A writer reveals his trauma: Having put my fictional characters though hell, I had to go there myself

Delhi: In the ‘Nordic Noir’ session, on day one of the

Times Litfest Delhi

, Icelandic author Hallgrimur Helgason spoke of the trauma of rape, which he experienced as a student in Germany. “Having put my fictional characters through hell, I had to go there myself,” he revealed, in a poignant moment in an evening session. “My fiction helped me when I was writing about myself.”

“Interesting” was how Helgason described the reaction to his coming out with this harrowing memory, in the autobiographical novel, ‘Seasick in Munich’. The women, he recalled, were sensitive and considerate but not so the men. “The old guys started attacking and shaming me, telling me I’m a weakling, and I shouldn’t have written what I did. It made me feel as if I was raped again, made me depressed, and I ended up in therapy.

“Then I came to India, and it felt as if a huge weight had lifted.”

Scandinavia is known for its egalitarianism and neither Helgason nor Kjell Ola Dahl have shied away from writing about women characters. “When I’m writing about my female protagonists, I do a lot of research on women detectives, and try to keep it realistic,” said Norwegian Dahl. For policing, he reminds, is a very “masculine” profession.

“It’s always a stretch when you’re writing about things you don’t know of, but that’s a writer’s job,” explained Helgason. Yet so convincing was this Icelander’s portrayal of an old lady (‘Woman at 1,000 Degrees’, based on a real person) that a woman entered a bookshop in Germany and asked for another work by ‘Frau Helgason’!

So, what is it about Nordic Noir that has left people the world over in its grip? Is it the desire to know what makes people tick in lands that are in darkness for six months? “They are good stories, good crime fiction,” said Dahl. “And there’s a loyalty to society, to how people function in society – it’s about common people.”

And Iceland, says Helgason, is surfing on the Nordic Noir wave. “We get to ride on this ticket, so I can’t complain! “We only have one homicide every year, so Icelandic crime fiction is very heroic!” he added, in jest. “Because when you live in a country where death is invisible, you’re drawn to reading and writing about it.”