Reaching for the Moon

PARADISE RECLAIMED (253 pp.)--Hall-dor Laxness--Crowell ($4.50).

Much of Icelander Halldor Laxness' life has been a search for an earthly paradise. He has sought it in a monastery in Luxembourg, among surrealists in Paris, in the Communist Party. His novels have faithfully reflected the current state of his search. Independent People, for instance, which won him the 1955 Nobel Prize, deals with Icelandic freeholders battling capitalist landowners. In his latest novel, Laxness, now 60, takes a tranquil, detached look at man's age-old quest for paradise and in delicately laced, gently ironic prose shows how elusive paradise is.

Two Straws. Steinar of Hlidar, a typical Laxness peasant-hero, grows restive with life on his small farm, where he works on a stone wall begun by his greatgrandfather and regales his children with fairy tales. He longs for spiritual challenge. A Mormon missionary, one of many who came to Iceland in the late 19th century, provides it. The missionary urges him to seek a paradise on the "other side of the moon" in Utah, where great principles are lived out in hardship and suffering: "You must renounce home and family and possessions. That is how to be a Mormon. You must lead your young and rose-cheeked sweetheart out into the wilderness. One day she sinks to the ground of hunger and thirst, and dies. You dig a grave with your hands and bury her in the sand and put up a cross of two straws that blow away at once. That is how to be a Mormon."

Steinar has no rose-cheeked sweetheart, but he is inspired to leave wife and two children and go to Salt Lake City. In a wonderfully evocative picture of the early Mormons, as sympathetic as it is ironic, Laxness shows a stern community of God adjusting to the weaknesses of man. Proud of the civilization they have wrested from the desert, the Mormons consider their material possessions a sign of God's favor. "The cosmic wisdom that lives in the words of the Prophets and the deeds of Brigham Young," lectures a Mormon, "does not manifest itself exclusively in enormous truths which can only be contained in the brains of university professors; no, it lives also in the sewing machines of people who yesterday had correct thoughts, certainly, but no shirt." Laxness' Mormon men take sly pride in the number of wives they accumulate; their justifications of polyga my are delightfully specious: "Woman's salvation consists in having a righteous husband, and there can never be too many women sharing in such a man."

Price of Boots. Steinar sends for his family to join him in paradise. His son first discovers an interest in Mormonism when he notices the fine pair of boots a bishop is wearing. Neatly mixing materialism with religion, the bishop makes his convert: "No Lutheran could obtain a pair of boots like these, my lad." he says. "These shoes are a proof that the Church of the Latter-day Saints is founded on the All-Wisdom. These shoes have been a much stronger argument for me in arguments with Lutherans than any quotations from the Prophets."

Steinar has. in effect, exchanged one complacent society for another--and utopia has escaped him. He returns to his farm in Iceland and. laying aside his Mormon literature, starts to rebuild the crumbling wall. Every paradise is betrayed by human frailty, Laxness seems to say--and not such a bad thing, either.

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