Product Description

'You have heard stories, many stories, true and fictitious, about everything under the sun - everything except my little crime. Nobody except me knows about that.' Peter Peterson is wracked with nightmares of the past. Now a dying man leading a degenerate and shadowy life in New York, estranged from his family, he confesses everything, from his boyhood in Reykjavik to his escape from Nazi-occupied Denmark - and, of course, the 'little crime' that destroyed his life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #417105 in Books
• Published on: 1995-06-05
• Original language: Icelandic
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Customer Reviews

"Absolution" holds us spellbound.
I warmly invite you to read "Absolution" written by Olaf Olafsson, a young writer born in Iceland in 1962. From his father, a well-known novelist in his country, he has inherited the pleasure of writing. A graduate in Nuclear Physics, the author is a talented novelist whose second book "Absolution" is a very captivating and tormented confession - story.

Peter Peterson, the main character of the novel, wrote his memoirs published after his death. The novel will make you travel back to his youth in Iceland, the Resistance during the German occupation in Denmark and his adulthood in New York. Peter is a rich man obsessed with his past and the aim of his memoirs is to confess a "crime" about which we do not know anything. He depicts himself as a distasteful person, a misanthropist, an egocentric who is unable to love anybody not even his own family: his wife and children are like strangers to him. Furthermore, he is a manipulator and he uses people in a cynical way so as to fulfil his own wishes.

Peter Peterson brilliantly keeps us in suspense until the end : we expect him to confess a terrible crime. Although he shows himself as a calculating and cold man I felt close to him: he can be such a charming and such a loathing person because he can be so moving and so pitiful, depicting his imperfection so openly. Along the book he makes us his accomplice, giving us some hints little by little. You will discover that Peter has his own reason for being so provocative but you will have to wait till the end of this confession to understand fully the reasons for these manipulations. The suspense remains entire until the last pages of the book.

"Absolution" holds us spellbound. In that way only it is a thriller where no blood is shed by an unusual "criminal". Peter's memoirs reveal a strong sense of guilt in a world made of illusions and dreams. A confession always ends with an absolution and we will give it to Peter light-heartedly for what he has committed.

Enjoy your time spent with Peter Peterson !

Somewhat Touching
“For I fear death, I am afraid of the end, the nothingness and perplexity.”

Peter Peterson a wealthy businessman and wine connossieur from Iceland is tormented living out his last days in New York. Besides the fear that his undeserving children will acquire his estate, there is his repetitive obsession with a crime of passion he believes he committed sometime back in his youth in Denmark. This crime brings him constant nightmares and cold sweats in his awakening and sleeping hours for they never leave him.

His constant companion is his Cambodian girlfriend who takes care of him, does all the chores and hardly leaves his side. This is a touching story that will keep Mr. Olafsson’s fans on the brink of anxiety.

Lovers of Olaf Olafsson should not miss this beautiful novel which I believe is his first book… Grab it now. And I would also like to recommend Walking Into The Night by the same author.

Death of a Misanthrope
The thin story contained in this slim novel is contained in a rather lame and unnecessary framing device. A translator is asked by a lawyer friend to skim a handwritten manuscript and tell him if it has any bearing on an estate the lawyer is executor for. The translator is soon drawn into the confessional memoir of wealthy New York businessman Peter Peterson. This could have stood on its own, and the introduction of the translator only creates clutter in getting to the meat of the matter. The memoir is the work of a dying man, wealthy in a material sense, but spiritually bereft (quite the cliche). An Icelandic emigre during World War II, he spent the following 50 or so years manipulating people, accumulating wealth, becoming a wine connoisseur, playing out a loveless marriage over three decades, fathering two children he can summon little (if any) warmth or feeling toward, and generally greeting his fellow man with a skeptical eye. This final document of his life is split between reminisces on these aspects of his life and his desire for absolution in the matter of a crime he committed as a young man during the war in Denmark.

The gradual revelation of this crime is the main element of suspense in the book, as the events leading up to it are sparingly and exactly doled out. These also help to partially explain why he became the distasteful and misanthropic adult he describes himself as being. About halfway through, it becomes clear what the crime is, and why it causes his nightmares at the end of his life. The other element of suspense is derived from the "will he or won't he" question of whether he will reach out to and possibly reconcile with his son before dying. Peterson is not a likeable character and for much of the book it's hard to care about him or the decisions that have led to him living friendless and alone with a Cambodian housekeeper. His boyhood years in Reykjavik are idyllic enough, but his entire character is then formed out of a single betrayal in his late teens. Ultimately, one is hard-pressed to care too much about what happens to a man who has managed to inflict so much pain on those close to him over the course of his life. There is a twist ending which is reminiscent of someone like Roald Dahl, but it's not enough to save the book.