2023-12-16 14:46:22
It is freezing cold during our walk in Berlin’s Tiergarten. But what does that mean for a writer from Iceland? In Hallgrímur Helgason’s Novel “60 Kilo Sonnenschein” A whole world is created on a completely white area in the north of Iceland, where everything was buried after an avalanche disaster at the beginning of the 20th century: In the beginning there was snow. And in the sequel volume “60 Kilo Chin Hook” (published by Tropen in October like the previous volume), the world of the novel is again buried under ice, at least part of it, because the story of the former herring fishing Eldorado Segulfjörður is supposed to continue.
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Hallgrìmur Helgason is in Germany to present his new work on a short reading tour. In the evening he reads in the Icelandic embassy. That’s fitting, since Helgason has been a kind of ambassador for his country for more than two decades, a quirky diplomat who torpedoes all Icelandic clichés in the rest of the world with black humor. His novel “101 Reykjavík”, originally published in 1996 and successfully adapted into a film, made him famous and was the starting point for the cultural rediscovery of the country beyond the natural bliss of the glaciers.
The representative thing was not planned that way. As a young man, he first had to quickly get far away from his homeland, which was then – before the era of the Internet and low-cost airlines – deeply provincial and isolated in every respect. From 1985 to 1995, Helgason lived abroad, first in New York, where he attempted a career as a visual artist, and then in Paris. He came to professional writing more out of necessity. He didn’t sell enough as a painter, so the first thing he did was write reports from the emigrant’s perspective for newspapers back home.
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With the success of “101 Reykjavík,” literature suddenly became his main profession. Something else came up: “As a writer in Iceland you are treated like a kind of god. When you paint, people look down on you. This is a consequence of this great literary tradition. Writers are kings, fine art has only existed here for around a hundred years.”
Writer as king
He knows this so well because it is part of his family history. His grandmother’s sister, he says, was the first woman in Iceland to paint. In 1919 she went to the Academy in Copenhagen. After her return she had her first exhibition ever in Reykjavik. A great uncle was one of the country’s first composers.
But there is also literature in the family tree, at least something like this: “My father comes from a family in the east of the country, where it was customary to write down local chronicles and anecdotes, to write little funny stories and quatrains.” Being Icelandic is special For Helgason, having a relationship with books and literature is not just a cliché. The number of copies is increasing, there are more and more writers, the tradition is alive: “There must be something in our genes.”
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But the myth is also being worked on: every year 40 writers (in a country with almost 400,000 inhabitants) receive state funding; If you are translated and have good reviews, then it is almost certain that you will receive a salary every year. “I’ve been getting this for 15 years now, kind of like a state employee or a ministry official. My father was employed in the state highway administration all his life; It’s something like that: the state hires you to write novels.”
And in return, Helgason actually writes a kind of Time.news of modern Iceland in novel form. The second volume ends in 1918, when the secession from Denmark began with the Union Treaty (which was finally completed in 1944). In addition to a social, economic and mental history, “60 Kilo” is also a multi-volume development novel of its historical main character Gestur, to which the author has foisted his own experiences.
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At the same time, it is also a narrative exploration of the role of herring in world history. Because the figures’ fortunes and woes depend on the highly traded food fish. With the discovery of the shoals by Norwegian fishermen, the gold-rush boom period of the sleepy town begins; the absence of fish is followed by decline.
At the place of the first date
We return from the North Atlantic cold, so to speak, and we have coffee and ginger tea. Actually, Helgason can’t afford to spend days like this while traveling. While he is promoting the second volume of the “60 Kilo series”, the deadline for the third, which is scheduled to appear in Iceland next fall (in German then 2025), is rapidly approaching. He should then accompany his hero Gestur until the 30s. After “60 Kilos of Sunshine” and “60 Kilos of Uppercut,” the title hasn’t been decided yet; after the harsh “Upperture,” the publisher would like something friendlier and more marketable.
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Concrete locations are important for Helgason; he has to go there and be able to take a close look at the setting. The “60 Kilo” novels are set in Siglufjörður – slightly alienated from Segulfjörður in the novel, but every Icelander can see through that immediately, says Helgason. “I have a romantic relationship with the place. When I was 15, I took part in the Icelandic Ski Championships as a downhill skier; and there I had my first date after the wrap party. I fell in love with this place forever. About six years earlier the herring had disappeared; you could see that something had happened. All the buildings were still there, the people were gone. That impressed me a lot. In 2012 I was there again on a skiing holiday and in the local museum I saw two photos: the place in 1890 with three houses, and in 1930 the same spot was full of buildings and chimneys, a big city. It was already clear to me at the time that I would need three or four novels to tell this story.” With such an initial spark, the work starts in his head until it eventually becomes reality: “You start a book to write when it has become physically impossible not to.”
After three thick volumes, he now feels a bit tired. A fourth part is conceivable at some point, but for now other materials are emerging. It has been too long since he wrote a novel that takes place in the present: “The world has changed so much. I’ve never written a book that has smartphones in it.”
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The fact that life in the digital age is not completely different than it was a hundred years ago can be seen in the changing patchwork constellations in which “60 Kilo” novel hero Gestur lives. Helgason himself has four children from two different marriages. The youngest turns six this month and the eldest daughter turns forty in January. Helgason is already a grandfather. It’s funny, he says, to have a small child again at his age. When asked whether it makes him feel younger or even older, he laughs loudly: “I hope it keeps me young.” But it is strange to talk to the parents of classmates who could almost be his grandchildren. “I’m forever stuck in this ‘father of a young child’ category.”
Painting and literature
At home in Reykjavík, Helgason starts his day before everyone else, around six, he eats breakfast alone and lets the dog out the door before getting his little daughter ready for elementary school. Then he goes to work – “like an office worker” – in his nearby studio near the Harpa concert hall, either painting or writing, until four or five in the afternoon. The six-meter-high walls offered him “a lot of space to think.” He takes weekends off from work.
For him, painting and writing are still artistically synonymous, even though he was forced to neglect his pictures. “In a second life I would only paint. When I write, I miss it all the time. It’s a bit like living with two women at the same time. If you’re with one, you’re betraying the other.” During the Covid period he got to paint more than usual, so he now has enough works for a new exhibition. Are in spring his new paintings in Copenhagen to see; A major retrospective will follow in Reykjavík in October.
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He also returned home to Iceland a long time ago in terms of literature. He saw his early novels as a conscious revolt against tradition, origins, the obsession with genealogy, the eternal cult of the sagas, whose characters many Icelanders have a more intimate relationship with than with the Bible. “When I was younger I hated all of it. Now that I’m getting older, I realize how much I am part of this culture.” Now Helgason is taking up the national myths, spinning them out, rewriting them, melting them into a hundreds-of-page epic that pulls out all the stops and becomes… Lucky for the reader, he doesn’t have to choose between comedy and tragedy, entertainment and harsh naturalism.
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“I don’t believe in these categories like I used to in video rental: romance, comedy, drama, action.” He learned that from Shakespeare, says Helgason, and it doesn’t sound pretentious at all. He translated “Romeo and Juliet” and “Othello” into Icelandic; each took him four months. His favorite play is “Hamlet,” and translating it is a dream that will one day come true. At some point it will be physically impossible not to do it.
To person
After studying art, Hallgrímur Helgason, born in Reykjavík in 1959, initially worked as a visual artist. His debut novel was published in 1990, but it was “101 Reykjavík” that marked his breakthrough as a writer in the mid-90s (the German version was published in 2002). With black comedies like “The Dubious Pleasure of Being Dead” (2005) or “Ten Tips to Stop Murdering and Start Doing the Dishes” (2010), he finally became Iceland’s literary export hit in the noughties. He has been awarded the Icelandic Literature Prize for the best novel several times. The second volume of his historical novel cycle was published this fall “60 Kilo Chin Hooks” (translated by Karl-Ludwig Wetzig, Tropen Verlag, 672 pages, 26 euros).
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