Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
I won this book in a Goodreads Giveaway.
I am a sucker for historical fiction done well, and this is written
remarkably well.
Burial Rites is a fictionalization of the last year of Agnes
Magnusdottir, the last woman executed in Iceland in 1830. Over the last year of her life, Agnes was
placed with a family in lieu of prison and assigned a priest to help her come
to terms with her death sentence. The
novel imagines the interactions between Agnes and the family and her
priest.
Each chapter begins with translated case documents up to and
including the record of her beheading and burial in unconsecrated ground. While
these documents are factual inasmuchas they tell the government’s side of the
case, they leave a lot of room to imagine Agnes’s side of the murders of Natan
Ketilsson and Petur Jonsson. This is
where Hannah Kent has applied her creative license in imagining this last year
of Agnes’s life.
The story captures Agnes’s difficult life from her
childhood. Born a bastard and abandoned at
an early age by a mother seemingly incapable of providing a stable life for her
children, Agnes works hard to overcome the associated stigma and become a young
woman capable of supporting herself. Kent is able to humanize this murderer, a
difficult task even in the best of circumstances, and allows readers to see the
other side of the story that the courts either refused to see or didn’t care to
acknowledge.
Through Agnes’s social and literal isolation, the story
evokes the isolation of Iceland itself, geographically and socially. The social
mores operating in the early 1800s in Iceland were truly not much different
from those in other parts of the European and American world at the same time,
but the geographic isolation of Iceland emphasizes the social isolation
experienced by those marginalized by that social system. Kent includes an interview at the end of the
novel that I greatly appreciated for its assistance in helping me understand a
culture I knew virtually nothing about prior to reading this novel.
I highly recommend Burial Rites. I truly appreciate burial rites for introducing me to a new
culture and a strong woman whose side of the story may have been ignored by
history. I appreciate that Kent looked more deeply into this intriguing case. And,
I appreciate the care Kent has taken in crafting a remarkable piece of
historical fiction.
Source:
Kent, Hannah. Burial Rites. Back Bay Books,2013.
