4 ideas
Herbjörg María Björnsson, granddaughter of Sveinn Björnsson, Iceland's first president, is separated from her family as a child during the Second World War, while her father fights on the Nazi side. She survives alone across occupied and collapsing Germany, then follows her father to postwar Argentina. At eighty she lies dying in a rented Reykjavík garage with a laptop and a wartime hand grenade, having pre-booked her own cremation.
A nation that sees itself as peripheral and untouched by history can still have its elite entangled in atrocity. The book puts the president's family on the Nazi side of the war. It uses that to show how official national memory keeps the founding story clean by leaving out inconvenient kin.
Herbjörg schedules her own cremation at the thousand-degree oven and keeps a live grenade within reach. The dying body stops being something that happens to her and becomes an event she stages. The deadline also forces her to finish her life story before it arrives.
The book argues that people who lived through extreme violence often tell it through irony, obscenity and black comedy rather than solemn testimony. This is not because they feel the pain less. Mockery keeps unbearable memories speakable and stops them from swallowing the teller.