Memoir of a wasted life
Tom Hiney
ABSOLUTION by Olaf Olafsson Phoenix, £12.99, pp. 259 To recommend the debut novel of an Icelandic businessman sounds like the start of a second-rate Python gag. But Absolu- tion by Olaf Olafsson is a funny, sad and utterly enjoyable little novel, translated by the author himself, who is a Sony executive in New York. The book is, not surprisingly, already a big hit in Reykjavik.
The narrator, Peter Peterson, is clearly of a not dissimilar background to that of the author. His story flips back and forward from contemporary Manhattan, Twenties Iceland, Thirties. Copenhagen to the per- manent scars of an unrequited love and the memory of an unconfessed crime. Peterson lives in New York with his nubile Cambodi- an mistress, having been through two mar- riages, several businesses and a considerable fortune since his arrival in the city in 1941. His children disappoint him, Icelandic ex-pats bore him and he lives with the uncomforting suspicion (eventual- ly proved correct) that his one and only love, whom he left behind in Copenhagen, is now a fat and vacuous woman.
Writing from the meticulous comforts of his Upper East Side apartment, Peterson out-Bellows Saul Bellow as he muses with mischievous cynicism on the Fate of Man. He wishes for nothing more than for the continued strength to go on enjoying his vast cellar of Bordeaux and the delights of his oriental 'secretary'. As to the knowledge of his crime, he feels no ethical compulsion to regret the hot-headed murder of a young student in Copenhagen, but he resents the fact that he has allowed this crime to haunt his life, He knows that it drove him away from Iceland, turned him into a cruel businessman (have Sony read this book?) and a disloyal husband. It annoys him that a moment's adolescent indiscretion has so destabilised his appreci- ation of bourgeois adulthood.
The fun in reading Absolution hangs in the fast-paced ambivalence of the narrator, as he works his mind back over a chequered life. On the one hand, Peterson could not care less about anything. He neglects to turn up to his wife's funeral, expressing only his surprise that she has died before him; he had always had a men-
tal picture of her feigning tears at his own funeral. He is unsentimental, libidinal, utterly amoral and highly amusing. Yet there is also Peterson the vulnerable memoirs writer, who now wishes he had taken time to return to Iceland before his father's death; who feels he collaborated with the Nazi cause by turning down the chance to join the Danish resistance in favour of the riches of the New World; who knows that his children deserve more from him; who wonders about the boy he killed one night in the chaos of occupied Denmark.
These two sides of Peterson, the irrever- ent and the remorseful, slug it out through the course of the book. They are united only in Peterson's knowledge that, either way, he is no more than a miserable old man on the point of death. He is a man who has spent his life working and drinking hard enough not to think too much, but who has now been forced by senile inertia to look back on a pitiful biography. Not with the selectivity of nostalgia, but with 'a revelation of triviality'.
Above all, Peterson always has enough self-loathing to prevent himself slipping into mawkishness; Absolution is the frank, pained and hilarious record of a long life wasted.
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