Nordic humor and satire from Hallgrímur Helgason

I've run into deadpan Danes, wisecracking Swedes, jovial Icelanders, and Norwegian authors who enjoyed a good joke, and the one Finn I've met was a gregarious hotel clerk who radiated benevolence and good fellowship. In short, if dour, gloomy Nordics exist, they cheer up when they see me coming.

So I was not shocked by the following in Hallgrímur Helgason's The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning:

"I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here [to Iceland], in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. ... Only when you've had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars."

and

"Getting Friendly off my back was like dumping a loud girlfriend with a Texan accent and a cell-phone addiction."

and

"She smells like a New Jersey Devils' banner that's been hanging on the dim corner of a seedy Newark lounge for the past twenty years."

and

"I don't know. I just hate it when people discriminate against me, only because I kill people."

Along the way, Hallgrímur's satirical targets include sanctimonious public apologies and spurious declarations of corporate duty to the customer. And I have to think that his decision to make the protagonist a Croat is a bit of sly fun at the expense all the crime novelists who have found it expedient in recent years to people Europe with Balkan characters, usually one per book, generally dark and forbidding, all the better a background against which we are asked to contemplate big subjects like human depravity and the vicissitudes of history. (I can't be sure, but I think those characters have tended to be Croats rather than Serbs, possibly because Serbs were the bad guys in the recent Balkan wars, as opposed to World War II, when Croats filled that role.)

The Icelandic author's decision to make his protagonist/narrator a foreigner also affords him the opportunity to observe the oddities of his own country: its silence, its high prices, its cleanliness, its difficult language, its beautiful women. And the briefer glimpses of the protagonist's native Split tally with my recollections of that marvelously situated city.

I'm not sure how well a middle section works in which the multi-named protagonist has an emotional crisis and undergoes a kind of exorcism. The section is melodramatic, and Hallgrímur has more fun when the soul-savers turn out to engage in some of the same crimes as the protagonist does.  But even there Hallgrímur works in a few good observations and jokes.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

4x4: The meme

My fellow award-winning blogger J. Kingston Pierce has tagged me with a meme tailor-made for Detectives Beyond Borders. The meme is built around questions involving the number four, and I especially liked the ones that involved travel and places where one has lived.

Since Jeff expanded the list of questions from eight to ten, I don't feel too badly about making my own adjustments. And you can do the same.


Four places I'd like to go or things I'd like to do:

1) Visit the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia

2) Visit the Ajanta caves in India

3) Hike the length of Hadrian's Wall

4) Complete a short walk I began a few years ago, along the West Kennet Avenue from Avebury to the Sanctuary


Four places I've lived:

1) Montreal

2) Rome

3) Philadelphia

4) The Boston area, which leads to my own category of ...


Four places I've lived in the Boston area:

1) Waltham

2) Brookline, whose no-overnight-parking regulations seemed intended to keep out the folks from ...

3) Brighton

4) Somerville


Four places I've been on vacation:

1) Split, Croatia. By the shimmering blue Adriatic Sea, in a hotel within the precincts of Diocletian's Palace. One of the places that has inspired me with a desire to live there.

2) 桂林 (Guilin, China.) Sweaty, hot, amid spotty air-conditioning and other trappings of a section of China making the uncertain transition to Western-style consumer capitalism. Also home of the near-hallucinogenic beauty of the sandstone natural spires, and the only place I have seen anyone playing a guitar while passenger on a bicycle.

3) Israel/Palestinian territories. Alas, it's not as easy as it once was to visit the Tomb of the Patriarchs to see blind old Muslim sage-like men praying at a site so fundamental to our sense of our own culture.

4) Istanbul, in particular Hagia Sophia, quite possibly the most influential building in the history of the world, and certainly one of the most beautiful. One can see the gallery mosaics up close, and there is something special about seeing and touching the rough, unfinished stone that lines the spiral stairways to the upper levels.


Four foods or drinks I have liked:

1) A nice, medium-rare steak

2) A good Brunello da Montalcino

3) Fresh raspberries

4) Deviled eggs


Four (with ties) books or movies I could read or watch again:

1) Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility

2) Roughing It

3) Any of books 7 through 16 of Bill James' Harpur and Iles novels

4) Seven Samurai, Stray Dog and, appropriately for repeated viewing, Rashomon


Four works of art before which I have stood (or sat) either in deep relaxation, as close as I get to a meditative state, or with a profound sense of receptiveness:

1) Piero della Francesca's Resurrection and Montefeltro Altarpiece (Scan by Mark Harden)

2) Velázquez's Las Meninas

3) Rembrandt's Bathsheba at Her Bath

4) Trajan's Column


Four literary, scientific, artistic or political figures from the past whom I'd like to watch at work or meet for dinner and drinks:

1) Giotto

2) Jane Austen

3) Mark Twain

3a) Charles Darwin

4) Jawaharlal Nehru. Anyone who can write a book of world history from memory and addressed as a series of letters to his daughter is a man to be reckoned with. Anyone who can write a book about his own country and call it The Discovery of India has a passionate intellect that's worth anyone's interest. And the man had a few practical accomplishments as well, I think.


Answers have begun to arrive from four people I think might take it upon themselves to answer these questions:

1) Sucharita Sarkar (yet another evocative post from one of my favorite writers in blogland.)

2) Seana Graham (good reading!)

3) Adrian McKinty (good reading about bridges and food!)

4) Maxine Clarke

and

5) Kerrie, who stepped in graciously for Maxine and talks about her journey from Paradise to Hell and back. Thanks!

© Peter Rozovsky 2009