Customer Reviews

Absolution

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"For I fear death, I am afraid of the end, the nothingness and perplexity."

Peter Peterson a wealthy businessman and wine connossieur from Iceland is tormented living out his last days in New York. Besides the fear that his undeserving children will acquire his estate, there is his repetitive obsession with a crime of passion he believes he committed sometime back in his youth in Denmark. This crime brings him constant nightmares and cold sweats in his awakening and sleeping hours for they never leave him.

His constant companion is his Cambodian girlfriend who takes care of him, does all the chores and hardly leaves his side. This is a touching story that will keep Mr. Olafsson's fans on the brink of anxiety.

Lovers of Olaf Olafsson should not miss this beautiful novel which I believe is his first book... Grab it now. And I would also like to recommend Walking Into The Night by the same author.
Heather Marshall 2/3/04

This is the story of a frozen heart.

Peter Peterson fell in love with a girl who tolerated him, perhaps even led him on. Peter followed her from Iceland to Denmark in 1941 where he learned that she opened to another young man. He still loves her, denies that she is lost to him and arranges a weekend away with her. When in his burning desire for her he attempts to make love to her, she rejects him utterly. He takes revenge by informing on her lover to German authorities in occupied Copenhagen. This crime imprisons him for the remainder of his damaged, closed life.

The writing is spare and lucid. The slow-burning fuse of the narrator's guilt propels the reader forward through the thickets of an average lonely life. There is a distance in the narrative, however, that held me at arms length. As a result, this reader's take-away is qualified; similar to a footnote that sticks in the memory after details of the tale break apart and fade.

I picked this up in Reykjavik at the end of a trip to Iceland. I had previously read other Icelandic authors to get a feel for the country and its people but was disappointed. This book was a great read. The translation was done by the author himself so the quality of the prose is even more remarkable. There are numerous flashbacks contained in chapters that usually run about four pages. It jumps back and forth from the 1940s and from Reykjavik to Copenhagen to New York.

My daughter tried this book and found it tough to read at first because she didn't like the main character (he is not what one would call warm and cuddly). But she became engrossed with the book halfway through and was glad she stuck with it. I, on the other hand, loved it from the first page.

I am about to order another book from this author and I can't wait till it arrives.

Peter Peterson is an embittered man. He is mistrustful towards his son Helgi and his daughter Gudrun because he thinks that they are after his money. Now an elderly man he is confronted with the memories of his life. He was brought up in the gentry quarter of Reykjavik, followed his first love to Copenhagen during the Second World War and then went to live to New York.
Time and again he remembers what he calls his "little crime" but this remains a mystery until the end of the novel. Like a murderer compelled to visit the site of his crime because he feels that his first love was clouded by betrayal and a harrowing revenge which poisoned his soul for the rest of his life. Did Peter Petersen really betray anybody? Who was the victim of his revenge?
Excellently written with a carefully engineered plot, the reader is pulled into the story - with its numerous flashbacks which are interwoven into the present day - until the very end.

The thin story contained in this slim novel is contained in a rather lame and unnecessary framing device. A translator is asked by a lawyer friend to skim a handwritten manuscript and tell him if it has any bearing on an estate the lawyer is executor for. The translator is soon drawn into the confessional memoir of wealthy New York businessman Peter Peterson. This could have stood on its own, and the introduction of the translator only creates clutter in getting to the meat of the matter. The memoir is the work of a dying man, wealthy in a material sense, but spiritually bereft (quite the cliche). An Icelandic emigre during World War II, he spent the following 50 or so years manipulating people, accumulating wealth, becoming a wine connoisseur, playing out a loveless marriage over three decades, fathering two children he can summon little (if any) warmth or feeling toward, and generally greeting his fellow man with a skeptical eye. This final document of his life is split between reminisces on these aspects of his life and his desire for absolution in the matter of a crime he committed as a young man during the war in Denmark.

The gradual revelation of this crime is the main element of suspense in the book, as the events leading up to it are sparingly and exactly doled out. These also help to partially explain why he became the distasteful and misanthropic adult he describes himself as being. About halfway through, it becomes clear what the crime is, and why it causes his nightmares at the end of his life. The other element of suspense is derived from the "will he or won't he" question of whether he will reach out to and possibly reconcile with his son before dying. Peterson is not a likeable character and for much of the book it's hard to care about him or the decisions that have led to him living friendless and alone with a Cambodian housekeeper. His boyhood years in Reykjavik are idyllic enough, but his entire character is then formed out of a single betrayal in his late teens. Ultimately, one is hard-pressed to care too much about what happens to a man who has managed to inflict so much pain on those close to him over the course of his life. There is a twist ending which is reminiscent of someone like Roald Dahl, but it's not enough to save the book.