Hallgrimur Helgason’s novel Woman at 1,000 Degrees centers on Herra, an 80-year-old Icelandic woman waiting to die in a garage with an old hand grenade and a laptop ... This is, in part, a comic novel in the vein of Helgason’s global bestseller 101 Reykjavik. But Woman at 1,000 Degrees contains a variety of tones as Herra moves back and forth through the decades of her life, with an emphasis on World War II ... The life she leads is tragic, and in the end, readers will understand why Herra clutches her grenade so close ... She is the most unreliable of unreliable narrators, but her perspective might be just what we need in these uncertain times: She survives and shares her story on her terms. And what a story it is, one worth reading to further understand the complexity of World War II — and to enjoy the quick wit of a woman you won’t forget.

Old Hera Bjornsson is dying, and she can’t wait. She’s made herself an appointment at the crematorium for the 14th, and she doesn’t want to miss it. She’s looking forward to being, as the book’s title suggests, Woman at 1,000 Degrees ...we learn from what she tells us she’s done, and how she tells us, that this is a woman who refuses to be redacted or reduced to the role of daughter, wife, mother, victim, whore, or criminal ...This is a profoundly, triumphantly feminist book, a fact that, depending on your view of such things, may or may not be undercut by the fact that it’s written by a man ...Helgason’s story could be seen as a riff on the Wife of Bath’s Tale, without the stuff about King Arthur, and if she hadn’t been so concerned with giving her story a moral. Helgason can write beautifully, like his Icelandic contemporary, Sjon, and he can be perfectly dark and crass, like his other mononymic contemporary, the cartoonist Dagsson. But unlike either, he can do both at once, often on the same page.

With this request, the reader is launched into Herra's jarring first-person narration, bordering on stream-of-consciousness, that carries us [in a] zig-zag fashion... On her journey, she encounters one atrocity after another, and recounts each with a mixture of bravery, bravado, horror, and resignation. At first, Herra's chilling, bawdy narration is off-putting. But after witnessing her descriptions of cruelty, rape, and the smell of burning bodies at Treblinka, the reader understands full well how the monstrosity of war can whittle away human decency when sufferers relive...scenes through Herra's eyes, skillfully composed by author Helgason and adeptly translated by Brian FitzGibbon, expose the boundaries of descriptive language with arresting similes ... Woman at 1,000 Degrees is not for the faint-hearted. Rather than distancing itself as a remote historical account, Herra's point of view carries the reader atop her back, it seems, experiencing her degradation in excruciating detail ...a bold work of fiction that gnaws at the silence blanketing the blackest holes of humanity to lay bare the author's dark vision of truth.

Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/576a1990-0b63-11e8-8eb7-42f857ea9f09 The book is neither entirely a memoir nor fully a novel, and flounders between both forms. Herra’s raunchy, raspy voice sits uneasily with her conscience — terrible things have happened to her, but she has also committed terrible acts — and too much of the novel is bogged down in back-story about her parents or various lovers ... Please use the sharing tools found via the email icon at the top of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour. https://www.ft.com/content/576a1990-0b63-11e8-8eb7-42f857ea9f09 At shorter length, and with a less scattered narrative framework, The Woman At 1,000 Degrees could have been more satisfying. If you’re open to novels that are imperfect but disturbing, it is still worthwhile getting to know Herra and her hand-grenade life, and to explore Helgason’s growing oeuvre of rich and highly unusual writings.

Her account of three years fending for herself in war-ravaged Europe is so brutally gripping that it’s a wrench to be yanked into the 1970s and the saga of Herra’s marriage to the drunken, abusive Baering. The novel never really recovers after this. It lurches between the '80s and a postwar sojourn in Argentina that seems to belong in another book before returning with diminished impact to the denouement of Herra’s wartime ordeal and her final present-day epiphany. Helgason’s fragmented chronology, so effective at first, proves to lack an overarching architecture that would unify its vivid pieces ... Brilliantly written with flashing insights, but an incoherent structure muffles its power.

Helgason’s sad and funny novel begins in 2009, as 80-year-old Herra Björnsson lies dying in a Reykavík garage, still in possession of a live hand grenade from World War II ... Her life encompasses four husbands, countless lovers, and a flirtation with John Lennon. In her unsentimental, unsparing narrative, she offers insights into Icelandic culture and character, including a riff on reticence and a brief summary of Iceland’s financial meltdown. Like the Icelandic landscape, she can be both appealing and treacherous.