{"id":290486,"date":"2012-05-21T22:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-21T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2012\/05\/21\/the-hitmans-guide-to-housecleaning\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:11:38","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:11:38","slug":"the-hitmans-guide-to-housecleaning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2012\/05\/21\/the-hitmans-guide-to-housecleaning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former soldier and current hitman for the Croatian mafia in New York, Tomislav Bok\u0161i\u0107, nicknamed Toxic, has dispatched roughly 125 people. It\u2019s a fully ingrained way of life for Toxic\u2014he feels \u201crestless if three months go by without firing a gun\u201d\u2014and takes pride in his professionalism. As a \u201ctriple six-packer,\u201d he even holds something of a record in the business: his last 18 consecutive hits have not only been completed successfully, but each was accomplished with a single bullet apiece. But as Hallgr\u00edmur Helgason\u2019s The Hitman\u2019s Guide to Housecleaning<\/em> opens, Toxic is in trouble: \u201cHit #66 was a miss,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t get me wrong. I got the bullet into the guy\u2019s head safe and sound, but there was some serious aftermath. The mustached Polish guy turned out to be a mustached FBI<\/span> guy. What was supposed to be a bright and sunny murder in broad daylight became a nightmare.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is how Toxic ends up going into hiding, fleeing his cushy life in New York City and heading back to Croatia to maintain his \u201cLPP, or Lowest Possible Profile.\u201d But even that plan goes awry and instead of heading back to his homeland, the beleaguered hitman ends up on a plane to Iceland under the assumed identity of a Southern televangelist named Father Friendly. <\/p>\n

The second of ten Icelandic novels to be published in English by Amazon\u2019s internationally-oriented publishing imprint, AmazonCrossing, The Hitman\u2019s Guide to Housecleaning<\/em> is a darkly comic novel which commingles irreverent indifference with sincere introspection and the possibility of redemption. As Toxic settles into his exile on \u201cLilliput Island\u201d\u2014a country he discovers has no handguns, no army, and hardly any murders (but plenty of good crime writers\u2014there\u2019s actually a list of Icelandic crime authors worked into a conversation)\u2014he reflects back on his life as a killer, both as a soldier during the Yugoslavian civil war, as well as a contract killer. And while it wouldn\u2019t really be true to say that Toxic feels a deep remorse for his actions, in the course of the novel, he is able to both reconcile with his past and plan ahead for a very different future. <\/p>\n

While The Hitman\u2019s Guide<\/em> has much to recommend it in terms of plotting, pacing, and characterization, it is particularly interesting on a more “meta” level as well. For one, since Toxic arrives in Iceland with little to no previous knowledge of the country and culture, the book acts as something of a crash course in Icelandic society and idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, his observations about Iceland are more factual: he learns that it was originally christened by Irish monks, that Iceland has no prostitutes, and that \u201cthe beer costs a bear.\u201d In other cases, the observations are a little more (self-)mocking (\u201cAccording to Icelandic house rules, you\u2019re allowed to enter in your shoes if they cost more than two hundred dollars\u201d), and a bit opaque for someone unfamiliar with say, Iceland\u2019s satirical contestant in the 2006 Eurovision Song Contest.<\/a> But however these cultural snippets are conveyed, upon finishing the novel, the reader comes away with a fairly strong, if somewhat slanted, sense of Reykjav\u00edk and Icelandic culture. <\/p>\n

Another interesting feature is the author\u2019s use of language. Hallgr\u00edmur originally wrote The Hitman\u2019s Guide to Housecleaning<\/em> in English rather than Icelandic, and has an almost playful approach to rhyme and description throughout the novel. Toxic refers to a contender for his girlfriend\u2019s affections, an Italian mafioso, as \u201cthe Talian Mobthrob.\u201d In another passage, he describes the late-setting sun: \u201cAt 10:33 the sun is still burning on the horizon like an orange lantern at an outdoor Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn.\u201d The descriptions don\u2019t always hit their mark\u2014there are a few too many laboriously detailed passages about female anatomy, and sometimes the imagery borders on overwrought (\u201cThe Balkan animal, which is my soul, is always hungry for prey\u201d), but overall, the prose and dialogue is fresh and expansive. There are also a host of phonetic jokes about Icelandic words and names that Toxic mishears and then renders into stilted English, making countless puns on street names around the capitol; Icelandic phrases are renamed into things like \u201cGuard the Beer,\u201d and Reykjav\u00edk\u2019s famous Kaffibarinn becomes \u201cCaf\u00e9 Bahrain.\u201d <\/p>\n

Both The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning<\/em> and Hallgr\u00edmur Helgason seem assured to find a dedicated audience in the United States. As of this writing, the novel is among Amazon’s Top 20 Mysteries and Thrillers (although neither genre seems to really fit the book). Perhaps its success will allow for more of Hallgr\u00edmur’s Icelandic language novels to make it into English translation in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former soldier and current hitman for the Croatian mafia in New York, Tomislav Bok\u0161i\u0107, nicknamed Toxic, has dispatched roughly 125 people. It\u2019s a fully ingrained way of life for Toxic\u2014he feels \u201crestless if three months go by without firing a gun\u201d\u2014and takes pride in his professionalism. As a \u201ctriple six-packer,\u201d he even holds something of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[43376,27486,47036,6046,14766],"class_list":["post-290486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-amazon-crossing","tag-hallgrimur-helgason","tag-hitmans-guide-to-housecleaning","tag-icelandic-literature","tag-larissa-kyzer"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290486"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341206,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290486\/revisions\/341206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}