The crazy old lady with a grenade and memories of war

Artist, radio host, writer

Hallgrímur Helgason is a figure at the intersection of literature and visual art. He is known as the author of the novels “101 Reykjavík” (1996), “Woman at 1,000 Degrees” (2011), and “Sixty Kilos of Sunlight” (2018), as well as an artist whose works have been exhibited in Iceland and abroad. His texts are regularly adapted for film and stage: two novels have been turned into films, and four have been adapted for theater. In addition to writing fiction, he has authored columns for Icelandic media and worked as a translator, connecting different forms of expression.

Helgason was born on February 18, 1959, in Reykjavík. His father was an engineer and headed the Icelandic Road Administration; his mother worked as a kindergarten teacher. He began his artistic path as a painter: he studied at the Icelandic Academy of Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich but was dissatisfied with both institutions and began writing on his own. Early on, Helgason consciously moved away from the conceptual and minimalist practices popular at the time, choosing romantic, colorful, and “beautiful” landscapes inspired by his native Iceland.

In the mid-1980s, Hallgrímur Helgason found himself in the United States: first in Boston, then in New York, where he lived from 1986 to 1989. There, he tried to make a living through painting, exhibited in galleries, but simultaneously began writing texts for the Icelandic press. These texts documented everyday life in the “Big Apple.” At the same time, Helgason recorded the program “Radio Manhattan," sending audio notes back home about the Hell's Kitchen area (literally translated as “Hell's Kitchen”). The success of these materials became a turning point: encouraged by the positive reception of his articles and radio broadcasts, Helgason felt the need to take a break from painting and try his hand at writing a novel.

His first novel, “Hella," was published in 1990. It was conceived as an objective text as possible. The author tried to avoid poetic descriptions and adjectives, and never entered the inner world of the characters. This method is linked to the influence of writer Gustave Flaubert and artist Marcel Duchamp. The novel did not bring great success, but it set a direction — a movement from the visual to the narrative, while maintaining an “external," almost cinematic gaze.

Between 1990 and 1995, Helgason lived in Paris and continued to work in two directions: as an artist and as a writer. It was here that he found his own literary voice. His second novel, “Everything is Going Just Fine," published in 1994, was a breakthrough. With this book, he found his true style, overflowing with words, ideas, and stories. Simultaneously, Helgason continued to exhibit in galleries, gradually developing a recognizable style — figures against an almost empty background.

In the latter half of the 1990s, Hallgrímur Helgason returned to prose and wrote the novel “101 Reykjavík," which cemented his fame. Subsequently, Helgason lived mainly in Reykjavík, published poetry, experimented with form, and created large-scale novels, including “The Author of Iceland” (2001), which caused a stir due to the protagonist's character, clearly referencing Icelandic writer Halldór Kiljan Laxness.

A garage deathbed

The novel “Woman at 1,000 Degrees” was published in 2011 in Reykjavík. Its concept is directly linked to a real encounter: Hallgrímur Helgason himself has said that he “stumbled upon this story while calling voters during a political campaign in 2006.” On the other end of the line was a woman who lived alone in a garage. This episode became the starting point for the text.

At the center of the narrative is Herra, an eighty-year-old woman dying in a garage on the outskirts of Reykjavík. She has a laptop and an old German hand grenade from World War II, and she is planning her own cremation. At the beginning of the narrative, Herra explains:

Someone once told me: “Grenades love stone floors.” Yeah, it would be cool: to disappear with a loud boom, and have my bits and pieces then covered with dust and rubble. But before I blow up, I'd like to remember my life.

The novel is structured as an alternation between present and past. The protagonist jumps through time: from 2009 to her childhood in Iceland, then to wartime Germany, post-war Europe, Argentina, and back. Her story is non-linear and fragmentary. This is a disjointed first-person narrative, almost on the verge of a stream of consciousness. The texture of the text is composed of episodes: orphanhood during the war, wanderings through devastated Germany, numerous sexual liaisons, returning home, and loneliness in old age.

Herra has a real-life prototype, and it's not just the woman living in a garage. The novel is based on the life of Brynhildur Georgía Björnsson, the granddaughter of Iceland's first president. Her father was one of the few Icelanders who fought on the side of the Nazis, and this fact determines the character's fate. Helgason noted the degree of fiction: “This book is fiction… half of what happens to her comes from my imagination.” However, the use of real names in the novel caused a scandal: relatives tried to prevent the publication and discussion of the book.

In Helgason's fictional version, Herra is a deliberately contradictory figure. She is simultaneously a victim and a provocateur: a cantankerous old woman with a wild sexual past. Her voice is aggressive and mocking; she is prone to sharp judgments and self-irony. The character is built on a combination of biographical trauma and personal freedom. War leaves her young, alone, and abandoned, yet, strangely, free. This duality is key to Herra's behavior in adulthood. In one episode, she says:

I was the star of the parties and outdrank all the men long before Ásta Sigurðardóttir shocked the whole country with her behavior. I became a practicing feminist long before the word itself appeared in the Icelandic press. I devoted many years to “free love” before the term was invented. And of course, I kissed Lennon long before Beatlemania finally reached our slow-witted, frozen land.

Iceland is portrayed in the book through the heroine's subjective, often scathing gaze. She destroys external notions of the “romantic island” and describes the country without reverence for national myths. The text also includes direct lines: “In Iceland, we have neither cavalry nor gentlemen. Although we don't have real ladies either.”

At the same time, the theme of silence becomes an important feature. The heroine speaks of the tyranny of silence that ruled Iceland in the 20th century. She calls her country the “Republic of Silence.” Society, she says, tends not to discuss traumatic experiences, especially those related to the war. Concurrently, the novel is rich with details of language and culture. For example, it highlights the scale of the Icelandic language:

On the website of the University of Iceland, I read that it has six hundred thousand words and more than five million word forms. That means the language is much larger than the people themselves.

The novel is constructed as a private story within the history of the century. Essentially, it is the story of the 20th century with a brief foray into the 21st. Key events — above all, World War II — are traced through Herra's biography. The wartime experience is described as a continuous trauma. The heroine says that during the war, a person is forced to live through the worst moment of their life about five times a day. The text shows scenes of destruction, camps, and violence. War gave nothing and brought nothing — nothing was gained. At the same time, Iceland is presented as a country that missed the war directly, not understanding its consequences. The contrast between the heroine's personal experience and the country's collective experience becomes one of the structural elements of the novel.

This text “is, in many ways, Herra's life story, supplemented by about eight decades of Northern European and Icelandic history," said Hallgrímur Helgason. Moreover, the narrative is deliberately unstable: non-linearity, an unreliable narrator, and a mixture of fact and fiction form a structure with very sharp, dense language. So dense that every line looks as if the heroine is tamping down gunpowder. Simultaneously, “Woman at 1,000 Degrees” functions as a chronicle: the consequences of war, migration, and social change pass through the private life.

Publisher: Gorodets
Translation from Icelandic: Olga Markelova
Number of pages: 544
Year: 2025
*Age rating: 18+*

Yekaterina Petrova is a literary columnist for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya and hosts the Telegram channel «Булочки с маком».