April 28, 2014
Helen Hagemann’s Prose class
resumes on Friday
2nd May. The class
will read Chapter 2 of Burial Rites
by Hannah Kent. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around the
placement and story perspective of different characters within the one chapter.
For the short story writer the aim will be to practice two points-of-view
within the one narrative. 10.00am til noon. All welcome!
In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdóttir is condemned
to death for her part in the brutal murder of two men. Agnes is sent to wait on
the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson and his family, who are horrified about
having Agnes living with them. Only Tóti, the young assistant Reverend
appointed as Agnes's spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her.
As the summer months fall away to winter, Agnes's story begins to emerge. And
as the days to her execution draw closer, the question burns: did she or didn't
she? This novel is based on a true story, and portrayed by Hannah Kent in her
first novel published in 2013 by Pan MacMillan.
Hannah Kent writes:
I first heard the story of Agnes in 2003, when I was living as an exchange student in northern Iceland. At the time I was intensely lonely, troubled by the social isolation I was experiencing as a non-Icelandic outsider in a tightly knit community. One day, driving past a particularly striking northern valley, I asked my host family about the strange hills that lined its mouth. Three were then pointed out to me as the site of the last execution in Iceland, and I was told about Agnes's crime.
Who can truly understand why certain stories come to us at crucial points in our lives? Why do some engage us but are soon forgotten, and then others – simply in the timing of their telling – send an arrow into our hearts in such a way that we are transfigured by them? Perhaps I saw a fragment of my own alienation mirrored back to me in Agnes's story of ostracism. Questions about Agnes were persistently and disturbingly present in my mind from that day and for many years afterwards. Who was this woman, and why was her community so vitriolic in their condemnation of her? It wasn't her guilt that unsettled me, but the way she had been stripped of her humanity and reduced to a gross stereotype in the sources and retelling of the murders. I wanted to return to Agnes the ambiguity and complexity she surely possessed, but also banish her presence from my imagination. In this way, the writing of Burial Rites was both an act of restoration and an exorcism.
