THE BLUE FOX - SJON

I copped this because I read a NYT magazine piece by the writer, Sam Anderson who turned me onto Anne Carson, about the author of this book, the Icelandic surrealist Sjon. Sjon is apparently something of a sensation in Europe and an all-around artist whose work I was totally unaware of but was willing to check out. THE BLUE FOX was described as short and fairy-tale-like so it seemed like a good place to start. I don’t know much about Icelandic anything, let alone their literature, outside of segments of some of their famous sagas so I didn’t have many expectations going in. That being said, this book did seem to live up to every expectation I would have had about Icelandic novels. It features shipwrecks and hunting, long passages about hunting in the snow, magical foxes, time spent inside of a glacier and accusations of witchcraft. Who could ask for anything more? There's a dark subplot about folks with Down’s syndrome and the treatment they’ve received in Iceland over time (as well as some historical facts about Down’s Syndrome I’m going to have to look into). Overall, it was quite short and very strange. I appreciated the book most when it was at its most surreal and bizarre, when animals were talking and whatnot, and found it the most boring when it tried to depict regular life. However, the whole thing is about 100 pages with most of the pages not even being full text, instead being paragraphs isolated in the middle of the page like poetry which did give the whole text the feeling of a novella (an underused form) or, like I said, poetry. I was particularly taken with the phrase which is said w/r/t smothering a child to death, “thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.”  One section even rhythms which is quite a feat of translation. Overall, very strange, I could see myself reading more by the Sjon fellow if I was going to go visit Iceland but I don’t think I’d be interested in any work of his that was “more serious.” 1883 month in a glacier