I'm well on my way to being a cranky old gal in a garage, so I loved the premise of this book - All I need is a hand grenade and a computer...I'm a new lover of Icelandic fiction, so this book called to me for that reason as well. Icelandic writers seem to have an excellent sense of atmosphere, and this book places you in the garage, too. And all over crumbling Europe.

What I wasn't expecting was a heartbreaking story of a young girl surviving alone through WW2, struggling for food and safety, being sent or hiking all over Europe. The book switches between the current time and the past and the woman's confusion sometimes muddles things, but I found compelling this tale of an 'ordinary person' (how I hate that phrase) whose life was destroyed. Spent a day immersed in reading it.
In the reading, I learned about Iceland's declaring of independence, the awkward choices before that as a Dutch protectorate (pro-German) occupied by the British. Civil wars are always the most hellish, and this book sheds light on the fallout.

The writing is clear, funny, revealing, and, in the end, saddening. We will keep fighting wars, silly humans that we are. I hope that no one will ever again have to hand a live grenade to a child as their only sort of protection.
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3.25 stars

80-year old Herra lives in Iceland in a garage by herself with her laptop, and she is waiting to die. She was told 18 years earlier that she had 3 months to live due to cancer… and here she still is. She does expect it will finally happen soon. She is thinking back on her life with a focus on when she was about 10-15 years old or so during WWII. When her father joined the German army to fight for Hitler, she and the rest of her family left for Denmark. The book goes back and forth in time.

There were a few amusing parts, I thought, including Herra calling the local crematorium to make an appointment for her own cremation! Initially I found her current day situation more interesting, but as things progressed during the war, I liked those parts better. She wasn’t a very likable woman, though that wasn’t necessarily the case when she was younger. Although she also wasn’t treated very well by her three sons nor their wives. Overall, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to rate it 3 stars (ok) or 3.5 (good), so going with the in-between. ( )

Het orgineel van mijn review kan je vinden op mijn blog:
http://www.linda-linea-recta.nl/een-vrouw-op-1000-door-hallgrimur-helgason-een-b...

Wat een verhaal! Een reis door (haar) honderjarige geschiedenis. Raadselachtig, aangrijpend, verslavend en af en toe komisch. Een contact-arme eenzame kettingrokende vrouw die de na haar ervaringen in de 2e WO en de dood van haar dochtertje, geen liefde meer te geven heeft. Haar mannen geeft ze de bons door een taxi te bellen!

Haar geschiedenis leid ons van het vooroorlogse IJsland naar Duitsland en het bezette Denemarken ten tijden van de 2e WO en vervolgens na het naoorlogse Argentinië en weer terug naar IJsland. Het verhaal is pakkend geschreven met oog voor details (soms wel heel veel details en neigt dan naar langdradig) Maar het verhaal blijft pakken.

Arm kind, als elf jarige alleen in Duitsland ten tijden van de 2e WO! Van haar elfde tot haar zestiende zwerft ze alleen in het door oorlog geteisterde Europa rond. Zwaar getraumatiseerd, mishandeld en verkracht komt ze hieruit. Natuurlijk was er toen nog geen War Child!


In een oorlog ben je altijd alleen en ik geloof eerlijk gezegd dat die eenzaamheid mijn leven heeft gevormd; ik word altijd een beetje misselijk bij de gedachte dat men ernaar streeft na zijn leven weer met dezelfde mensen samen te wonen.


Ze was overal op de verkeerde plek. Voor Ase was ik te Deens. Op school was ik te Duits. Maar voor iedereen was ik te IJslands. Ik was altijd verkeerd. Zo is het mijn hele leven geweest. Na de oorlog in Argentinië dachten ze dat ik Duits was en keken ze me met scheve ogen aan. In Duitsland kwamen ze erachter dat ik in Argentinië had gewoond en keken ze me met scheve ogen aan. Thuis was ik een nazi, in Amerika een communist en in de Sovjet-Unie werd ik beschuldigd van z8kapitalistisch gedrag*. In IJsland was ik te bereisd, voor mijn reizen te IJslands. Op de Bessaplek was ik niet chic genoeg terwijl ze me in Bolungerbaai voor *primadonna* uitscholden. Voor vrouwen dronk ik als een kerel, voor kerels als een del. In de liefde was ik te hongerig en in het huwelijk had ik geen trek. Ik paste verdomme nooit ergens in en was voortdurend opzoek naar een nieuw feestje. Ik was een eeuwige zwerfster. Zo begon mijn vlucht, mijn levenslange, aanhoudende vlucht. In september 1940 op de lagere school in de Zilverstraat.


Ik heb beter verdiend. Verdomme! Ik heb zoveel beter verdiend. Ik dacht dat ik ten minste in mijn eigen bed zou mogen sterven, zelfs in aanwezigheid van degenen die *mijn naaste familie* werden genoemd


De geschiedenis van de mensheid is niets anders dan een ratelslanglange aaneenschakeling van krankzinnige gebeurtenissen, die geen barst met het leven te doen hebben, maar slechts een vorm van buitensporige mannenwaanzin zijn, die vrouwen van allen tijden eindeloos over zich heen moesten laten gaan.

Persoonlijk vond ik de hoofdpersoon niet aardig, maar naarmate het boek vordert begrijp ik volkomen hoe ze zo is geworden. Heel cynisch met een flinke doses zelfspot, zichzelf niet (meer) bloot kunnen geven.
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The acknowledgements credit inspiration to a woman the author spoke to when campaigning for his then partner. It manages to bring in everything from the Icelandic crash to Nazi fellow travellers, in one increasingly incredible fictional autobiography, narrated by an elderly cyber criminal whose nicotine filled lungs are giving up on her.
"After spending half my life abroad, I yearned for my country in all its crassness. All its women’s-club coffee, cake mania, cola binges and cold sauce orgies. All its wind and rain and bitter, grumpy men. All its myopic culture and Worst German architecture with its endless parking fields and petrol temples. It was actually so strange that in the beauty of Paris, which never meets you without her makeup, it was the rudeness of Reykjavík I missed the most, the ugliness and its rough weather. I couldn’t stand all those flowery balconies anymore, baroque palaces and quaint, arty squares, not to mention the frigging fountains. This lava longing must have had something to do with the ugliness of our land, because Iceland obviously isn’t all beautiful. Many parts of the highlands and around Snæfellsjökull are very ugly, for example, not to mention the Reykjanes Peninsula and Mount Hellisheidi, that uncooked gruel of gales and lava.
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Herra is eighty years old, riddled with cancer, and ready to die. So ready she calls up the crematorium and makes an appointment, but first, she will take some time to review her life–an alarmingly eventful and unlikely life.

If Hallgrïmur Helgason had not based Woman at 1000 Degrees on the life and memoirs of Brynhildur Georgia Bjornsson, the granddaughter of Iceland’s first president. Helgason serendipitously called her while phone canvassing for his wife’s campaign, it would be easy to think Herra was too incredible, but truth can be stranger than fiction.

With sardonic humor and frank honesty, Herra assesses her life and her many loves. She’s more or less alone–living in a garage, neglected by her children which she thinks is fair since she often neglected them. She recalls the many men in her life, her travels, and her travails. At first, it seems like it will be a sarcastic recollection by an unrepentant and self-indulgent femme fatal, but she’s just warming up before getting to the hard stuff.

And the hard stuff is hard. Her father is seduced by the strong-man appeal of Hitler and enlists in the SS even though he’s Icelandic. The family is separated, her mother going to work as a housekeeper, her father in the army, and Herra sent to an island away from the war. However, when a planned family reunion in Berlin is disrupted, she is stranded, alone, a child who must figure out how to survive during World War II Germany. Her story is harrowing, a remarkable example of survival against all odds.

I enjoyed Woman at 1000 Degrees very much, though it took some doing to get into the story. I nearly quit about fifteen percent of the way through, thinking I didn’t much like Herra and who cares about all the men she slept with, but that’s just because she’s gearing herself up for the tough stuff. She’s not exactly a nice person, she catfishes on the internet, she talks about neglecting her children for men and travel and it’s only when you get to know her story that it begins to make sense.

I received an e-galley of Woman at 1000 Degrees from the publisher through NetGalley.

Woman at 1000 Degrees at Algonquin Books, Workman Publishing
Hallgrímur Helgason author site

https://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/9781616206239/ ( )