If Honoré de Balzac’s Human Comedy invited Realism into the house of the novel—only for Gustave Flaubert to remove its coat, pour some tea, and draw out the depths of domestic confidences and desires—a doppelganger of Realism still wandered the moor. This shadow Realism, where the landscape generates emotion and character, emerges in the novels of George Sand only to condense and explode in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In contrast to Flaubert’s domestic Realism, the wild geographic Realism of Sand, Brontë, Walter Scott, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, and, importantly for this short introduction, Halldór Laxness, obeys an entirely distinct notion of time. Feeling forms over generations and recedes at a glacial pace. Like their ancestors in the Sagas, the Icelanders in the novels of Laxness are heroically stubborn, and investigations into the hidden motivations of their actions yield little more than one would get from psychologizing a stone. In Laxness, the boundary collapses between inward and outward. Nowhere is this more on display than in the novel released by Archipelago Books this month, A Parish Chronicle.