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Woman at 1,000 Degrees dryly, darkly delivers

Book cover for Hallgrimur Helgason’s Woman at 1,000 Degrees
Book cover for Hallgrimur Helgason’s Woman at 1,000 Degrees

The most remarkable thing about Icelandic author Hallgrimur Helgason's blackly funny Woman at 1,000 Degrees (translated by Brian Fitz Gibbon, Algonquin Books, $27.95) is that it is based on the real life of a woman the author happened to encounter on the phone in 2006 when he was working as a volunteer, canvassing potential voters for his then-wife's campaign for a city councilor in Reykjavik.

The third person he called, Brynhildur Georgia Bjornsson, kept him on the phone for 40 minutes. "After hanging up," Helgason writes, "I honestly asked myself why this woman was not a household name in Iceland."

Bjornsson, who died in 2007, had an amazing life. Her father, Bjorn Sveinsson Bjornsson, was one of about 20 Icelanders who fought with the Nazis during World War II as an SS officer. He saw action on the Eastern Front as a war correspondent before heading up the Nazi propaganda machine in occupied Denmark. (Bjorn was an enthusiastic Nazi, writing on his application: "I certify that I am of pure Aryan stock. Heil Hitler!")

And while her father busied himself with producing news and cultural programs designed to demonstrate the superiority of German arts and portray the Nazis as the saviors of Europe, his father -- Sveinsson Bjornsson -- was a popular member of the Icelandic Parliament who would, after Iceland declared its independence from Denmark in 1944, become the new country's first president.

In May 1945, Danish partisans regained control of their nation, killing or arresting the SS troops remaining in the country. Bjorn was taken prisoner and held for more than a year. He was suddenly released in the winter of 1946 to great public outrage. There was much speculation that Georgia Hoff-Hansen, Bjorn's mother, had pleaded with King Christian X of Denmark to show her son leniency.

Upon his release Bjorn traveled incognito to Sweden and was smuggled back into Iceland on a fishing boat, where the Danish press erroneously and maliciously reported he was greeted by crowds of flower-waving Icelanders. (There was much tension between Denmark and Iceland in the years immediately following the war; the Danes thought the Icelanders had deserted them at the worst possible time.)

Iceland didn't exactly welcome Bjorn back with open arms. In 1946, poet and playwright Halldor Laxness, who would go on to become the only Icelandic Nobel Prize winner, called Bjorn "one of the worst Icelandic men who ever existed. A man who allowed German fascists to drive him into all sorts of vile acts against the Danish people, while wearing a uniform only worn by members of a specific murder club ... When the papers mention his father they can't help but bring his son into the picture, usually in a nasty way, often adding the suffix: ... he with the SS son."

So Bjorn, like a lot of Nazis after the war, decamped for Argentina where he struggled for decades before moving to Germany. Eventually he returned to Iceland where he worked as a tour guide, specializing in German visitors. He published a self-serving memoir in Icelandic in 1989 and died in 1998.

A biography of his daughter, Brynhildur, was published in 1983. Presumably Helgason read it as research for his novel, but I haven't, since it's only available in an Icelandic edition. Meanwhile Helgason's book has already been published in at least 15 languages.

. . .

In his author's note that precedes Woman at 1,000 Degrees, Helgason takes pains to remind us that his book is "a novel ... partly based on events that actually occurred and people who lived and died." In the acknowledgements section at the end of the U.S. edition of the novel, he reports that shortly after the book's Icelandic publication, he received a call from "a rough-sounding sailor" who told him he had contacted Brynhildur through a medium and that "the old lady ... was 'not amused.'"

So we understand that the story is fiction, and that 80-year-old Herra Bjornsson who lies dying in a Reykjavik garage in easy reach of Facebook and a live (and very Chekovian) hand grenade from World War II, is only inspired by the lively mind of Brynhildur Georgia Bjornsson and not meant to be a simulacrum. So I have no idea whether the real woman ever flirted with a Beatle or catfished an Australian bodybuilder or escaped from an old folks' home disguised as a bag of garbage, but it's delicious to think she might have.

It is 2009 and Herra is reminiscing, rolling her life back and forth. Abandoned by her father, she spent the first seven years of her life with her mother and maternal grandmother on the remote Svefneyjar islands off the west coast of Iceland. Then her father returns, sweeping them off to the continent where he embarks on his adventure with the Third Reich. He leaves mother and daughter to shelter with his mother in Copenhagen, where Herra finds out that while the Danish government may be happy to collaborate with their German occupiers, Danish schoolkids are not so accommodating.

When Herra's mother finds work in wartime Germany, she sends Herra off to the Frisian Islands, an imagined safe space. But the war intrudes there too.

In 1942 her father, on leave from the Eastern Front, shows up to collect her and deliver her to her mother, who has finally secured an apartment:

"Dad was a changed man. His expression had hardened like that of a dry fish, and there were traces of frostbite on his nose ... He'd spent the whole winter driving back and forth across the plains of Ukraine, transporting weapons, people, and food on the tented back under muddy downpours or in such polar temperatures that not even an Icelander like him had encountered them before.

"He'd had no experience of battle, other than some crossfire in the woods, and had never reached the front line himself ... so he hadn't killed anyone. Yet he wasn't the same man who had ... spontaneously danced with Mom and me in the living room, without music ... the Russian winter had frozen his gaze ... his eyes were like two pebbles on the tundra."

. . .

I admit a fondness for Helgason's work, to which I was introduced through the film 101 Reykjavik (2000) which followed the adventures of a largely inert 20-something protagonist as he crawls through hundreds of cigarettes, a porn obsession, alcohol and ennui on his way to an affair with his mother's lover, a hot-blooded flamenco dancer portrayed by Pedro Almodovar muse Victoria Abril.

This led to a fascination with Icelandic cinema (about a decade ago I told a friend I was likely one of the world experts on the films of Iceland; I was only half-joking) and to Helgason's other writings. (Like a lot of Icelanders, he seems not to specialize -- he writes novels and poetry and plays and newspaper columns. He translates other Icelandic books into English and has written a detective novel, The Hitman's Guide to Housekeeping, in English. He started out as a painter.)

What distinguishes his work is its indefatigable unsentimentality, a certain dry acceptance that all ends are tragic and all tragedy will eventually be rendered as humor.

On one level there's not anything too tricky going on here -- Herra unspools her life, her four husbands, her dull and neglectful sons, her many lovers ("Men have their uses, but quick witted they sure ain't," she muses), an ill-fated encounter with an "Aaron Hitler" and most of all her harrowing, undocumented and ultimately parent-less existence during the war. At times the fractured narrative lurches and the jokes land cold (some readers will find it annoying to be wrenched away from Herra's wartime experiences to her '70s marriage to an abusive drunk), but I put that down to the peculiarities of the Icelandic sense of humor.

While reading a translated work always feels a bit problematic, Fitz Gibbon's translation suits Helgason/Herra's generally lively mordancy -- the character feels like a real, not entirely reliable (and not entirely likable) voice, the sort who might, as a wrong number, capture your attention for 40 minutes.

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Hallgrimur Helgason is the author of Woman at 1,000 Degrees.

Style on 01/07/2018

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