Some reviews have suggested this is a book about sheep, perhaps in the same way Moby Dick is about whales. You won't find that here - as one character, Einar, says, sheep are sheep, and there's no point for Laxness describing the minutiae of turn-of-20th-century Icelandic rural life, as much as that would (in all seriousness) interest me. So no proto-posthumanist insight, but instead a novel about one particularly stubborn man who persists in sticking to his rigid but vaguely defined notions of independence, no matter how many wives and children this kills or alienates. I found it exhausting - a character like Bjartur isn't really capable of either a heroic or tragic arc, which makes it tough to anchor a five-hundred-page book around him.