The Icelandic literary maverick and Oscar-nominated songwriter Sjón writes with a poet’s ear and a musician’s natural sense of rhythm. This extraordinary performance, consisting of three books in one – the first originally published in Iceland in 1994, the second in 2001, and the third in 2016 – sets out to entertain, but also to prod the reader towards a stark realisation of human mortality and the games fate plays.
Book One takes place during the second world war in an inn in a small German town. A battered stranger called Leo Loewe is discovered lurking in the shadows close to death, and the tavern owners attempt to help. A young maid is entrusted with caring for this starving Jewish fugitive, who is burdened by the weight of history. Leo guards a hat box that contains something very special – our future narrator, just waiting to be born. This baby-to-be is made of clay, and his fantastical birth takes more than 20 years and hinges on several factors, including love and a stolen ring.
From the opening pages and through much of a chaotic if playfully executed narrative, the influence of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum is evident. Sjón has mastered the earlier fabulist’s technique of merging history with high-speed comedy and surreal profundity. With a man made of clay and a bewildered angel struggling to get rid of a symbolic trumpet, there are shades of the Bible as well as Milton. Sjón, an heir of Mikhail Bulgakov and Laurence Sterne, eases literary references into the text as mere suggestions. With the light, fluid touch of Victoria Cribb, a resourceful, often inspired translator who is alert to Sjón’s quick-change vocal register and genre-hopping artistry, the effect is hypnotic. The reader becomes a gleeful collaborator in an extravaganza in which Bosch meets Chagall, with touches of Tarantino.
The narrator, Jósef, appears to have been born to suffer. In Book Three, he tells his own story to a geneticist’s researcher in present-day Iceland, but he uses Book Two to recall his father’s experiences. Jósef takes his time and when his female listener protests, impatient with his tendency towards philosophical digression, this is his lofty response: “May I remind you that you are not sufficiently well versed in the history of narrative to start getting uppity. The fact that I am introducing you to the basics of feminist thinking on narrative at this point is not irrelevant.”
It proves a key passage, however irritating it seems: the narrator is bewildered by the reality of his own slow gestation, which is part of history itself. Sjón is also instructing the reader, and this authorial awareness of the art of storytelling is evident throughout, not as a flaw but rather as a consolidation of his weirdly cohesive attention to detail. The reader will also require patience.
Cast aside chronological logic: Sjón makes the point that in Iceland people prefer fantasy over facts as the best way to confront reality. His wild, subversive imagination is among his great strengths, not only in CoDex 1962 but throughout his work, most notably in his beautiful novella The Blue Fox, published in Cribb’s immaculate translation in 2008.
Stories, digressions and colourful characters all create the context into which our narrator is born. His melancholic Jewish refugee father, Leo, is central: “born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, [he] held a Czechoslovakian passport when he came to Iceland in the summer of 1944, took Icelandic citizenship in March 1958”. He is a lost soul straight from the pages of Bruno Schulz, another of Sjón’s mentors. Both father and son are outsiders sharing the romantic dream-life of the hero of Moonstone, Sjón’s most masterful work to date.
Late in the narrative there is a cautionary announcement: “Authors are as much in thrall as readers … Little do they suspect that most of what they consider new and innovative in their works is actually so old that millennia have passed since the idea first took shape in the mind of a female storyteller … and with every retelling and garbling, misunderstanding and conflation, mankind’s world of songs and stories expands.”
Sjón is celebrating story while commemorating the brief lives of many of those born in the same year as him, 1962, yet fated to early deaths through disease, chance accidents and other horrors. In a sombre recurring device, he includes random lists of the dead, reminders of life’s fragility inserted into a lively picaresque about a difficult birth that makes that of Frankenstein’s monster appear straightforward. This wayward, exciting odyssey confronts death throughout. Nothing is quite what it seems, and there are no easy answers. Here, instead, is an artist preoccupied with questions.
• Eileen Battersby’s Teethmarks on My Tongue is published by Apollo. CoDex 1962 by Sjón and translated by Victoria Cribb is published by Sceptre. To order a copy for £14.99 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
