Absolution: A Novel - Hardcover

Olafsson, Olaf

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679428917 ISBN 13: 9780679428916

Publisher: Pantheon Books, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

"Brilliant . . . a tour de force." -"The New York Times Book Review
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"Powerfully accomplished. . . . Absolution""sets long reverberations tolling in the reader's mind." -"The New York Review of Books"
"A clever, unexpectedly enjoyable novel of crime and punishment." -"The New York Times"
"A fascinating, wintry tale of a frozen heart." -"The Wall Street Journal
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"A literary triumph. . . . The book works extremely well both as a psychological thriller and as a character study." -"The European"
"A solemn, intellectually challenging work." -"Chicago Tribune"
"The first book in English by this top-notch Nordic novelist, who may become that true rarity, an Icelandic Nobel Prize winner." -"Forbes Magazine"
"Surprisingly effective. . . . This story of crime and punishment is an impressive novel. . . . A modest, but not unworthy, offspring of Dostoevsky's towering predecessor." -" The Economist"
"Compulsive reading, and the spare, dry language concentrates the suspense. . . . As cold and lucid as a quartz crystal." -"Independent on Sunday"
"Spellbinding. . . . Formidably written." -"Entertainment Weekly"
"The novel whose aftertaste has lingered longest this year is Absolution." ." . . Its deep humanity and elegiac tone made it oddly exhilarating. . . . A superlative example of the genre, which reverberates in the reader's mind because of the craftsmanship and integrity which Olafsson has brought to the story." -"Sunday Telegraph"
"[A] sophisticated novel . . . written in clear, sparse prose." -"The Times "(London)
"Olafsson's debut as a writer in English has more than curiosity value: this is a fine novel." -"Time Out"
"Icelander Olafsson's style has the linear austerity and emotionally supercharged restraint that seems a Nordic hallmark. . . . The honesty of this first-person account of a traumatised conscience holds the attention. The slow-burning fuse of the narrator's guilt . . . s

Book Description

A brilliant and intriguing anatomy of revenge and evil, reminiscent of Ian McEwan's BLACK DOGS.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679428917
• ISBN 13: 9780679428916
• Binding: Hardcover