Austrians adapt Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning to stage
A play based on Hallgrímur Helgason's novel The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning, (orig. 10 ráð til að hætta að drepa fólk og byrja að vaska upp) recently premiered at the Schauspiel theatre in Salzburg, Austria. The play, which is adapted to the stage and directed by Peter Arp, has received strong reviews from the Austrian media. “An excitingly disturbing farce about war, life and death,” writes DrehPunktKultur, while Kronen Zeitung, Austria's largest daily newspaper, is of the opinion that “the play works out marvelously. Everything comes to life, thanks to the precisely calibrated interplay between acting and words.”
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning, a story of a Croatian hitman who, following a bewildering course of event, finds himself hiding out in Iceland under the assumed identity of an American televangelist, will be published in English by AmazonCrossing in early 2012. As announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, AmazonCrossing, an imprint of Amazon, plans to publish ten Icelandic books in the near future, with the goal of increasing the ratio of translations on the American book market.
2011 has been a busy year for Hallgrímur, who recently completed a reading tour around Germany, Austria and Switzerland in support of his newest work, The Woman at 1000° (orig. Konan við 1000°), published in Germany earlier this year. The reception, among readers and critics alike, has been positive. “A wonderfully nutty novel,” is the opinion of Süddeutsche Zeitung, while SWR3 Kultur declared it “the book of the year.”
Click here for a trailer of the stage version.