Burial Rites

This book made me thankful I was born in the US in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yeah, it’s one of those. Full of grinding poverty, disease, filth, vermin, hard physical labor, wicked weather and death. Not that we have learned to give death the slip or manage the weather, but they don’t control our everyday lives like it was for the people of Iceland in the 1820s. For those folks, wooden panels for your dirt walls were luxury. Having teeth was a luxury. More than one dress. Food. I read this book electronically, but if I’d read it as a physical copy, it was so atmospheric I would have expected dirt to fall out of it.

Agnes is to be pitied, but isn’t full of self-pity. She knows she’s been railroaded to some degree show more (and just how much is hidden from the reader until almost the end, and who can trust the source anyway?), but she doesn’t rail and cry and only once does she try to change her destiny. Her destiny, along with one of her co-conspirators, is with the axe. Because that’s an established fact (Agnes will and did die, the character is based on the real Agnes Magnusdottir), you’d expect this book to be a total downer, but it isn’t.

It starts off that way, with everyone hating, condemning and repudiating every minute of her existence because of her part in the deaths of two men. Not only their deaths, but an attempt to cover those deaths by fire. She is treated brutally, far more brutally than you’d ever see today and probably worse than her two accomplices. She is bruised, beaten and starved. Malnutrition has caused her to stop menstruating, a fact she considers to mean she is no longer a woman. She is literally crusted over with dirt, blood, piss and shit when she’s delivered to the farm at Kornsa. She turns the bathwater to sludge and the stench of her burning clothes drives everyone from the croft. Instead of bathing in the water, at first, Agnes tries to drink it, plunging her whole head into the bucket. This moves the heart of the most steely Margret, in whose home she is billeted until her execution.

From there, it’s basically a story of Agnes’s life; flashbacks to her past and vignettes from her present. It was rewarding to see her become a person to those she is forced upon; Margret, Jon, Steina & Lauga. Steina is first to recognize Agnes and tries to draw her out about her past. She’s not too successful and draws the ire of both her mother and sister. Especially Lauga, who being the youngest still sees the world largely in black and white, and while her mother, sister and local priest and even her father start to see Agnes’s humanity, Lauga steadfastly refuses and continues to be horrified that they actually have to feed her and let her stay indoors.

Interspersed with the fictional parts of the story are what appear to be transcriptions of actual court documents, official letters and other records of the murder, the trial and the subsequent housing and execution of the prisoners. Some of the attitudes are so harsh that it seems our own criminal justice system is laughably soft. Even Sigga’s reduced sentence at first seems like a mercy, but is anything but.

The characters seemed realistic and balanced to me. No one is an over-the-top villain, hero or victim and while some attitudes and behaviors made me angry, they were of the place and time. Like blaming women for their rapes. Expecting men to understand and deal with women better than women because they are men. The general deference to men as knowing and being better than women. The whacky religious fervor. Ugh. Back to being glad for being born when and where I was.

The language is starkly beautiful in spots and I highlighted a few passages that struck me -

(Early in Agnes & Margret’s relationship, Margret muses on Agnes’s nature)
“This woman is not a saga woman. She’s a landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty.”

“Winter comes like a punch in the dark.”

“Illugastadir. Of all the names, one is a mistake. One is a nightmare. The stair you miss in the darkness.”

“As they say...Blind is a man without a book.”

Agnes is remembering how her relationship with Natan changed -
“It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.”

I’m not surprised this has been shortlisted for the Bailey’s Orange Prize this year. It’s a well-crafted novel that will stick with me and one I’ll probably read again someday. show less

Burial Rites surprised me. I went in expecting a grim historical novel, but what Kent delivers is something far heavier — a cold, controlled excavation of a woman’s last months, written with an emotional precision that never allows you an easy out. The book’s power doesn’t come from melodrama. It comes from restraint, from the quiet horror of a community where gossip is moral law, and from the claustrophobic daily life of a household forced to live with someone they’ve already been told to fear.

Kent’s writing is beautiful, sometimes too beautiful. She loves to describe things — landscapes, gestures, emotional beats — and there are moments when it feels like she is describing for the sake of describing. As a reader, you show more occasionally want to say, “Yes, I get it, you’ve already shown me this.” There’s a stretch around pages 240–263 where the story slows to almost a crawl. You feel the wheel spinning, the mood tightening. For me, it was a slog to get through — but it pays off, because the emotional weight of the ending relies on that tightening coil.

The characters are what make the novel unforgettable.

Burial Rites is beautifully written, emotionally punishing, occasionally overwritten, and absolutely worth reading. It’s the story of a woman the world decided to erase — told in a tone so stark and unsentimental that you feel the erasure happening even as you read. It hurt, and I loved it. show less

This was Kent's debut novel and it was superb! It is the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, a 30 year old woman in Iceland that was put to death for a gruesome murder. The first lines of the book set the tone, and they are chilling: "They said I must die. They said that I stole the breath from men, and now they must steal mine. I imagine, then, that we are all candle flames, greasy-bright, fluttering in the darkness and the howl of the wind, and in the stillness of the room I hear footsteps, awful coming footsteps, coming to blow me out and send my life up away from me in a gray wreath of smoke." The book, although a novel, was based on a true story. Definitely a winner!

I love reading about Iceland, which sounds like a fascinating if rather bleak place to live, but even a glimpse into the history of the country wasn't enough to lift this novel out of the three star doldrums. All praise to the author for her research and skill in writing a novel about the fate of a real woman in an alien place and time, however - her notes on crafting her first book were almost as overwrought as the main character's life story!

Based on the infamous case of the last woman to executed - by axe! - in Iceland, Agnes Magnúsdóttir in 1827, Hannah Kent weaves a more sympathetic version of the condemned woman's final months in the custody of a farming family living in the bleak north of the island. Agnes and two others were show more convicted of bludgeoning and stabbing to death Agnes' lover Natan and another man before setting fire to his remote house in a bid to destroy the bodies. Agnes and Fridrik, an acquaintance of Natan's, were sentenced to death, while Natan's young housekeeper had her conviction commuted to hard labour. Kent delivers Agnes' version of the murders in reverse, revealing the 'human truth' of her part in the crime via an extended therapy session to a young priest sent to help the murderess seek forgiveness for her sins.

Finding out if Agnes was actually guilty, and to what extent, is all that kept me reading after a certain point, and even that revelation turned out to be an anticlimax. The bulk of the novel, which could have been shorter, is more of a depressing travel guide for Iceland, with families freezing to death in hovels or butchering animals as a community event. The narrative is divided between repetitive third person accounts of Agnes surviving day to day with the family of a local official while waiting her execution date and Agnes' own life story in first person, as reported to the reverend in training who is little more than a sounding board for her tale of woe (or as one of the official's daughters captures pithily: 'Oh, pity me, I'm a pauper!'). I did actually start to feel sorry for Agnes, who is portrayed as capable and intelligent, until her story boiled down to falling in love with a wrong 'un and being rejected for a younger model. Her life choices were limited, certainly, but a woman throwing her life away for a man is always a depressing read.

I did get into the 'rhythm' of the story after a while, and the setting was very evocative - this is definitely a book to read in winter rather than mid-August! - but the pacing started to drag and I lost interest around the halfway point and started skim reading towards the end. show less

This impressive debut novel by Hannah Kent is a fictionalized account of a true life story. In 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir and two other servants are sentenced to death for the gruesome murder of two men on a isolated farm in northern Iceland. While waiting for her execution date she is put under the physical supervision of District Officer Jon Jonsson and the spiritual supervision of Assistant Reverend Thorvardur Jonsson (Toti).

During the cold winter months Agnes begins to unburden herself to Toti, even thought she has never spoken of her story before. As she works alongside the Jonsson's on their farm, the family begin to see another side to Agnes and begin to wonder if she is actually guilty of the crime she has been accused and show more convicted of. The story of Agnes' life is told in a series of flashbacks, describing her early life as well as the actual murder and her relationship with both the men who were killed.

Each chapter begins with a piece of correspondence or a witness testimony, which reflects the legal standards of the time. The title “Burial Rites” refers to whether the dead deserve to be buried on consecrated ground.

The author brings the harsh Icelandic environment sharply to life. We experience how the characters struggle to maintain their meager existence out of the land, continually battling the threat of severe weather. Agnes is a tragic figure and the descriptions of the bleak and miserable lives of the other characters and how they live will fill you with pity. Children and servants are thrown out into the harsh weather to die. I kept thinking as I read....how could I ever live such an existence? How were these people able to live in such poverty and endure such desperation and loneliness?

I felt that the book was beautifully written and the story compelling. I'm haven't been able to stop thinking about Agnes and the rest of the characters. It's a book that will stay with me for a long, long time I think. show less

I loved this book! Even though it was much less action-packed than other things I've read so far this year, I didn't want to put it down. The prose was so well written I felt like I was sitting in the room with them, not in my apartment. It was really interesting the way the beginning of each chapter presented hard facts of what was happening within the government to prepare for the execution and then the meat of the chapter was so much more emotional. Even though before even opening the book you know how it will end, I just wanted to know more. Kent does a great job of slowly revealing what really happened the night of the crime while you are jumping to your own conclusions. The character development is quite slow, so you almost don't show more realize it's happening until the end - but that makes it all the more beautifully tragic. Right out of the gate, you empathize with Agnes as she is in this horrible jail and you just want the best for her, but it never happens. When she finally gets what she wanted her whole life, it is too late.

I highly recommend this to anyone, it was a beautiful read and I'm so glad I picked it up. show less

No need for spoiler alerts. We know how this one ends before it begins: In Iceland in 1830, a woman is executed for murder.

It takes real skill to build suspense toward a known outcome, and something akin to sorcery to make that outcome almost surprising. Hannah Kent manages this, and so much more.

Her depiction of life in rural Iceland 200 years ago is fascinating. Read the book just for that, and consider the flowing prose and gripping plot a bonus. Then fall on your knees and give thanks for a lice-free bed and central heating.

Burial Rites is a stunning view into a cold, bleak corner of history. Kent lifts it up for us to see and fills it with humanity--both the light of compassion and the darkness of pride and jealousy.