I traveled to Iceland last year, read a bunch of stuff, and found a few books while I was there. Top of that stack was Smile of the Wolf, by Tim Leach.

Kjaran, a wandering skald (a bard), and Gunnar, a retired Viking raider who has made his home in Iceland, encounter a “ghost”, with fatal consequences. The outcome of that start a feud that drives the entire novel. The early part of the book is so transporting. I’m there, in Iceland, in the 10th century. So well done. Here’s the first paragraph:

In the distant lands where men worship the White Christ, I have heard that a ghost is not such a dangerous thing. They are creatures of no substance, who may wail and howl but cannot hurt a man. But in my country, the people are warriors even in death. Our ghosts are not shadow and air, but walk- ing flesh. They wield their weapons with as much strength as they did in life, and more bravely, for they have nothing left to fear. And so, when we heard that Hrapp Osmundsson had crawled from his grave and begun to wander his lands at night, no man in the Salmon River Valley would leave his house after dark without a good blade at his side and a shield on his arm.

The early parts of Smile of the Wolf capture the grim beauty that is both the Icelandic terrain and the pagan northern world view. It mirrors the classic Icelandic sagas in many ways, but where the saga characters are usually pretty opaque, we get inside the heads of the characters and get a detail and color the sagas don’t provide, yet the cadence and speaking voices can be suitably terse or blunt.

The narrative and the prose really work for me. The initial scenes with the “ghost”, and events that follow, are magic. The gradual progression of the resulting feud, leading up to the critical inflection point in the novel, has the same fatalistic unfolding of the sagas. 

Eventually, one of the characters is Outlawed, which in medieval Iceland meant any man could kill you – so outlaws either left Iceland, or lived in desolate areas no one came to. I loved the Outlaw sequence. Many of the sagas feature people being outlawed, but none that I have read really explore what that means to the individual beyond being constantly on one’s guard to avoid being killed. I thought Leach added a lot of color, with the cave, the farming, the thieving, the cold, the rough medicine (for example, having your fingers amputated). 

Many of the sagas (and Smile of the Wolf) feel like American Westerns to me. And of course what’s more Old West than Outlaws? But it feels an interesting difference to me. The American Outlaws feel as though they have chosen their life, and being an Outlaw means one places oneself outside the law. It feels an active, individual choice in a way – I Choose to disobey the law. In the sagas, being an Outlaw is in a way not about choosing to disobey laws, it is that society places you outside the law, the laws do not protect you. You are outside the law, and can be killed. But society is doing it to you, rather than you doing it to society (a few related articles on being an Outlaw in Iceland, if your interests run that way.)

I also found very interesting the treatment of Christianity in the latter half of the book, and the inner life that might lead a pagan who follows the old gods to convert. Again, many books have explored the intersection of the Viking world with Christianity, but usually Christians are portrayed as pious, meek, and not necessarily fierce in battle, and the conversion process has always felt like it was just words, for convenience or under duress. The priest Thorvaldur who joins their Outlaw band is just a fierce a Viking as anyone. And the Christian God of SotW is not the God of love and mercy, that God is the God of Revenge, and feels like a bit like just another god. (also interesting: the Christian God and the White Christ seem pretty conflated in Kjaran’s head….). The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell (or the TV show), and the relationship between Uhtred and Alfred is an interesting comparison.

I read SotW with a friend on my social reading app, Bookship. They found parts of the book less convincing than I, and wished that some of the characters had been more explored – which I can’t argue with – they are fascinating people, some more explored than others. But in the large, I found the book transporting, and perhaps the best modern capture of the spirit and worldview that is the Icelandic sagas.

I recently reviewed the books I read last year. Some great stuff, but also too much “bookish junk food”. I’m committed to reading better this year.

(btw. I made a music playlist for this book. Salter always makes me think of jazz. Go ahead and push the play button on this while you read).

Some time ago I was wandering through a used bookstore in Manchester by the Sea and stumbled across Burning the Days, the memoir of the writer James Salter. The well known book reviewer Michael Dirda of the Washington Post famously wrote “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”. I opened the book to a random page, and found:

“I cannot think of it without sadness. I think of the day-long, intimate hours in her apartment with the same record playing over and over, phrases from it like some sort of oath I will know til the day I die.”

OK it’s two sentences.

Salter is an amazing writer, and behind that lies a fascinating, complex, insightful man. Burning the Days tells the story of his life, from the early days of learning about sex through to his early 70’s. The transience of all things is lurking on every page, but the book rings out with its joys as well.

In youth it feels one’s concerns are everyone’s. Later on it is the clear that they are not. Finally they again become the same. We are all poor in the end. The lines have been spoken. The stage is empty and bare.

Before that, however is the performance. The curtain rises.

His description of becoming aware of sex is priceless. After a friend tells him stories, this:

Months later one noon, looking through the magazines in a cigar store, I came across a pamphlet with blue covers. Some had placed it there, concealed behind a magazine; it was not part of the stock. The provocative title I have forgotten, but as I began to read I underwent a conversion. …fairly trembling with discovery, like someone who has found a secret letter, I hid the precious thing. I was going to try certain things, and all that I had read, in time, I found to be true.

Years afterwards, at a luncheon, I sat next to a green-eyed young woman, a poet, who declared loftily that you learned nothing from books, it was life you learned from, passion, experience. The host, a fine old man in seventies, heard her and disagreed. His hair was white. His voice that the faint shrillness of age. “No, everything I’ve ever learned,”, he said, “has come from books. I’d be in the darkness without them.”

I didn’t know if he was speaking of Balzac or Strindberg…. but in no particular order I tried to think of books that had instructed me, and among them, not insignificant, was the anonymous twenty page booklet in blue covers that described the real game of the grownup world.

At The Hawaii Project, we often say Books Change Lives. And they do.

His time at West Point was equally formative.

The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how.

During his studies at West Point, a number of books figure prominently. But one book changed his life.

There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.

An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.

The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.

He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm…

I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.

I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.

I began to change, not what I truly was, but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.

To the anonymous poet mentioned above: yes, Books Change Lives. If they are good enough, and if we let them. On my reading, I was struck by how much this fictional company commander resembles the Leonidas of Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield, of which I’ve written elsewhere.

The first phase of Salter’s life is military, eventually becoming a pilot, and Burning the Days chronicles that life in ways that are by turns comical, heartwarming, and searing. This phase of his life leads to his first novel The Hunters, and flying the Korean War, and his true tales from that time open a window into the military experience few books can match.

The success of The Hunters eventually drives him to leave the Army and write full time. He discovers Paris. This leads him to write A Sport and A Pastime, an erotic chronicle of Paris, with an unreliable narrator. He goes into movies, writing screenplays for a number of films, most of them unsuccessful (I’ve recently become aware of how many writers of that era put food on the table by writing screenplays — Steven Pressfield is another). His stories of the movies, the stars, and set locations are thought provoking as well as interesting.

And always, there are the books. The books he’s writing, the books he’s reading — I’ve picked up 3 or 4 books other than his own, that meant something to him.

What a fascinating man and life. A fighter pilot, a man’s man, a serial womanizer it seems, and yet deeply introspective and caring. An aesthete, intimately aware of the transient nature of all things. Burning the Days is simultaneously elegiac and joyful, and will give you insightful perspective on life.