The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

Visitors to Brekkukot sometimes talked about "the authorities" and "the gentry". But there was not much come and go, exactly, between Brekkukot and the doors of the authorities. "The authorities" – for long enough I had no idea what kind of foreign company this was. It is strange to have lived in the selfsame capital in which the authorities of the country sat (for that's what all authorities did – they sat), and yet not know with any certainty more about them than about the angels that flew upright with a garland of flowers in our picture. But when a man in a frock-coat with a velvet collar, a half-keg, a come-to-Jesus collar and lorgnettes came over to grandfather's wheelbarrow on a bright summer's day and raised his hat and asked with dignity and courtesy, "Did you have a good catch this morning, Björn? " while my grandfather laid a medium-sized cod on the scales for him and the man paid with a newly minted silver coin, and was given wire through the cod's head while others had to make do with sticking a forefinger through its gills, and then raised his hat again, and held the fish at arm's length as he walked away – that man was one of the authorities. But it happened more often that my grandfather would wheel his barrow to the kitchen doors of the authorities' houses and sell the fish to the maid. I myself, on the other hand, had no dealings with the authorities until I had grown important enough to enter their presence on New Year's Day with the late Captain Hogensen.

I am not actually going to describe all the New Year's Day expeditions I made to the authorities with Captain Hogensen in my childhood days, but only to touch lightly upon the first one we made, for it was somewhat the same as all the later expeditions on the same errand, and had the added interest of novelty.