Reykjavík Grapevine - 13.04.2012, Blaðsíða 18

18
The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 4 — 2012
'101 REYKJAVÍK' WAS WRITTEN ABOUT
A MORE INNOCENT pLACE
Hallgrímur Helgason on his new books, and old
Literature | Interview
Words
Haukur S. Magnússon
photography
Alísa Kalyanova
Writer/artist Hallgrímur Helgason
should be familiar to most of our
readers, not the least for his 1996
novel ‘101 Reykjavík’, which along
with its movie adaptation managed
to define downtown Reykjavík as a
party-hearty nightspot full of lov-
able slackers, a reputation that the
area is still coasting on. His first
novel written in English, ‘The Hit-
man’s Guide To Housecleaning’
was recently released by Amazon
Crossing and is charting nicely,
while on the homefront his latest
book ‘Konan við 1000°’ has been
well received, while causing a stir.
This caused us to think: “this is an
excellent time to interview Hall-
grímur Helgason.” So we did.
TRAGIC, FUNNY
What’s new, Hallgrímur Helgason?
Painting. I’m painting now, for the first
time since 2007. I’m having big fun do-
ing crazy coloured paintings, all the
things you’re not supposed to do when
you’re an artist. I feel like a child again.
Your eighth and latest novel, 'Konan
við 1000°' [‘The Woman At 1000°’]
was released last year. Could you
tell us more about the book?
It’s about Herra Björnsson, an eighty-
year-old Icelandic woman, who was the
granddaughter of the first president of
Iceland. She was born in 1929 and grew
up on the Breiðafjörður islands. Her fa-
ther was among the few Icelanders who
fought on Hitler’s side in WW2. Her life
was very much affected by this fact,
and during the war she was left alone,
a young girl roaming around Germany.
You can say she never recovered from
this experience.
After the war she goes from here
to there, has many husbands and lives
all over the place. She then ends up
bedridden, in a garage in Reykjavík,
where she spends her last years living
alone with a laptop and an old German
hand grenade, her sole souvenir from
a turbulent life. The book plays out in
the present, with her in the garage, do-
ing her tricks on Facebook and such,
but also in the past, as she looks back
on her eventful life. The novel is very
much Herra’s life story, peppered with
some eighty years of North European
and Icelandic history. It’s very tragic at
times, but funny as well, I hope.
THE BOOK IS FICTION
The book created quite a stir in
Iceland upon its release, as some
of its characters are based on real
people. Did you anticipate such
trouble?
Yes, Herra is based on a real person,
Brynhildur Georgía Björnsson, whose
father also fought with the Nazis and
whose grandfather also was our first
president. I tried to minimalize the
damage by stating straight out in every
promotional interview that I based my
character on her life and her biography,
which was published in Iceland in the
early eighties. Still there were people
who were not happy, and I can under-
stand this. The only thing I can say is:
This book is fiction. Though it’s based
on a real-life person, the character of
Herra is fictional. Half of what happens
to her in the book is from my imagina-
tion only.
‘Konan við 1000°’, with its ultra-
dramatic backdrop and female
protagonist (your first in a while)
is quite the departure from your
previous novels. Is this intentional?
Does it reflect the times at which it
was written?
Well, my first and second novels were
about women. ‘Hella’, from 1990, and
the comic troll called ‘Þetta er allt að
koma’ (“Things Are Going Great”), from
1994 (neither book has been translat-
ed). It’s always exciting to write about
women, you have to “try to become a
woman” yourself, so it’s quite a chal-
lenge. It was quite refreshing to do so
after writing five books in a row about
men. I tried to give it a feminist touch,
since I believe so strongly in feminism.
I had great fun making fun of the male
species.
“A CALF IN SpRING”
'The Hitman's Guide to Houseclean-
ing' is the first novel you write in
English. Was the process in any way
different from writing in Icelandic?
If so, how?
It was a fresh new departure for me.
It was quite a ball writing in English. It
was like getting a new PC, full of new
features. I also felt like writing for a
whole new audience. But of course it
proved quite difficult in the end. My
English is not 100% and in the last ver-
sion I almost had to google every tenth
word. After two years working with
the English language I was getting so
tired… And when I started to write the
next one, I was so happy to get back
to my mother tongue that I felt like “a
calf in spring” as we say in Iceland. I
think you can sense this joy in the style
of ‘The Woman at 1000°’. It was a very
happy homecoming.
I understand 'HGTH' was published
in the US as part of an initiative by
Amazon.com’s new publishing firm,
Amazon Crossing. Could you elabo-
rate on this?
For four years my agent tried to get a
publisher for ‘Hitman’s Guide’ in Eng-
lish, without success. It was already out
in Germany, Denmark, Russia, Poland
and elsewhere, but the text proved to
be too rough for the refined tastes of
London and New York. So we found
Seattle: On the occasion of Iceland be-
ing the guest of honour at the Frankfurt
Book Fair 2011, the Seattle-based Ama-
zon decided to publish ten Icelandic
novels. And one of them was ‘Hitman’s
Guide’.
A TSUNAMI OF TOURISM AND
MEDIA ATTENTION
The book’s main character, Croa-
tian hit-man Tomislav Bokšić (Tox-
ic) is not far removed from ‘101
Reykjavík’ protagonist slacker,
Hlynur Björn. One might imag-
ine Hlynur Björn making some of
Toxic’s choices had he come from
a similar background, and the two
oftentimes seem to share anxiet-
ies and ambitions (or lack thereof).
Could one imagine ‘HGTH’ as a re-
visit to some of the sentiments from
‘101 Reykjavík’?
No, you are absolutely right. I even let
Toxic visit Hlynur Björn’s old hangout,
the famous Kaffibarinn. That is no co-
incidence. ‘Hitman’s Guide’ is a bit like
‘101’ with a gun. The Reykjavík book
was written when Iceland was a more
innocent place, like a thousand-year-
old maiden in the middle of the Atlan-
tic. Since the mid-nineties we’ve had a
Tsunami of tourism and media atten-
tion. The world has been making love to
the maiden for fifteen years now. Then,
around the millennium we also saw
the rise of Nordic crime writing. I don’t
think I would have written a book about
a gunman without this crime wave. I’m
not a big reader or an expert of crime
novels, and of course ‘Hitman’s Guide’
is not a crime novel in that sense—at
the most you can say it’s a crime novel
inside out, for here the criminal is the
hero and not the police—but still it was
influenced by the genre, I would say.
Do you consider yourself a moral
artist / writer?
Yes. Even though I may deny it myself,
as I have in many interviews, you should
not really listen to me. I think you can
spot an underlying moralistic tone in
my books. Even in the dead sarcastic
and cool ‘101 Reykjavík’ you can sense
a longing for a better world. And ‘Hit-
man’, despite all it’s gory scenes, is all
about the search for happiness and a
decent kind of life.
LAXNESS IS CRUCIAL
What other Icelandic novelists
should we be reading?
Halldór Laxness of course. His ‘Inde-
pendent People’ is crucial. Jonathan
Franzen rated it as one of his five fa-
vourite novels. ‘Blue Fox’ by Sjón is a
beautiful little book. He also recently
got nominated for the Independent’s
Foreign Fiction Prize for his ‘From the
Mouth of the Whale’, which I have not
read yet. Bragi Ólafsson’s ‘Pets’ is a
modern classic as well. And then it’s
Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir’s ‘Greenhouse’,
also published by Amazon Crossing.
It’s a charming tale and was a massive
hit in France and Spain. There are more
good books from Iceland, but not all of
them have seen English translations.
What's next?
I started with sixteen ideas for a new
novel back in January. They have been
playing against each other in the pre-
liminary rounds through February and
March. This coming weekend will see
the semi-finals. And then the final is
scheduled for late April, after the open-
ing of my show of paintings. Then we’ll
have a winner…
Read a bunch more of our conversation
with Hallgrímur on www.grapevine.is!
An exhibit of paintings Hallgrímur Helgason has made in the year 2012
will open at the Gerðuberg Cultural Centre in Breiðholt on April 21, and
will be up for display until June 22. You should check it out.