It took me a month to drag myself halfway through this book and it appears that I've been reading a different book than everybody else in the reviews It took me a month to drag myself halfway through this book and it appears that I've been reading a different book than everybody else in the reviews has. I found no part of this book "funny", "entertaining" and no deep meaning hiding under it. Yes the narrator is lovingly unlikeable and has moments when he blurts out smart words but the majority of his writing is dull and there are no stakes whatsoever. It took me a month to reach the halfway point of this book, I always felt sleepy and uninterested after 2-3 pages but I thought a redeeming quality would appear. After arriving at 50%, I can clearly see that this is not the case and I opt out of reading one more time about Renata's round thighs and Denise's violet eyes....more
Virginia, you gave me a lot of trouble and a lot of emotions. Your stream of consciousness technique is so pristine that m[short letter to the author]
Virginia, you gave me a lot of trouble and a lot of emotions. Your stream of consciousness technique is so pristine that my consciousness could not focus on your words, it jumped all around, being carried away by streams of thought you induced. I had to constantly go and fetch my wandering mind back to my skull. My anger at you for doing this accompanied me throughout the book, but having finished, I realised I love you now. Somehow it worked.
There are two ways to make a monument (let's take a not so random example, the 1st world war): either very carefully take a piece of marble and put alThere are two ways to make a monument (let's take a not so random example, the 1st world war): either very carefully take a piece of marble and put all your skills and whatever they taught you in art school and make a symbolic structure that all will admire, or you can visit the battlegrounds and arrange thousand of tombstones and let them tell the story.
And that’s kind of the same method Sjon is using to talk about the things he want, life and death, identity and memory, and of course storytelling. He’s taking all this and inflating it, maximalism galore. So does his hero, Josef Lowe, this is the same style he uses to tell his story - the fourth wall is shattered early on when we realize we are only standing there listening to a story being told, from one person to another, maybe we’re not even supposed to, but we’ll understand at the third book who is the story teller and why he narrates the way he does.
Are our memories to be trusted? Is our identity permanent or a floating brain play that depends on circumstances?
‘I thought for a minute that you were going to say my whole story was a figment of my imagination, that I don’t even exist myself, that I’m nothing more than a twinkle in God’s eye, as the little children say.’ He smiles weakly, swallowing the lump in his throat. ‘Yes, or your own imagination.’ Aleta lays a hand on the stone man’s pale misshapen arm. ‘Then we’d be figments of each other’s imagination.’
How is life experienced, is our experience of it a solidity? Or the only solid thing in the end is death?
You promised me you wouldn’t get sentimental, you promised you’d spare me the kind of banal childhood incidents that are so common that everyone has poignant memories of them, regardless of whether they happened to them or not-[...] while over all these reminiscences hangs a shared miasma that none of you noticed at the time: the powerful reck of boys’ sweat overlaid with the scent of cheap perfume and lip gloss from the girls. You story’s on a fast track into the black hole of nostalgia.
There are wonderful reviews here in Goodreads and I’ll urge to read them, if you want more details. I won’t do that here. I’ll honestly say that the book tired me at some points but I’m not sure, if it wasn’t my fault, as I was tired myself and only read 2-3 pages per day. For the same reason, I felt the 2nd book was fractured. And I’ll also honestly say that the third book broke me into pieces. It had me sobbing.
It takes the young people a moment to realise that is no ordinary dance floor. Here they dance to the silence that ensues whenever someone departs this earthly life. Each of them sways to the absence of sound that attends their footsteps and hand claps, to the absence of their voices and intestinal noises, to the absence of all the rustling, splashing, banging and creaking that resulted in their living bodies made contact with the external world, to the absence of their breathing, the absence of their heartbeat.
The “Dance” interludes of the third book which consisted of long lists of births and deaths and a everchanging dancehall that followed each decade’s music and style (yes it did), the interludes, I was saying, at first seemed like a good way to easily fast read pages and move forward. Only as they unfolded and expanded and secured their meaning, did they made sense to me as a brilliant construction. Only then, did they stop being a gimmick and acquired substance. And made the simple turning of pages a painful thing to do. And that’s pretty much true of the whole book. Only in the end everything is tied together and you are rewarded for following along the broken path. And judging from the Epilogue, the author acknowledges it was intended and that’s smart and brave of him. There is also a paragraph where the author summarizes the whole three books in simple sentences, outlining the absurdity of his own story but also leading you to understand that the storytelling is what matters.
Some would argue that the author is a megalomaniac, narcissistic overachiever and I wouldn’t necessarily argue with them. Is that a bad thing? Do I not appreciate classic works of literature, universally acknowledged and proven in time? Using "classic" methods to tell a story, safe and expected? Of course I do. But do I need to read stories from people that are not afraid to blow into the balloon of storytelling without hesitation and without fear of the boom it might make? Fuck yes, I do....more
To be honest, I wanted to read Codex 1962, the maximalist novel that many people are talking about, but since I've never read anything by Sjon before,To be honest, I wanted to read Codex 1962, the maximalist novel that many people are talking about, but since I've never read anything by Sjon before, I thought I'd give him a test drive and check his writing, before committing to 500+ pages. Test is passed and I'm giving The Blue Fox an enthusiastic 4 star rating. The book cover and the choice of the English title is misleading in making you think that this will be some kind of cute northern fairy tale. Instead this book is brutal. The brutality comes by the author's wise, for me, choice to create an old narrative voice (or rather 2), dismissing all modern rounded corners. After all, nature will not round the corners for you if an avalanche fell on you and you slided on edgy rocks. It can get disturbing, but history (including natural history) is disturbing for the most part, that's why you should read more of it. Re-thinking about it and comparing with Burial Rites I can certainly say that the latter, is clearly an outsider's modern eye perspective view of Iceland of the past and has dramatized and rounded the edges of the narrative whereas Sjon feels natural and authentic. While both books are good, I can't help but spot this authenticity difference. Off to Codex 1962!...more
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