Sjón’s The Blue Fox (2008) is gloriously good — if you don’t know whether or not to read it, you should. It’s a magnificently made modern myth which has wriggled its way deep into my heart, and it’s given the aging Icelander Sjón a permanent place in my favorite authors. It’s ludicrously lovely, creatively creepy, alternately highly heartwarming and horrifyingly heart-colding — and strikingly, splendidly smart.
Sjón — whose real name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson — is an Icelandic writer with an unbound admiration for his homeland, the land of vicious volcanoes, endless icefields, and beautiful tales of bygone times. This love flows through his work like a river. He writes sprawling sagas of Icelandic love, life, history, and crimes.
The Blue Fox keeps to his love of Icelandic landscape: it spends its first few pages following a hunter as he stalks a bewitching blue fox through the sludge and snow of 18th-century Iceland while the dreamlike night sky folds in like a drape. The rest of the novel is no less loyal in its love of the land, constant narration on the serene silence surrounding the characters leaving no part of it bland.
Though nominally about Icelandic life under Danish rule, the novel spends most of its time in the minds of frustratingly fascinating people — how they live, how they love, and how they feel about what is and isn’t legal. In this respect there are few people in it whom one can really respect, as the novel also spends a large amount of its time reflecting on one broken family’s neglect.
One unique part of the novel is its absolute insistence on consistent competence over obtrusive prose. My copy of it is only 112 pages long, and the audiobook doesn’t even stretch itself to two hours, as it seems many authors currently oppose. Where Martin and Rothfuss — two of the most talented writers of our day — write tomes of towering length, Sjón’s brevity and briskness prove a beautiful breather.
One unfortunate problem of Sjón’s writing is that it is entirely in Icelandic — his mother tongue. Whereas this might be spectacular if you speak said language — with wonderful words he spins stories of Icelanders overflowing with identity — if you don’t, his prose may feel, well, wrung. The translations aren’t bad, by any sense of the word — they are clearly creations of intense passion and respect for Sjón’s work — but pulling such powerful poetry into English can be an unattainable undertaking. Fortunately, the many English translations of The Blue Fox are more terrific than most, and their prose may still leave you shaking. The translation I recommend is that from Victoria Cribb — the translation, which was this article’s original foundation, can be found on Amazon in a beautifully produced publication.
The Blue Fox is an outstanding example of Icelandic writing, its words soothing and its anger biting. If you’re given the chance, let it put you in its trance.
