The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

Guests in their party best went streaming into the home of the editor of the Ísafold at twilight that late-summer evening, and all over the house the lights were fairly blazing. As the evening wore on, the townspeople began to gather in the street outside; they were the sort of people who neither had the worry of preparing for parties nor the bother of attending them, dockers and seamen with jackets over their jerseys, the kind of men who in my young days used to be called "landless men" because they had a house full of children but no cow; and there were the bakers and artisans who were establishing urban culture in Iceland by acquiring hard hats and stiff collars and canes, the kind of people who live in constant risk of being mistaken for one another – and their wives; there were fishwives who had lost their employment salting down fish on the shore because of old age – this was about the time when Iceland had just become the first country in the world to pass a law relating to old-age pensions, even though that pension scarcely covered the cost of a rusk; here and there one could see pretty young girls in national dress, some from out in the country, others from Hafnarfjörur in the south; a few young louts just about as tedious as myself were slouching around; and there was no shortage of the kind of cynical mocking-birds who have always peopled town squares as a matter of course ever since the days of the Greek Comedies.

Did I happen to mention that it was raining?