Absolution

In his dazzling literary debut in the English language, Olafur Johann Olafsson - one of Iceland's preeminent and best-selling writers of fiction - gives us the putative memoirs of an Icelandic expatriate living in New York in the autumn of his life, a degenerate, self-styled captain of industry and aesthete who has endured two failed marriages and whose children are "a testimony to a mistake."
Peter Peterson is a man racked by nightmares of a crime of passion he may have committed half a century ago out of unrequited love, a crime that has shaped the rest of his life. His memoirs - a confession ranging from his placid bourgeois boyhood in Reykjavik, to his days as a student in Nazi-occupied Denmark, to his ferocious rise as an immigrant entrepreneur in New York - are refracted not only through his paranoia, manipulativeness, vanity, crazed cynicism, and wry humor, but also through the sensibility of a compulsive fellow countryman who has translated and edited Peterson's scribblings in the settling of Peterson's estate - and who might have made them very much his own.
Sly, highly intelligent, and lucid, Absolution is a brilliant anatomy of obsession, desire, and self-deception.

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.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The English-language debut of an Icelandic writer now living in New York: a novel that perceptively probes the depths of two ‚migr‚ Icelanders' self-deceptions. When a nameless young Icelander, working in New York, is asked by his boss to translate papers found in a locked vault of the recently deceased Peter Peterson, he acknowledges that ``sometimes...Peterson's words might just as easily have flowed from my own pen.'' Indeed, both men settled permanently in the US, both allude to unhappy love affairs, and both men have--or had- -obsessive tendencies. But it is the shared failures in love that shape the story: failures at the heart of both lives, confusing memory and permanently wounding psyches. In his part of the story, moving back and forth from the past to the present, Peter, now a wealthy old man estranged from his family and cared for by a young woman whom he dreams of seducing but is too frail to do so, recalls a seminal comment of his father's. The change that his father observed in him after his year in Denmark explains, Peter thinks, his subsequent unsavory reputation as a businessman and parent. He recalls his tranquil middle-class childhood in Iceland: how in high school he fell in love with a fellow student, whom he followed to Denmark, obsessively pursuing her even though she saw other men; and how the Nazi invasion of Denmark precipitated the events that changed him forever. When the girl turned him down, preferring Jon, the handsome Resistance leader, Peter committed what he thought was a terrible crime, and fled Denmark. But there is a tape, the translator learns, made a few months before Peter's death, that suggests how strong and pervasive ``deception, pure and simple'' may have been after all. Beautifully crafted, and, even though both the pace and the conceit pall a little, a welcome new voice. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Iceland comes a contemporary novel presented as the memoirs of an expatriate living in New York. Though wine connossieur Peter Peterson has achieved financial success, he looks back on his selfish, egotistical, and manipulative life with a combination of vanity, defensiveness, paranoia, and self-deception. As a student in Denmark, he responds brutally to the pangs of unrequited love; for the rest of his life, he is haunted by his crime of passion, despite a new life in the New World. Though Peterson claims he does not seek forgiveness, the revelations in this first-person narrative are those of a guilt-ridden man yearning for understanding and vindication. A best-selling author in Iceland, Olafsson deserves wide attention in this country as well. Recommended.
- Ann Irvine, Montgomery Cty. P.L., Ct .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.