Books: 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...