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Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. . . . BURIAL RITES evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place --… (altro)
BookshelfMonstrosity: The Polished Hoe portrays conditions in 20th-century Jamaica, while Burial Rites focuses on 19th-century Iceland, but these exquisitely detailed literary historical novels explore the lives of unusually intelligent women whose treatment by their masters has resulted in terrible crimes.… (altro)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Although Slammerkin is more suspenseful and richly detailed than the spare, reflective Burial Rites, both character-driven historical novels draw upon true stories of young women accused of murder. Emphasis on the protagonists' impoverished backgrounds allows for exploration of social issues.… (altro)
Non so, indubbiamente è scritto benissimo ed è anche interessante conoscere un po' la vita in Islanda nel 1800. D'altra parte è un libro cupo, la storia è segnata fin dall'inizio. La protagonista fa pena ma non mi ha portato ad empatizzare molto con la sua condizione. ( )
The novel isn't seamless—Ms. Kent disrupts its rhythms by awkwardly switching between an omniscient narrator and Agnes's first-person point of view. But it convincingly animates Agnes, who feels "knifed to the hilt with fate," showing her headstrong humanity and heart-wrenching thirst for life. At one point she recalls seeing two icebergs grinding together off the northern shore, the friction from their exposed boulders causing gathered driftwood to go up in flames. At her best, Ms. Kent achieves a similar eerie force in this story of passion in a frozen place.
There are other stylistic problems. Some dialogue that’s meant to seem elevated and of its time simply sounds unidiomatic: “I was worried of as much”; “The only recourse to her absolution would be through prayer.” There’s prefab phrasing — “my heart throbbed,” “she said breathlessly,” “overcome with relief” — and descriptive clichés, including a sky that’s “bright, bright blue, so bright you could weep.”
A remarkable story of the last case of capital punishment recorded in Iceland, Burial Rites is the extraordinary debut novel by Australian author Hannah Kent.
Amidst an agrarian existence of bleak deprivation, the stories, whether Biblical or other, that characters tell themselves in Burial Rites are the meat they feed off; small but compelling pleasures they allow themselves.
Hannah Kent has a fine turn of phrase. It is this, more than anything, that makes Agnes Magnusdottir, the central figure in her debut novel, both elusive and captivating.
A major two-book deal with Pan Macmillan and some heavyweight PR means that most will read about Kent’s work before they read the novel itself, a pressure this competent debut could do without. Having started life as a verse novel, Burial Rites still bulges at its seams, descriptive lyricism occasionally spilling over into excess.
IT all started because she was a girl who had never seen snow. That lack, commonplace enough in an Australian childhood, took Hannah Kent to a desolate hillside in Iceland where, more than 170 years earlier, one woman's life came to a brutal end.
The author, who has researched with utmost scrupulousness this spare, disquieting first novel about the last execution to occur in Iceland, describes it as a “dark love letter” to the country. Dark it certainly is, with a sombre foreboding so thick it is almost tangible. ...Kent portrays the harsh existence of these rural, highly literate people with exactitude; and even the bleakness of Agnes’s end, its gut-churning fear, holds an exhilaration that borders on the sublime.
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I was worst to the one I loved best.
Laxdæla Saga
Dedica
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For my parents
Incipit
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They said I must die.
Citazioni
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His hair is as red as before, as red as the midnight sun. It looks as though his locks have soaked up the light as a skein of wool suffers the dye.
"Do you know the right name for a flock of ravens?" Tóti shook his head. "A conspiracy, Reverend. A conspiracy."
A tight fear, like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must, inevitably, be dragged from the depths.
Yes, I am quite alone, and a tremble of exhilaration passes along my skin, like the tremor on the surface of a pot of water about to boil.
At Hvammur, during the trial, they plucked at my words like birds. Dreadful birds, dressing in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush.
After the trial, the priest from Tjörn told me that I would burn if I did not cast my mind back over the sin of my life and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.
I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them. As the scythes run sharp fingers through the stalks, the cut grass makes a gasping sound.
"That's what happened to my mother, Reverend," Agnes continued. "Who was she really? Probably not as people say she was, but she made mistakes and others made up their minds about her. People around here don't let you forget your misdeeds. They think them the only things worth writing down."
If he wants to learn of my family he'll have a hard time of it. Two fathers and a mother who seem as blurry to me as strangers departing through a snowstorm.
It's a silent memory, and one, like the others, I can't quite trust. Memories shift like loose snow in a wind, or are a chorale of ghosts all talking over one another. There is only ever a sense that what is real to me is not real to others, and to share a memory with someone is to risk sullying my belief in what has truly happened.
Did my mother look down at her baby daughter and think: "One day I will leave you?" Did she look at my scrunched face, hoping I would die, or did she silently urge me to stick to life like a burr? Perhaps she looked out to the valley, into the mist and stillness, and wondered what she could give me. A lie for a father. A head of dark hair. A hayrack to sleep in. A kiss. A stone, so that I might learn to understand the birds and never be lonely.
"In here," she said, "I can turn to that day as though it were a page in a book. It's written so deeply upon my mind I can almost taste the ink."
two women were spreading clothes out to dry in what slender sun the day afforded.
In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We'd place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces.
Then there was the first touch of skin on skin, and that was the gunshot, the freefall.
I craved his weight, then.
I arched my neck until my face was wet with the drifting damp.
He groaned and the sound lingered in the air like a cloud of ash over a volcano.
I felt too much to see it for what it was.
When everything froze we met in the storeroom, with a constellation of drying meat above our heads.
I remember feeling too full with blood.
For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.
All those weeks, all those nights, I was rotted through with hunger.
All that willpower to contain that which I wanted to cry into the wind, and scratch into the dirt, and burn into the grass.
He would haul me out of the valley, out of the husk of my miserable, loveless life, and everything would be new.
I could even see the west fjords over the gray swell of water. Like a shadow of themselves.
I learnt later that he was as changeable as the ocean, and God help you if you saw his expression shift and darken.
But the hours crept past like the guilty and midnight came and went, and still he did not come inside.
Only the wind speaks and it will not talk sense, it screams like the widow of the world and will not wait for a reply.
Ultime parole
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The sudden sound of the first axe fall echoed throughout the valley.
While the deed took place, and there until it was finished, everything was appropriately quiet and well-ordered, and it was concluded by a short address by Reverend Magnus Arnason to those that were there.
Actum ut supra. B. Bléndal, R. Olsen, A. Arnason From the Magistrate's Book of Hunavatn District, 1830
Set against Iceland's stark landscape, Hannah Kent brings to vivid life the story of Agnes, who, charged with the brutal murder of her former master, is sent to an isolated farm to await execution. Horrified at the prospect of housing a convicted murderer, the family at first avoids Agnes. Only Tóti, a priest Agnes has mysteriously chosen to be her spiritual guardian, seeks to understand her. But as Agnes's death looms, the farmer's wife and their daughters learn there is another side to the sensational story they've heard. . . . BURIAL RITES evokes a dramatic existence in a distant time and place --
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