Herra is 80 years old and has already made an appointment with the crematorium, although as the pleasant young man on the phone points out, she has to be dead before they push her into the 1000° oven. In the meantime she lives alone in a garage along with a laptop and a hand grenade. On the laptop she has set up several accounts at facebook, using a photo of Linda Pétursdóttir (Miss World 1988 as any fule kno), and gingering up the hopes of men from Harare to Hamilton. The hand grenade is a relic from WW2. To deflect the legitimate concern of her carer she claims it is a novelty perfume flask (Feu de Cologne).

It all starts off well, you see. Droll, in a quirky, bizarre way. What German calls skurril, which is a false friend to the English word scurrilous. Not vulgar or offensive, merely freakish, funky, flaky. Fun.

Like many elderly people, Herra lives more in the past than the present, and like many an elderly raconteur, the memories pour in willy-nilly. The most intense experiences of her life are the ones that elbow their way to the front of the unruly crowd; those of the war years, when she was a girl in Denmark and Germany. As one might expect, the fun fizzles out fast to be replaced by horror.

So the concept is realistic. Yes, 80 year olds do ramble. I know, I spend several hours a week with my 89 year old father-in-law. He's a poppet with a great sense of humour, but he does go off at a tangent sometimes. One of his legendary phrases is "Den kennst du doch", which has entered family lore: You must know him, surely, thingie, whatshisname, he lives down the street from the woman who used to do for Annemarie's sister's hairdresser, you know. The best non-committal response is to nod and shrug at the same time. So I know the form. But it is far from engrossing. Sometimes, dare I say it, a little frustrating.

Jumbled up and comical is fine, but of the 119 short chapters, over half, around 60 or so take place in the years between 1939 and 45. Not much to laugh at there, no matter how twisted a sense of humour you might have. Not much in the way of suspense. Not much incentive to pick up the book once it was put down.

Interestingly enough (I hope), since Iceland has a population of around 320,000, Hallgrímur Helgason has more readers in Germany than in his home country. As far as national stereotyping is concerned, he's very considerate of his German readers. I suppose it's not a good idea to alienate your main audience. But he is definitely writing about Iceland, and is scathing of the change of values that led to the 2008 crash. And I managed to finish this on the day the centre-right parties who are widely held responsible for that particular debacle have been returned to power. How topical is that.

What a heroine! Enjoyed the main character, although slow paced in some places. Reminds me of 'the 100 year old man...'

https://www.librarything.com/work/11847871

Go Cantankerous and Hacking Your In-Laws Emails Into That Goodnight

Herra, now an old woman in her eighties, lives crippled with arthritis in a garage, and tells us the story of her life – with no holds barred, and no triumph, tragedy or indignity left unexamined. And Herra has much to examine. She briefly knew (and snogged) John Lennon, she survived the second World War (just), she has had children (who now very rarely visit her, which she doesn’t really mind because there have been betrayals on both sides), and her company is the Internet (which she uses to stalk and hack her in-laws, among other, less reputable, things).

She is a crotchety, foul-mouthed old woman, though perhaps this is unfair as her foulness is really just an amused and experienced distance from life. She says of her nurse-cum-help ‘Poor Loa says she drinks beer only on those few occasions when she bares her beaver.’

It’s a completely lovable book, winding and rambling in parts (like the favourite old great aunt you wish you had, and whom you know you would adore), and at times Herra is utterly repulsive, annoying and outrageously offensive (again like that fictive old great aunt).

Herra looks forward to enjoying her end with the same frankly amused relish with which she has enjoyed her whole life. When she begins to plan her own cremation (which she wants to take place mid-December because she can’t abide the thought of one more bloody Christmas), the ‘dim-witted’ girl who takes the unusual booking is bemused but extraordinarily helpful, under the circumstances.

‘I don’t want to be half-cooked. A thousand degrees, you say?’
‘Yes, yes, don’t worry, we can heat it up well in advance before…’
‘Yes, and I go in headfirst, right?’

The Woman at 1000 Degrees is an account of the highlights and lowlights of the twentieth century viewed through the lens of the cantankerous, amoral and smartly louche Herra, who looks on the chaos of life’s mistakes, joys and evils with exasperated tolerance and amusement, and her relationships as fleeting joys to be relished in the moment then let go. She dismisses Nazism as one long birthday party for an attention-seeking Hitler, who, she says, was obviously in want of love.

The terrible, beautiful heart of the novel lies in the journey of Herra’s early life as a young girl surviving alone in the midst of the Second World War. These parts of the book, surrounded by artefacts of the stories of her later years and the unselfconscious, unselfpitying depth of experience with which the character imbues them, are a long, slow gaze into the depths of humanity.

The novel is often a little slow and rambling, drifting from one of Herra’s tales to the next, jumping from country to country as she wends her way through the world, but all of her tales, in the end, come together in a fantastically shattering crescendo, like an orchestra with perfect timing, perfect skills, perfect pitch. Helgason has captured perfectly this character (based loosely on a woman he spoke to accidentally and incidentally in 2006), and she is not only unique, but is also almost a grand collective voice, speaking – and laughing – for us all.

Herra’s is an ancient voice, the voice of a pragmatic (and often, realistically, reluctant) mother: ‘On the other hand, there’s no guarantee that they will even attend their mother’s funeral. They’re busy men’; the voice of the party girl who snogged John Lennon in 1960, and the voice for all of us who, when the time comes, which will hopefully be later rather than sooner, do not wish to go gentle into that goodnight.

An octogenarian Icelander ruminates on her life from the confines of a hospital bed in someone’s garage.

I struggled with this one. Chapters 19 & 20 have some of the most beautiful language I’ve read in a long time. At other times Herra’s memoirs are slow going and uninspiring. At 300 & some pages it should have been an easygoing read but it felt like I was wading in this woman’s life for weeks and weeks, living the War in real time, especially at the end.

Very similar to the 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared. Only without the pace & drive.. The story meanders mostly through the second World War and Herrbjorg's struggles through Germany and Poland as an Icelander and a teenage girl.

Far from the dry/dark humour I was expecting from the blurb, this is a harrowing tale of a war survivor's life, and the struggles she faced even after the war was over

Read if you enjoy historical fiction, particularly from the second World War.
Read if you enjoyed Winter Garden by Kristin Hannah

Trying too hard to be funny and ending up by just being irritating. I couldn't get very far with this novel. Not for me I'm afraid.

I started this book laughing out loud and full of optimism given the blurb and my preferences for Scandinavian literature. But a third of the way through I just lost all interest and abandoned it.

Unfortunately, I couldn't finish this book because I was so bored! I tried and read the first 50 pages but couldn't read anymore. The style of the author is so plain and so cold it doesn't let you "be" in the story.