Read "The Fish can Sing" by Halldór Laxness online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
On the afternoon of the day he arrived, he said to me, "Go home and tidy yourself up, I'm going to take you to a party at the Hotel de la Gumundur tonight."
It was a long, old-fashioned shop-building; older men often called it after a merchant with a Jewish surname who came to Iceland from Schleswig or Holstein in the last century. The shop was in three sections. The first section: food, which people were then beginning to call "colonial wares" after all the aromatic produce from distant corners of the world, such as pepper, cinnamon, and cloves. Next to it was the department for dry goods and small wares, with the name GUDMUNSEN'S STORE painted in black on a rotting board above the door; and finally there was "The Schnapps", called by a Low German word that the Danes had imported to Iceland, that is to say, the liquor department. Food and schnapps had once been in the same department, until the increased fishing gave people so much more ready money that the drunks began to silt up the doorway to the shop, singing and brawling and denying entry to women who were trying to shop for food; so liquor was then moved to the other end to give the food some peace.