I love Icelandic language – even the name of this movie, which is just wooly things that go baaaa, sounds epic in Icelandic: Hrutar!
This was another film screening at the Palace Cinemas as part of the Scandinavian Film Festival, and one I wanted to see the most, because of its setting and also because it won a prize at Cannes (mind you, so did Dancer in the Dark and I wanted to strangle that movie).
I was very eager to check this book out. It got a lot of attention and praise, and the premise seemed interesting: it’s based on the real-life story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be executed in Iceland. She was beheaded in 1830 for her part in the gruesome murders of two men, one of them her employer, and the attempted cover-up by arson. Before the execution, she spent her last months at the rural home of Jon Jonsson, a middle-ranking official, and his family, a wife and two daughters. Iceland is a place that has always fascinated me, and I can’t say I’ve read many stories with it as a setting, so that made this book even more intriguing. Did it live up to the hype? Not really. I found it solid reading, but not that special, at least not consistently so.
yggdrasille.com 