The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

I developed a neutral expression which caused people more or less not to see me at all; it was as if a cocoon formed around me. I never looked miserable enough to tempt people to make fun of me for any length of time; I was just a little odd, in a rather uninteresting way. But it may well be that people made fun of me more than I realized; I was so unaware as a youth that I did not understand teasing until it became malice or downright mischief – and scarcely even then.

The man is not born, they say, who cannot find his equal. I found Grandpa Jón on my first day in the second class, and he me. He was twice as old as I was and had to shave every day to avoid having a long beard. He came from the Dalir, out west. Through some society which published Christian pamphlets in Norway he had received a higher calling – to convert the Chinese. Grandpa Jón was a constant target for the malicious; people were always telling him obscenities and trying to distress him with them. This broad-shouldered, fair-haired man was convinced that people would be improved by reading Christian pamphlets in Norwegian, and that it would benefit the Chinese to study enormous illustrated volumes of Biblical stories printed in Kristiania. People never tired of ridiculing his ideas, on the ingrained assumption of Icelanders that all believers must be out of their minds. Because of his age, Grandpa Jón was rather slow at his lessons; but his slowness of comprehension was as nothing compared to his total inability to remember anything. He thought Latin a ridiculous and unnecessary invention, particularly the subjunctive; he believed that it was the prince of darkness who had so arranged it that one verb could have different forms by the score in Latin and by the hundred in Greek; and yet he did not hesitate to tackle all these rigmaroles, for the sake of his calling.