Review by New York Times Review
In 1828, an Icelandic servant named Agnes Magnusdottir was convicted of killing her employer and another man, then burning their bodies. Pending ratification of her death sentence in Denmark, which then controlled Iceland, she was interned for many months on an isolated farm. Hannah Kent's fictional take on this promising material was written, she explains in an author's note, "to supply a more ambiguous portrayal" of a woman who has commonly been seen as a "witch, stirring up murder." The historical family compelled to serve as Agnes's death-row custodians must have been as reluctant to take on the job, at least initially, as the characters Kent has based on them - District Officer Jon Jonsson; his ailing wife, Margret; and their two daughters. An equally hesitant young clergyman, also based on a real figure, soon enters the novel when he's dispatched to the farm to act as Agnes's spiritual guide. While the tensions and evolving relationships between Agnes and her host family are generally well realized, Kent's Reverend Toti remains a stereotype: meek, callow, indecisive and given to pious, predictable counsel. The author tries to build him into something more complex, but it's hard to tease fullness from what starts out flat. As the novel proceeds, Kent simply reverses Toti's initial generic traits - he becomes less meek, more decisive - but these changes are too schematic to generate a layered character. Toti does, however, learn to listen better, sensing that the condemned woman, after 34 years of itinerant poverty, needs a sympathetic ear, not sanctimonious prattle. And so, a little predictably, he becomes a medium through whom Agnes reveals her story. In addition to sections seen from the viewpoints of Toti and the others, Kent provides first-person monologues from Agnes, along with historical documents translated and adapted from the Icelandic originals. While these varied perspectives help elaborate the ambiguous portrait Kent intends, the most effective passages - both in adding nuance to Agnes's character and in spinning her story - are those told in Agnes's unmediated voice, at least once the narrative has picked up momentum. In one affecting passage, she recalls how her foster mother went into premature labor during a calamitous winter storm. These gripping pages demonstrate the way narrative urgency can discipline a writer's style and pre-empt self-indulgence, a flaw that's far too common in the book's earlier monologues. There Agnes operatically ponders ("I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps"; "I am run through and through with disaster; I am knifed to the hilt with fate"), poeticizing even her wounds, the bruises "blossoming like star clusters under the skin." It's hard to imagine a brutalized convict - even one who has supposedly composed verse - prettifying her affliction so self-consciously. There are other stylistic problems. Some dialogue that's meant to seem elevated and of its time simply sounds unidiomatic: "I was worried of as much"; "The only recourse to her absolution would be through prayer." There's prefab phrasing - "my heart throbbed," "she said breathlessly," "overcome with relief" - and descriptive clichés, including a sky that's "bright, bright blue, so bright you could weep." Other phrases are more inventive but no better, as when Agnes describes herself - with a metrical jauntiness deeply at odds with her meaning - as "beached in a peat bog of poverty." Inner states that might be implied by action or gesture are awkwardly described: Margret is "invigorated by a sudden curl of anger"; Agnes feels, along with "lugs of pain," a "swell of happiness murmur throughout" her heart. Elsewhere her "heart gibbers." With her lover, she's "lost in a rising swarm of lust." At times these gaffes seem like a sort of verbal transient ischemia, because soon afterward better things appear, as when Agnes evokes scythes swinging in a field so "the cut grass makes a gasping sound," or recalls feeling, when hungry in childhood, "as though my bones are growing larger in my body." And the landscape of Iceland's surprisingly "lush north" is simply and lucidly painted. Best of all, Kent offers a wealth of engaging detail - from how to make blood sausage to why it's necessary to swing a newborn lamb - without showing off or distorting her story to accommodate these nuggets. Instead, the research is naturally embedded in the narrative, always a sign that an author has a deep and sympathetic knowledge of her subject. Repositioning historical figures as protofeminist heroines - sometimes with supporting evidence, sometimes without - is now a standard strategy, and occasionally there are signs Kent was tempted to do this. In the end, however, her Agnes emerges as painfully human, not idealized. Though she sees through the era's gender and class hypocrisies, she's also bound by them, persisting in loving and defending her inventively abusive master, a man who likes to warn her to "remember your place." And, near the end, despite her courage, a plausible dread enfeebles her. In the book's cleverest touch, she misrepresents a key detail when describing the crime. A later monologue will reveal what really happened, though that too might be a tantalizing deception. So Agnes will remain an enigma, resisting our assumptions and projections, as she has foretold early on: "They will not see me. I will not be there." Steven Heighton's recent books include the novel "Afterlands" and a collection of essays on writing, "Workbook."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 27, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* It is March 1829, and Agnes Magnusdottir has been sentenced to be beheaded for murdering her employer. Due to the cost of keeping her imprisoned, she is sent to the farm of district commissioner Jon Jonsson, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, until her execution. She arrives at the farm filthy, bruised, and bleeding due to the cruelty with which she has been treated during her imprisonment. The mistress of the farm immediately puts her to work scything the harvest, churning butter, and making sausages, while a young priest visits with her to prepare her soul for death. It is from their conversations that Agnes' story becomes known: abandonment by her mother condemns her to life as a pauper subject to the behest of her many employers, and her intelligence only makes her more of a target. Kent's debut novel, she says, is my dark love letter to Iceland, and rarely has a country's starkness and extreme weather been rendered so exquisitely. The harshness of the landscape and the lifestyle of nineteenth-century Iceland, with its dank turf houses and meager food supply, is as finely detailed as the heartbreak and tragedy of Agnes' life, based on the true story of the last woman executed there. Haunting reading from a bright new talent.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kent's debut delves deep into Scandinavian history, not to mention matters of storytelling, guilt, and silence. Based on the true story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the novel is set in rural Iceland in 1829. Agnes is awaiting execution for the murder of her former employer and his friend, not in a prison-there are none in the area-but at a local family's farm. Jon Jonsson, the father, grudgingly accepts this thankless task as part of his responsibility as a regional official, but his wife and daughters' reactions range from silent resentment to outright fear. After settling in to the household, Agnes requests the company of a young priest, to whom she confesses parts of her story, while narrating the full tale only to the reader, who, like the priest, "provide[s] her with a final audience to her life's lonely narrative." The multilayered story paints sympathetic and complex portraits of Agnes, the Jonssons, and the young priest, whose motives for helping the convict are complicated. Kent smoothly incorporates her impressive research- for example, she opens many of the chapters with documents that come directly from archival sources-while giving life to these historical figures and suspense to their tales. Agent: Daniel Lazar, Writers House. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This mesmerizing debut from Kent is a haunting fictionalized account of the final months of Agnes Magnusdottir, an Icelandic work maid condemned to execution in 1829. Charged with the brutal murder of two men, Agnes is shipped off to the -Jonsson family's remote farm in northern Iceland to await her fate-death by beheading. As the narrative gracefully shifts among historical documents, flashbacks, and multiple characters' perspectives, listeners become captivated by the complex Agnes, a woman whose intelligence has offended many in the patriarchal 19th-century Icelandic society. Kent's prose is achingly beautiful, and her descriptions of even the smallest incidents are so exquisite listeners will want to go back and hear them over again. -VERDICT Recommend this heartbreaking tale, masterfully narrated by Scottish actress Morven Christie, to anyone who enjoys suspenseful, smart historical fiction. ["[T]his compulsively readable novel entertains while illuminating a significant but little-known true story. Highly recommended," read the starred review of the Little, Brown hc, LJ 7/13.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
With language flickering, sparkling and flashing like the northern lights, Kent debuts with a study of Agnes Magnsdttir, an Icelandic servant convicted of an 1828 murder. The murder was horrific: two men bludgeoned, stabbed and burnt. Agnes and two others were convicted, but sentences--Agnes was to be beheaded--require confirmation by Denmark's royal government. Kent opens her powerful narrative with Agnes, underfed and unwashed, being moved from district capital imprisonment to Korns, a valley farmstead. Stoic, dutiful Jn and his tubercular wife, Margrt, are forced by circumstance to accept her charge. Reflecting intimate research, the story unfolds against the fearsome backdrop of 19th-century Icelandic life. It's a primitive world where subsistence farmers live in crofts--dirt-floored, turf-roofed hovels--and life unfolds in badstofa, communal living/sleeping rooms. Beautiful are Kent's descriptions of the interminable summer light, the ever-present snow and ice and cold of winter's gloomy darkness, the mountains, sea and valleys where sustenance is blood-rung from sheep. Assistant Rev. Thorvardur has been assigned to "direct this murderess to the way of truth and repentance," but he is more callow youth than counselor. His sessions with Agnes come and go, and he becomes enamored of Agnes and obsessed by her life's struggles. Kent deftly reveals the mysterious relationship between Agnes, a servant girl whom valley folk believe a "[b]astard pauper with a conniving spirit," and now-dead Natan Ketilsson, a healer, some say a sorcerer, for whom she worked as a housekeeper. Kent writes movingly of Natan's seduction of the emotionally stunted Agnes--"When the smell of him, of sulphur and crushed herbs, and horse-sweat and the smoke from his forge, made me dizzy with pleasure"--his heartless manipulation and his cruel rejection. The narrative is revealed in third person, interspersed with Agnes' compelling first-person accounts. The saga plays out in a community sometimes revenge-minded and sometimes sympathetic, with Margrt moving from angry rejection to near love, Agnes ever stoic and fearful, before the novel reaches an inevitable, realistic and demanding culmination. A magical exercise in artful literary fiction.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
