Under the Glacier by Halldór Laxness

It's appropriate here to make a long story short.

Your emissary, however, doesn't wish to delay giving a summary of the tales that have lived here in this part of the land since time immemorial about a mysterious woman: sometimes one, sometimes a multitude. Sometimes this woman has taken the form of some rather disagreeable luggage.2 Tumi Jónsen has now started to tell the Icelandic sagas in a style that consists principally of casting doubt on the story being told, making no effort to describe things, skating past the main points, excusing the main characters for performing deeds that will live as long as the world endures, erasing their faces if possible-but wiping them clean, just in case. Therefore it never becomes a story, at best just a subject for a poem. The women carry on with their scrubbing. This was a long morning.