Issues and Images - Iceland Review

Icelandic Books:
Surreal, Violent and Historic
Our critics look at three different Icelandic
books by three different Icelandic authors.
It's a fact:
2011 was a record year
in book publishing in
Iceland; 757 books were
published, which is ten
more than in 2010. That
means that every day of
the week, two books are
published in Iceland
on average.
From the Mouth of the Whale
From the Mouth of the Whale (Icelandic title: Rökkurbýsnir), the second novel
by the Icelandic writer Sjón to be translated into English, was shortlisted
for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2012. This award for the best
contemporary fiction in translation published in the UK in 2011 is unique in
recognizing the importance of the translator. The magical work of translator
Victoria Cribb preserves the special alchemy of the original Icelandic language.
From the Mouth of the Whale is set in seventeenth-century Iceland, the pre-
Enlightenment period when science was just beginning to challenge religious
authority. The protagonist and narrator, Jónas Pálmason the Learned, is a selftaught
healer who is exiled for blasphemy and sorcery to desolate Gullbjörn’s
Island off the coast of Iceland in the year 1635. Jónas is steeped in the superstition
and lore of his time, predominantly Catholicism and an embryonic science
that sought to understand the world through cataloguing all its wonders.
Jónas’s story is told in a stream of consciousness style that allows the reader
to ride along on all the fantastical journeys, tangents, highways and byways of
his mind. His meandering narrative tells of his career as a healer of women’s
diseases; his struggle to conquer a gruesome ghost; the deaths of his three
children; his debates with his mentors, the Danish scholar Ole Worm and the
Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson (real historical figures recruited into Jónas’s
story); and his persecution for allegedly invoking the devil. The profusion of
Jonas’s mind shows the richness of the world and of one man’s imagination,
especially when stimulated into high gear by the lack of anything else around it.
Sjón based Jónas on a real personage, Jón Guðmundsson the Learned, an
Icelandic self-taught sage of the seventeenth century who was exiled for sorcery,
but left behind several important texts. The line between Jónas Pálmason
the Learned and Jón Guðmundsson the Learned is unclear, and in typical postmodern
style, the characters in Sjón’s book overlap, and time and boundaries
blur and fade with tantalizing surrealistic echoes.
Jonas slyly describes a speckled sandpiper as a medium-sized fellow, with
beady brown eyes, clad in a grey-brown coat, not unlike himself (or the author
himself, perhaps). And at the end, Jón Guðmundsson the Learned steps into
the book. Jón dreams of a man in a grey-speckled cap, with beady brown eyes
surrounded by feathers, who says to him, “When you awaken you will have
forgotten your name; for all you know, you may be called Jónas Pálmason.”
The theme of magically transmogrifying material is woven throughout the
book in references to talismans, tupilaks, bezoars, kidney stones, and diacodi—objects
in which simple organic material becomes transformed and endowed
with power. Just as the bird becomes the man becomes the writer, the
shapes and colors of old Icelandic texts are remixed in this modern text, so that
translation becomes a form of alchemy in which the original wonder becomes
a new kind of wonder.
By Ann Sass.
44 I&I