The Fish can Sing by Halldór Laxness

E. Draummann had long suspected, according to what he himself said, and had at last found proof the previous year, that although his wife came of this famous Langahlí family, she had nothing in common with her father and mother nor with anyone else in Iceland or in this part of the world in this century and this millennium.

"When I was talking to her," he said, "she would often not hear for hours at a time what I was saying, but just stare out into the blue; so I tried putting her into a trance. And when she was hypnotized, I took hold of her little finger and began to question her. And then it turned out that in another life she had looked after goats and played the flute: that is to say, she had been Chloë. Later she was born again as a famous courtesan in Rome. But that was only the beginning. All around this woman was an unbroken, strange world. She had been born into the world yet again, probably because of some trifling peccadillo in her former life, or even some untimely act of kindness, just like the Master Santajama who had to be born again and again for eight thousand years, sometimes as an ox or some other domestic animal, because he had taken pity on a woman who suffered from nymphomania."