An Icelandic saga of sex, lies and Nazis
Author gives us profoundly, triumphantly feminist novel that’s unlike anything we’ve read
Old Hera Bjornsson is dying, and she can’t wait. She’s made herself an appointment at the crematorium for the 14th, and she doesn’t want to miss it. She’s looking forward to being, as the book’s title suggests, Woman at1,000 Degrees. The only thing that she’s got left to do in the Beckettish garage in suburban Reykjavik she’s living her last in is get her story down on this laptop one of her caregivers set her up on a few years back.
The grenade she’s got between her legs soothes her. It reminds her of her Nazi father, who gave it to her before leaving her 13-year-old self in the Hamburg train station in the middle of an air raid as a sort of extreme rape whistle. She takes the occasional break to hack into her adulterous daughter-in-law’s email correspondence with a witless, joyless paramour, and to carry on an increasingly serious relationship with an Australian bodybuilder who thinks she’s Miss World 1988.
She’s not had what most of us would consider an easy life. Sent off by her mother, abandoned by her father, she lost her virginity while still a child to a man she had a crush on and with whom she flirted — and then he raped her. It was the first of many rapes.
Coming of age during the Second World War, she was confronted with more than an average number of stark moral choices, and often made the wrong ones, such as when she decided not to turn in the former head of a concentration camp because his daughter was in the middle of teaching her to masturbate. Later, she gave up on her sons, never having taken to them like she did to her first-born, a daughter, who got run over as a toddler.
As she tells her story, introducing us to characters who remain very much bit players in her life, we learn from what she tells us she’s done, and how she tells us, that this is a woman who refuses to be redacted or reduced to the role of daughter, wife, mother, victim, whore, or criminal. One thing she was, as we learn in an author’s note at the beginning of the book, is a real person. The story’s been fictionalized, but the broad strokes are biographical: the story of the granddaughter of Iceland’s first president, a woman the author met briefly before she died about a decade ago.
A novel framed the way this is has a greater-than-average chance of being horrible; it’s a pretty pat trope. But Hera’s story is not the story of the 20th century, though she lived through most of it. It is also not the story of a woman made strong by adversity, or finding herself, her inner strength, just as her long day closes. She was strong to begin with. If anything, the 20th century crashed into her and fell apart while she stood strong and firm. This is a profoundly, triumphantly feminist book, a fact that, depending on your view of such things, may or may not be undercut by the fact it’s written by a man.
Wherever you land on that one, you’ll probably agree by the end of the book that Hallgrimur Helgason — a native Icelandic speaker who once successfully wrote a book in English with a Croatian accent — is talented. Icelandic being the rough Nordic equivalent of Chaucerian English, often expressing a similarly jaundiced world view, Helgason’s story could be seen as a riff on the Wife of Bath’s Tale, without the stuff about King Arthur, and if she hadn’t been so concerned with giving her story a moral. Helgason can write beautifully, like his Icelandic contemporary, Sjon, and he can be perfectly dark and crass, like his other mononymic contemporary, the cartoonist Dagsson. But unlike either, he can do both at once, often on the same page (with the help of a translation by Irishman Brian FitzGibbon that renders Helgason’s peculiar brand of Icelandic sang froid better than we had a right to expect). “A snake of hat-clad boys loitered on the veranda on top of the steps, gulping down the night, as men are wont to do,” Hera tells us. This from the woman who also tells us she’s on a poop-to-rule strike with her caregivers.
We come late to such things, we anglophones. Ask a German reader who her favourite writers are, and she’ll mention a French novelist, an Italian poet, a Portuguese essayist. But we don’t tend to notice who’s doing what in other languages unless they’re doing it with cops and murderers. We’re late to this game as well. The novel’s been published alreadyin Norwegian, Danish, German Dutch, Russian, Lithuanian, French, Spanish, Albanian, and Catalan, and been adapted for the stage twice. There are no crimes to solve in Woman at 1,000 Degrees, but maybe we should read it anyway. There’s nothing like it in our language. Bert Archer cycled around Iceland, ate lamb face (which is a thing there), and once enjoyed a brief but exciting Twitter relationship with Sjon (which you can excavate @BertArcher).