As an unloved foster child on a farm in rural
Iceland, Olaf Karason has only one consolation:
the belief that one day he will be a great poet.
The indifference and contempt of most of the
people around him only reinforces his sense of
destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to
be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the
ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the
paradigmatic poetÉs life of poverty, loneliness,
ruinous love affairs and sexual scandal. But he
will never attain anything like greatness.As
imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness
in this magnificently humane novel, what might
be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine
exaltation. For as OlafÉs ambition drives him
onwardÍand into the orbits of an unstable
spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several
susceptible womenÍWorld Light demonstrates how
the creative spirit can survive in even the most
crushing environment and even the