Volume 41, Number 8 · April 21, 1994
Cold Comfort
By Brad Leithauser
Absolution
by Olafur Jóhann Olafsson
Pantheon, 259 pp., $20.00
There's a distant winking of lights in the gray cityscape of Olafur Olafsson's Absolution: we're approaching Christmas. The holidays aren't an occasion that the book's aged hero, an Icelandic-expatriate-turned-New-Yorker named Peter Peterson, is likely to make much of. Even so, the lights are there, conspiring in their gaiety and warmth to censure Peterson, who is as chilly a misanthrope as any literary character I've met in years. Absolution is a sort of dissonant Christmas Carol, the tale of a Scrooge whose holiday ghosts inspire not redemption but only increased bile and bitterness.
Review, 1932 words
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