women, and
song kept him in the bad books of the
church leaders and in the beds of his female
parishioners.
There are some exquisitely poetic pas-
sages in this prose, as well. One of my
favourites is:
Ravens have been teasing dogs for ages,
raven after raven, dog after dog, raven after
dog.
There is a surreal element to this book
as well, an other-worldliness that has the
reader floating above the story. And yet it
is so concrete, so specific in its detail that it
cannot fail to please the scientist and the
artist, the pragmatist and the dreamer.
Waiting for the South Wind is a multi-
layered book, a book for many ages. Older
children and younger teenagers will love
the sharp detail of Valli’s life. Whether he is
passing his time in church eating flies in a
pre-DDT era or attaching the coats of dead
lambs onto orphan lambs in hopes that the
grieving mother will adopt them, his is a
life that few children today will ever expe-
rience. The adult reader will appreciate all
of this and more - a complex philosophy
presented with such simplicity that we
sometimes have to set the book aside
before we realize that we have read some-
thing profound.
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