The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

As a result of the Prime Minister's last oaths there was no more discussion for a while about selling the country. There was now to be an interval of a year, followed by Parliamentary elections over the matter, and meanwhile attempts were to be made to get the representative of the Great Power to moderate the wording of the application: to ask not for a base for attack or defence in an atomic war, but rather for a shelter for any welfare missions which might be dispatched to alleviate the sufferings of European races. A temporary truce was declared between street and State. The Communists stopped saying that F. F. F. was going to sell the country, and F. F. F. stopped writing that people had to be true Icelanders and dig up bones. But in the middle of the calm that had fallen over country sales and exhumations, the main tidings of Christmas were that Oli Figure was found in a hut down by the sea with his head smashed in; the iron bar with which he had been assaulted lay nearby. As is the custom when murders are committed, little was written about it in the newspapers, so as not to offend the murderer and his family; until someone had the fine idea of blaming the murder on an unknown American negro, for it did not matter in the least if a colored Yankee and his family were offended.

PHILOSOPHY FOR THE ADVANCED