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WOMAN AT 1,000 DEGREES

Name: WOMAN AT 1,000 DEGREES
Author: Hallgrimur Helgason
ISBN: 978-1-61620-623-9

by Hallgrimur Helgason ; translated by Brian Fitzgibbon ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 9, 2018

Brilliantly written with flashing insights, but an incoherent structure muffles its power.

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An elderly woman looks back on a life permanently scarred by World War II in this latest from Icelandic novelist Helgason (The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning, 2012, etc.).

Reykjavik, 2009: 80-year-old Herra lives “alone in a garage, together with a laptop computer and an old hand grenade.” The laptop enables her to flirt with a bodybuilder in Australia and keep track of her three sons. They don’t visit much since she exited the nursing home they deemed appropriate for a woman with advanced emphysema and cancer. Herra doesn’t entirely blame them, freely admitting she was a lousy mother who drank too much and never stayed with one man for long. She may be planning her own cremation (at the 1,000 degrees of the title), but Herra recalls her amorous adventures with zest even as she wisecracks, “Men have their uses, but quick witted they sure ain’t.” Herra, by contrast, is exceedingly quick-witted and has a wickedly colorful way with words (well-rendered into English by FitzGibbon). Only when her recollections increasingly focus on the war years do we see that her verbal relish overlies profound trauma. The hand grenade is a memento of her father, seduced into Nazism while studying Old Norse in Germany. His enlistment in the German army ultimately results in Herra finding herself alone in the Hamburg train station at age 12. Her account of three years fending for herself in war-ravaged Europe is so brutally gripping that it’s a wrench to be yanked into the 1970s and the saga of Herra’s marriage to the drunken, abusive Baering. The novel never really recovers after this. It lurches between the '80s and a postwar sojourn in Argentina that seems to belong in another book before returning with diminished impact to the denouement of Herra’s wartime ordeal and her final present-day epiphany. Helgason’s fragmented chronology, so effective at first, proves to lack an overarching architecture that would unify its vivid pieces.

Brilliantly written with flashing insights, but an incoherent structure muffles its power.

Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-61620-623-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Algonquin

Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
101 REYKJAVIK
by Hallgrimur Helgason & translated by Brian Fitzgibbon

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE GOLDFINCH
by Donna Tartt

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LITTLE FRIEND
by Donna Tartt

- SEEN & HEARD
Podcast Will Explore Bennington College Lit Trio

- SEEN & HEARD
‘The Secret History’ Is New ‘Today’ Book Club Pick

- SEEN & HEARD
Jenna Bush Hager Launching Author Podcast

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ANIMAL FARM

A FAIRY STORY

by George Orwell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 1946

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A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.