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Overview
In his spellbinding first novel, acclaimed Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson takes us inside the mind of a man haunted by the crime he willed half a century earlier.Expatriate businessman Peter Peterson left behind the trappings of a seemingly charmed life: a vast fortune, two children, and a stately Park Avenue address. But he also left behind another legacy: a secret from long ago that shadowed his accomplishments and estranged him from his loved ones—a crime of passion, committed in the throes of unrequited love, that became a lifetime’s burden. Yet when Peter is forced to confront the consequences of his actions, an unexpected turn of events shakes the very foundation of his past. Spanning a boyhood in Iceland to the Nazi occupation of Denmark to modern-day Manhattan, Absolution calls up Dostoevsky and Ibsen as it masterfully plumbs the darkest corners of a sinister mind and a wounded heart.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
A popular writer in Iceland, Olafsson makes his English language debut in this sensitive, resonant, if imperfect, study of guilt, jealousy and betrayal. Peter Peterson, an Icelandic emigre and wealthy retired New York businessman, obsesses over a crime of passion he committed half a century before in Nazi-occupied Denmark. Spurned by a young Icelandic woman, he falsely accused her boyfriend of betraying the resistance movement to the Nazis. Now the aged Peterson is a cynical, fulminating recluse, his only companion a refugee Cambodian housemaid whom he clumsily attempts to seduce. Through flashbacks and reminiscences, we learn of his two failed marriages, his refusal to visit his ex-wife on her deathbed, his obsession with money and cruel contempt for his devoted son Helgi. Originally published in Iceland in 1991, this novel suffers from a protagonist who is so dislikable that one tends to lose interest in his melancholy, evasive monologue. Olafsson, president of Sony Electronic Publishing in New York, lamely frames the main narrative with commentary by a compatriot who is asked to translate the manuscript on Peterson's death and ends up identifying with him. A surprise ending puts Peterson's guilty self-recrimination in an ironic light. (Mar.)KLIATT
In a manuscript discovered after his death, an old man remembers a time in his youth when he committed a crime against another man who he felt stole his girlfriend and made him look like a fool. The manuscript was written in Icelandic and the translator becomes obsessed with finding out what happened during the last few months of the old man's life. He discovers the shocking truth about the crime that haunted the old man throughout his life. The story captures the pre-WW II setting of Iceland and occupied Denmark and dramatically portrays the soul of a young man whose lack of self-confidence turns into a bitterness that prevents him from ever finding happiness. The author draws a chilling picture of a man whose emotional life never warms to normal human temperature and whose feelings remain frozen in the past. KLIATT Codes: SA-Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 1994, Random House, Anchor, 259p., Ages 15 to adult.— Nola Theiss