Reykjavík Grapevine - 02.02.2018, Qupperneq 42

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42The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 02 — 2018
The Fact of Fiction
Hallgrímur Helgason's "Woman at 1,000 Degrees"
is published in the US
Words: Björn Halldórsson Photo: Art Bicnick
Though the Icelandic Christmas
book season is over, the next
few months mark the release
of many Icelandic translations
into other languages by publish-
ers across the world. One such
is Hallgrímur Helgason's 2011
novel "Woman at 1,000 Degrees",
published by Algonquin Books.
“Ideally you want to just move
onto the next thing
and not get stuck on
your old books,” says
Ha l lg r í mu r. “But
getting published in
the US is a big pack-
age, so I've spent
some time revisit-
ing the book over the
past two years. I was
very lucky to have a
great translator in
Brian FitzGibbon,
but even so, my text can be chal-
lenging. Sometimes I had to step
in and help, explain things, or try
to find an adequate solution my-
self. Then came fact checking and
copy editing. Even after 14 drafts,
the American detail doctors were
able to find some inaccuracies.”
The prickly US reader
Though Hallgrímur's vast bulk of
work is widely translated across
Europe, most English speak-
ers will be familiar with him
through his 20-year-old slacker-
opus “101 Reykjavík,” the novel
behind Baltasar Kormákur's cult-
classic film of the same name.
“I’m excited to see how the re-
action will be in the States,” Hall-
grímur says. “I sometimes get the
feeling that US readers can take
offence if things are too cruel or
sarcastic. It’s the opposite of Ger-
many, for example, where they
can’t get enough black humour.
Sometimes it’s even too much,
like they only want me as a comic
writer. I guess there's a scarcity of
humour in Germany." He laughs.
“It's a burgeoning market; they're
hungry for anything funny!”
Fact vs. fiction
The woman that the novel's title
refers to is one Herbjörg “Herra”
María Björnsson; a bed-bound
eighty-year-old who lives in a
rented garage with only a laptop
and a hand grenade
for company, ready-
ing her cancer-rid-
den self for a final
cremation wh i le
u nap ologet ica l ly
narrating her wind-
ing and contrary
life-story. From the
get-go, Hallgrímur
made it clear that
Herra had a true-
life inspiration—a
vivacious octogenarian who he
happened to meet over the phone
while doing political call-outs dur-
ing municipal elec-
tion season some
years ago. He’s also
done his utmost to
proclaim the book
be a work of fiction, not biography,
but still, the novel caused an uproar
upon its publication. The family
of his muse was none too pleased
with the depiction of their then-de-
ceased relative, reigniting yet again
the debate of author responsibility
when it comes to fact vs. fiction.
“I actually had an idea to pub-
lish a new version with alternating
yellow and white pages, so people
could see what was fact and what
was fiction,” Hallgrímur jokes. “To
me, it’s all fiction—even if you're
playing around with facts—but the
more fiction feeds off life, the stron-
ger it gets. Life is always grander
and stranger than anything you
can make up. An author has to
write fact as if it's fiction and fic-
tion as if it’s fact. You have to make
the reader go: “Wow! This is really
happening!” That’s the trick: fusing
the two together until the reader
is pulling their hair out trying to
decide what's true and what's not.”
The wait for the Big
Icelandic Novel
He's optimistic about the future of
Icelandic fiction but also hungry
for what's waiting around the bend,
urging new authors to take more
chances. “It would be great to see
some bigger and broader novels,”
he says. “There were only 2-3 ‘big
novels’ this Christmas; that's not
a lot! The rest is poetry and novel-
las and smaller novels. We can be
pretty impatient as a nation. People
say: I want a new book to curl up
with on Christmas Eve, and they
want to be able to read the whole
book that night. It all seems a bit
rushed and sometimes writers
get pressured into releasing their
books too early. That's something
I’ve tried to fight against in my
work; holding on to my books for
longer to make sure they’re ready.”
The Costco colony
He's also eagerly awaiting writers
seeking material in the yet-to-be-
mined ore of recent Icelandic his-
tory. “Despite some attempts, we
still haven’t gotten the big Finan-
cial Meltdown novel,”
he laments. “Maybe
more time needs to
pass, but by now it's
a l most ten yea rs.
The financial meltdown is like
our WWII; there's so many sto-
ries there. Everything collapsed
almost overnight. I'm currently
working on a novel that reaches a
bit further back than that; trying
to search for the national psyche
and look at Iceland in a larger con-
text. To show that moment when
we emerged from the turf huts
into modernity, at the beginning
of the last century; how we were
these helpless little pushovers on
the world stage. We must remind
ourselves every now and then that
we used to be a colony full of poor
and uneducated people.” He grins.
“A lot of progress has happened
here but still, that gormless push-
over who's just happy to be able to
go to Costco is not that far off.”
gpv.is/lit
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Hallgrímur Helgason, author of 'Woman at 1,000 Degrees'
"Life is always
grander and
stranger than
anything you
can make up."