Home | Books By Year | Books from 2008
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning
Buy The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the book. And once you've experienced the book, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
'The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning' is a novel by Hallgrmur Helgason. His first novel to be composed in English, it was actually first published in Icelandic, in the author's own translation, as '10 r til a htta a drepa flk og byrja a vaska upp'.Hallgrimur Helgason, 'The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning' (Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing, 2012), p. 249; Hallgrmur Helgason, '10 r til a htta a drepa flk og byrja a vaska upp' (Reykjavk: JPV, 2008). It has also been translated into Dutch, German, Czech, Russian, Polish, Danish, and Italian.https://gegnir.is/, under the title search '10 r til a htta a drepa flk og byrja a vaska upp'.
Plot
The novel takes place from May 15 2006 to May 12 2007. Tomislav Boki, nicknamed Toxic, after fighting on the Croatian side in the Croatian War of Independence, has moved to New York City and become a hitman for the Croatian mafia. His 66th victim is an undercover policeman and he has to flee the country. At the airport, he avoids detection by murdering a priest and takes his identity. Toxic uses the priest's boarding pass to Reykjavk.
Toxic is met by two small-time Icelandic televangelists, Gumundur and his wife Sigrur. He passes for Reverend Friendly until the police come looking for him. He flees and seeks refuge with his hosts' daughter Gunnhildur, who dislikes her parents' religiosity and is pleased to harbour a criminal. Toxic hides in her attic, begins to reflect on his life of violence and the two begin a relationship.
Toxic discovers that his girlfriend in New York City, Munita, has been brutally murdered. He attempts to kill himself by throwing himself off a bridge. Surviving, he makes his way to Gumundur and Sigrur's house, where he begs forgiveness and assistance. The two decide to take him in, wrap him in bandages, and get their friend orur, a preacher, to purge Toxic's soul through a programme of bodily mortification and spiritual reflection. Gumundur uses his underworld and political connections to get Toxic an Icelandic identity as Tmas Leifur lafsson, a job, and a room in an illegal boarding-house for East European immigrant workers. Toxic's relationship with Gunnhildur develops. Discovering that some of his Lithuanian neighbours are gangsters, he steals a pistol owned by one and moves out to Gunnhildur's house. He settles into Icelandic life, keeping the pistol hidden in his shoe sole.
While watching the Eurovision Song Contest 2007 with Gunnhildur, her parents and their friends, Toxic (now Tmas) receives a visit from his old mafia colleagues Niko and Radovan. They drive him to the lava-fields of the Reykjanes Peninsula to kill him. Toxic disables them, leaves them alive, and drives back, injured, to the party. The novel ends with him falling through the front door, and discovering that Serbia has won.Hallgrimur Helgason, 'The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning' (Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing, 2012).
The novel includes numerous flashbacks to Toxic's experiences in the Croatian War of Independence.
Style and influences
The narration is first-person and for the most part present-tense. In the estimation of Larissa Kyzer,
Hallgrmur [...] has an almost playful approach to rhyme and description throughout the novel. Toxic refers to a contender for his girlfriends affections, an Italian mafioso, as the Talian Mobthrob. In another passage, he describes the late-setting sun: At 10:33 the sun is still burning on the horizon like an orange lantern at an outdoor Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. The descriptions dont always hit their markthere are a few too many laboriously detailed passages about female anatomy, and sometimes the imagery borders on overwrought (The Balkan animal, which is my soul, is always hungry for prey), but overall, the prose and dialogue is fresh and expansive.Larissa Kyzer, 'The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning' [review], 'Three Percent: A Resource for International Literature at the University of Rochester', http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=3960.
Toxic comments several times on the limitations of his English, which provides a framework for reading unidiomatic moments in the novel as mimetic of real life.
The author, Hallgrmur, has noted that in some ways Toxic repeats characteristics of Hlynur Bjrn, the protagonist of his earlier '101 Reykjavk', reflecting that the earlier book 'was written when Iceland was a more innocent place'. He also notes that the book reflects the rise of crime-writing in Iceland.Haukur S. Magnsson, '101 Reykjavk Was Written About A More Innocent Place: Hallgrmur Helgason on his new books, and old', 'The Reykavk Grapevine', April 13, 2012, http://grapevine.is/culture/art/2012/04/13/101-reykjavik-was-written-about-a-more-innocent-place.
Reception
'The Hitman's Guide' was a critical and commercial failure when published (in the author's translation) in Iceland in 2008. It was awarded "The Worst Title of the Year Prize" at local newspaper 'Frttablai'. Four years passed before the original found its way into print, when the novel was picked up by Amazon Crossing and published worldwide in 2012. It became a bestseller on amazon.com, peaking at no. 1 in Thrillers, only two weeks after publications, and has earned over 450 readers' reviews on the bookselling web, the highest score of any Icelandic book. Film rights were sold to Miso Film in Denmark, and pre-production is underway. A stage version of the book, done by Peter Arp, ran for a few weeks at the Schauspielhaus Salzburg, Austria, in the fall of 2011, and German movie star Uwe Ochsenknecht did his own stage version of it, that traveled around Germany.
Douglas Coupland, author of 'Generation X', characterised the work as "a sensational book. Hallgrimur Helgason's brain is like this amazing app that morphs the English language into gorgeously blunt new forms. It delivers surprise after surprise and makes you feel good about books again. I can't recommend it enough."
Reviews
* rni skarsson: "Make love, not war", 'Tmarit Mls og menningar', 70.2 (2009), 123-26* K[ormkur] B[ragason], 'Bkmenntaspjall', 'Stna', 4.1 (2009), 85-98
* Kyzer, Larissa, 'The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning' [review], 'Three Percent: A Resource for International Literature at the University of Rochester', http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=3960.
References
Category:2008 novels
Category:Icelandic novels
Category:Novels set in Iceland
Category:Icelandic books
Category:Icelandic-language novels
Buy The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning now from Amazon
<-- Return to books from 2008