Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

Next, they asked their way to the dean's residence, for, as the woman said, he was a servant of God. It was an old wooden house with a steep roof and green-painted walls, standing by itself on a small hill in the middle of a field. An old, taciturn maid opened the kitchen door to them and asked what they wanted. Sigurlína asked to see either the priest or his wife, and the maid soon returned and said that the dean had instructed her to show them to his office. He sat at a worn-out old desk, in an armchair decked with pillows. He had an auburn goatee and his hair was beginning to gray, his cheeks were purplish-red, his eyes protruded slightly and had puffy bags beneath them, but the expression in them was as if he were standing in a high pulpit, looking over a large congregation, seeing both everyone and no one at once and not needing to think, everything he needed to say being written in his sermon, but his eyebrows were situated abnormally high, with deep lines traversing his forehead from them to just below his hairline. Perhaps the uplifted configuration of his eyebrows and wrinkles was attributable to his relish of snuff, with which he regaled himself every two minutes, from large silver cans on the desk before him. His whole face was particularly dignified and official-looking, but it was extraordinarily difficult to determine whether any human thought dwelt within it. When he began speaking, his voice was entirely monotone, cold and hollow, and seemed to descend from somewhere inside his head. Nor was any expression detectable in his eyes or face when he spoke, giving the impression that his thoughts and feelings, if he had such things, formed in his mouth along with his words. His nose, however, was completely blocked.

"From the north, yes," he said, after asking the woman about her family and previous place of residence. "Yes, there are several smaller families there in the valleys of the North that I have never been able to pin down, I must admit, though to my shame; so I take it that you perhaps belong to one such family. But, turning to other matters, what brings you to these parts, if I might ask?"