“Dust and poison gushed up from the old and moldy hay within the woman's bed as they began their search. Mixed up in the hay was all kinds of garbage, such as bottomless shoe-tatters, shoe-patches, old stocking legs, rotten rags of wadmal, pieces of cord, fibers, fragments of horseshoes, horns, bones, gills, fishtails hard as glass, broken wooden bolts and other scraps of wood.”It's a breathtaking coming-to-the-surface, the emergence of deathless medieval poetry from such a muddled midden. But much the same thing might be said of Iceland's Bell, emerging so tardily into English. The new publishing season, like every season before, will no doubt bring us its share of books that are like shoe-tatters, shoe-patches, old stocking legs. Yet now we also have, brought forth into the light, this darkly magnificent novel.
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