These are three separate books, but they are short books, with quite a bit in common, and it feels more natural to discuss them collectively. That’s how I first read about them, in a wonderful review entitled A Magus of the North, written by novelist A.S. Byatt for The New York Review of Books. It was one of those “you must read this” reviews, and it would probably be a better use of your time to read Byatt’s review than to read whatever follows here. The review begins: “Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head.”
I’ve been reading a few Scandinavian authors in recent years: Sjón, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Isak Dinesen, Halldór Laxness. I’ve noticed two dominant trends—there are the intensely realistic family dramas, novels, plays, and films that put people and relationships under a microscope. This theme runs from Ibsen, through Ingmar Bergman films like Scenes from a Marriage, to Knausgaard. But then there is the fantastic element: Dinesen’s gothic tales, Knut Hamsen. Some writers can do both: Dinesen and Bergman alternated realistic works with more mythopoetic ones. Maybe these two modes aren't quite as distinct as I'm assuming, or maybe opposites can meet at either extreme. Laxness’s Independent People presents a vivid picture of sustenance farming at the edge of the Arctic while also making room for a few ghosts and spirits.
I’m generalizing a bit, and your blogger is presuming on what is in fact a pretty marginal acquaintance with Scandinavian literature—I’ve never actually read any Ibsen. I do have one real credential, however—one week in 2009 I fought my way, sentence by sentence, through Hans Christian Andersen’s Grantræet (in English, The Fir Tree) in the original Danish. Grantræeet is the 48-hour autobiography of a Christmas tree, from envious and expectant outsider, to centerpiece of the celebration, to trash. Unlike the lesson texts and simple newspaper articles I was mostly tackling at the time, Andersen’s writing was full of strange and exotic words, and the weirdness of the tale combined with my very unsure renderings of the sentences to create a kind of child’s consciousness. What could be alive? What could a tree think? What does this word mean? Is this a metaphor? I felt as though I were looking up at this very brief fairy tale; it loomed. (Another story I enjoyed in Danish featured Scrooge McDuck. You can read about it here.)
Andersen would obviously belong in the fantastic camp of Scandinavian writers. And so quite clearly would Sjón. Sjón is a modern-day disciple of Ovid—he deals in transformations. In the short novel The Blue Fox, a man shoots a fox and then stuffs it in his jacket. Later, when the hunter is trapped in a cage after barely surviving an avalanche, the fox revives and begins a conversation with him. In The Whispering Muse, a sailor on a modern trawler speaks in the voice of one of Odysseus’s sailors at night. He reveals that he has spent the majority of the preceding 20 centuries in the form of a bird.
Sjón writes in the third person, but always in the voice of his characters. The narrator of From the Mouth of the Whale, for example, is a 17th century man, and he speaks to us with what strikes me as a very convincing recreation of a 17th century mind, where shrewd and rational observations mingle with bits of myth and superstition:
Last winter I was as solitary as Adam in his first year in paradise, though the island in winter is nothing like that delightful place. It is cold and bleak and one does not venture out of doors except to empty one's chamber pot, and not properly even then; one merely opens the door a crack, just wide enough for the pot. I was more like a wretched mouse in its hole than a man created in God's image. As little and hunched as the rat's cousin, not ramrod straight, proudly surveying my domain like Adam. Ah, yes, Adam was tall and held his head high. That way he could see over the whole world, for he was bigger and heavier than his living descendants, just under thirty yards in height, and with such a head of hair that his locks cascaded like a waterfall over his loins. He was the largest living creature that God had created from earthly clay. And all through that year as he walked the Earth alone, his massive body was being fired and glazed by the sun like clay in an oven. All growth was new: the trees put down roots, sprouted, then dropped their leaves and stood naked for the first time. The swans rose honking from the moorland tarns and heard their own voices for the first time. The bee alighted on the dwarf fireweed and quenched her thirst with fresh honey before buzzing in flight to the next flower cup. It had never happened before. Everything was new to the eyes of the man and he was entirely new to himself. Molded by the Master from the four elements, as they combine in the Earth, he was closer to his origins now than he ever would be again. His blood was still diluted with seawater, there was gravel in his flesh, roots crept along his sinews and muscles, the seed that quickened to life in his testicles was thick as spider silk and foamy as sea spume. Thus he strode across the world and wherever he looked he saw to the ends of the Earth.
This is every bit as rich and weird as Grantræeet.
Sjón has collaborated with Björk, and is the lyricist on several of her compositions, including the ethereal Jóga. According the Byatt, Sjón has also written a trilogy set in the time of World War II, which hasn’t been translated into English yet. I’ll be looking for it.
