Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness

There never seemed to be good weather in this village, because the Creator was always experimenting with His sky. After frost and snow, He brought wind, which whipped the snow into drifts. After whipping the snow into drifts, He would send a thaw, and melt all the drifts that He had swept together with great effort. All in all, it might be said that the Creator's favorite weather for this village was rain, which stirred up all sorts of stenches: sea and seaweed, fish, fish heads and fish guts, train oil, tar, manure, and refuse. And down from the mountain flowed at least fifty streams, which He directed through the village's vegetable patches, at whose corners the water pooled and spilled in little cascades over the low garden walls. Some He sent gushing straight at the houses, flooding their cellars or even their kitchens, causing children to catch cold, or even to contract pneumonia and die. The village's streets and footpaths were ankle-deep in ice-cold slush or mud. During the day, only ragged children with blue noses and shabby shoes were seen out and about, a woman or two on her way to the store, and dismal horses with dirt-crusted legs. Cold, sleet-bearing cloud banks billowed in the sky or sailed indignantly along the high ridges from peak to peak. Then, when the slush had turned to water and nothing was left but the stench and the mud, chilling fogs formed. Then came freezing rain and glaze. It was hard to predict, at any moment, what bad weather might come next; there could even come a calm, frosty evening, with stars twinkling in a cloudless sky- and who knows, perhaps even the moon, if the almanac indicated it. At such times, the Creator was pausing to think. But you could count on it: the blowing snow would be back, in fact the very next day, and the next, followed by frost, and more wind to sweep the snow into drifts, and thus did existence turn and bite its own tail here in the village. The Creator could go on like this uninterrupted, as if purely for His own amusement!

And life in the village was a kind of accompaniment to this ridiculous weather; the villagers continued to labor and toil, one bad-weather spell after another, with no one any better for it. These people seemed cursed; condemned to haul in those ludicrous fish far out at sea whenever the weather allowed, and then to cut off their heads and slice their bellies open, wash them and salt them and stack them for the summer. And although the villagers toiled incessantly, in competition with the whims of the weather, the fruits of their labor were nowhere to be seen; everything disappeared down the same hole, whether people fished for a share of the catch or a fixed wage: their accounts with Jóhann Bogesen swallowed everything. Here, no one ever saw money. This dogma, an account with Jóhann Bogesen, was in essence as abstract as the belief in the revelation of God or the redemptive act of Jesus Christ, yet nonetheless, its effects were, in their own way, as objective and tangible as, for example, the sacraments and other means of grace - it meant continuous credit in years when there were no fish, security when the fish trade slumped, tar paper, paint, raisins, cardamom, and candied citrus peel, along with little painted tin pails for the children at Christmas, and last but not least, this remarkable religion was a guarantee that no one need be buried at the expense of the parish, which, in this village, was considered one of the most shameful, humiliating fates that could befall a person, whereas being able to pay for one's own funeral was viewed as a sign of true greatness and spotless integrity in life as well as in death.