The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

For some time no one had heard our clock, any more than if it had not existed. But for these last few days the living-room was quiet, and then I heard that it was still ticking away. It never let itself get flurried. Slowly, slowly went the seconds in my grandfather's timepiece, and said as of old: et-ERN-it-Y, et-ERN-it-Y. And if you listened hard enough you could make out a sort of singing note in its workings; and the clear silver bell struck. How good it was to hear once again the note of this clock in which there lived a strange creature! And to have been allowed to stay here in Brekkukot, in this little turf cottage which was the justification of all other houses on earth, in the house that gave other houses purpose.

"Tell King Kristian of Denmark from me," said Captain Hogensen, "that I know well what it is to be summoned from other lands to become a man of authority among the Danes. They fetched me, a poor cottager with a crowd of starving children in Breiafjörur, and placed me in charge of their warships. And that's the way they fetched him too, a poor cottager with a crowd of starving children in Germany, and placed him in charge of the whole country in Denmark; and he of course did not know a word of their language, any more than I did. That's how they put impoverished foreigners into the highest positions in the land in order to have their own way. Tell him that I do not blame His Majesty even though the Danes have committed one of the greatest blunders in the history of the world; and that was when they allowed Gúmúnsen, together with the English and the Faroese and other such races, to use drag-nets and trawls in the most important bays in this country such as Faxaflói and Breiafjörur and scrape the bottom clean and destroy every single living creature, big or small. And with that, obviously, people like Björn of Brekkukot here are done for. Tell His Majesty that on every New Year's Day since I came to Reykjavík I have left no stone unturned in my efforts to impress upon His Majesty's highest servants in this country, Governors, Bishops, and King's Ministers alike, my protests against this behaviour. And that's that."