“An old woman is found dead in a garage, its curved fingers clasping a German hand grenade from the Second World War, on her arm, a swastika scar.” She had some time ago to reserve the date for their cremation by cell phone and let it also confirmed that the temperature of the oven will be 1000 degrees. is the lady reliable: time on Monday 14 December at 13.30 her body is transferred. Your hands will be sawed off and handed over to a demolition squad, including explosive materials.
“I still have phantom pain in the imaginary wrists,” she says – have just cremated narrator …
Only the Icelandic author Hallgrímur Helgason can a life story so bizarre, and make macabre as this Final his latest novel hints at “A woman at 1000 °”. The terminally ill end up cranky old man with pink hair was once a fashionable lady with an unconventional lifestyle. In 1929, she was born as Herb Jörg María Björnsson in a tin shed in Iceland; In 2009, she spent the last days of her life in a garage in Reykjavik.
Your almost 40 kg ‘female flesh “languish in the hospital bed then, more dead than alive, the Pall Mall box is always at hand. Because of their shortness of breath Herb Jim’s way to the loo are their “daily penance.” Day care service looks over, not without wondering how it because, as a hen sits on her eggs; because between her legs she hides a German hand grenade – their personal “feu de Cologne,” which has her pushed her father in the war as a defensive weapon in the hands
Just now it is her life than ever before.
gone, says Herb George, but she has a laptop that opens their internet the world and allows her via Facebook and Co. incognito appearances. Under the nickname “Linda” she enjoys the unrigged in truth “Matratzenhyäne”, as alleged Icelandic Miss World 1988, the greed of men. Under the name of a bishop she writes her daughter a letter that it holds its infidelity and invites them to repent and to visit all the services.
Now she has time to walk in the footsteps of their lives , She is on a “round trip”, jumps with a parachute here and there from lands beside himself, patting his shoulder (p.140).
And just as arbitrary, the author designed his novel. In short chapters, he jumps back and forth of a wild, reckless and eerie brutal life between the phases. Father John is the only Icelander, who draws as an Aryan conviction for the Germans in the war; Mother and daughter Gudrun follow him to Germany. But after seven years of sheltered, loving childhood Gudrun leaves her, and the girl is given to a family on the Frisian island Amrum in nursing. Early makes them the experience that she belongs nowhere and offend everywhere: Is she Icelandic like her father – or Danish as their mother – or at least German, because they speak the language? This dilemma is valid for life. During the cruel war times she flees as a lone fighter from one place to another. She reveals in their distress the hiding of an Englishman – and feels like a war criminal. She witnesses, defenseless one like a young German officer, amputee and shoots crazy Jew who as Aaron Hitler, the little brother “of its sovereignty” claims to be. Let must endure rape, falls for a helpful woman who is being held in a house and a whore offered for sale to the Russians. Located in the madness of senseless war people were shot on the run next to her, and she wonders: Why not they themselves? Their cruel experiences let them doubt God: “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” (p 372). All this can only work with sarcasm, cynicism and raven black humor; Anger and grief at the same time characterize their biestigen, ruthless character.
After stops in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris, Argentina and Cape Town, she returned to Iceland. She has four Icelandic men suffer with bad behavior and born three ungrateful sons who have now that they expected the imminent death of the mother hawked their assets. Really loved it only has their clever, clairvoyant mother; respects them because they than themselves was always a better person. Almost out of his mind Herb Joerg brings the sudden death of her three year old daughter who died in a car crash in Buenos Aires killed.
In Reykjavik, the capital of the volcano-rich, cold island whose inhabitants maintain silence as a culture, is highly explosive in every sense of the word Herb Jörg in their cozy garage. She shares sharply from, expecting mercy from rants relentlessly against her family, the men in particular, but also against the tiny Iceland. Their harrowing and cruel “memoirs” does it without missing something somehow cobbled together – and now they can be late to the agreed-upon date for their cremation
.
A woman at 1000 ° of Hallgrímur Helgason Review. (2019, Nov 18). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/a-woman-at-1000-of-hallgrimur-helgason-my-review/