Icelandic novelist and poet Sjón
CoDex 1962 - an epic trilogy composed of three novels: a love story, a crime story, a science fiction story.
From beginning to end, a cornucopia of stories and stories within stories and stories within stories within stories.
How to review this unique book? As my own modest attempt to click into Sjón's literary vibe, I'll shift to a mode of reviewing that embraces other reviews and reviewers, a mode of reviewing that also shares snips of a number of CoDex 1962 stories as if those stories tumble out, gush out, spout, surge and spurt out of Sjón's storytelling horn of plenty.
Why not? After all, when talking of his vast novel, Sjón describes a huge whale that swims through the ocean with its mouth open and swallows and digests everything that comes its way - so much like the novel (ah!, the grand novel form) that can swallow, digest, embrace and express all other literary and non-literary forms.
At any rate, here goes:
According to Parul Sehgal, "The book review belongs to the province of pleasure. It directs readers to ideas that will stretch their sensoriums, that will give them a gladness, an exquisite fright or sorrow." Perhaps Parul was reminded of such sensorium stretching when she wrote of CoDex 1962: "Everything I can scarcely bear in novels, I found in this book. I was spirited away - for a time."
What a novel! Parul tells us, "The plot is set in motion when a Jewish fugitive flees a concentration camp, carrying with him a lump of clay in the shape of a baby - a golem." Turns out, this lump of clay golem is Jósef Loewe, the tale's narrator. Parul goes on to say, "This book is a Norse Arabian Nights. Each section is a honeycomb. Stories are nesting in stories and crack open to reveal rumor after anecdote, prose poems, tendrils of myth." The New York Times is so very fortunate Parul has taken over for longstanding reviewer Michiko Kakutani.
Guardian Reviewer Eileen Battersby writes, "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." Added to this, Eileen observes that Sjón is heir to Mikhail Bulgakov and Laurence Sterne and creates a literary extravaganza where Bosch meets Chagall with an occasional touch of Tarantino. You gotta love all of Eileen's literary references.
Goodreads reviewer Meike informs us how the second part of Codex 1962, the crime story, is "based on a biography of the only known Icelander who survived a concentration camp" and how this section "shows Leo coming to Iceland as a refugee and, with the help of a Russian spy and a black scholar of religion, trying to get back his magical golden ring which he needs to bring Jósef to life."
Speaking of the tale's Part III, Meike lets us know "The title refers to a poem by Sjón who shows up in his own novel: He and Jósef were both born in 1962 and meet within the text. An integral part of this installment is the story of CoDex, a fictional company that is based on the real Icelandic biopharmacelutical enterprise deCODE genetics." Thanks, Meike!
And here are my favorite lines from Katharine Coldiron's review of the novel for Los Angeles Review of Books: "The sprawl of the trilogy, the messiness, the tonal contradictions, the storytelling that often confuses and occasionally bores - all these qualities offer a window into the broader human story that a novel coloring strictly inside the lines could never achieve. It's a risky, funny, sexy, entirely unique book, and its odd corners make it easy to love."
As for the stories themselves, in addition to the golem, a unicorn and angles, there's the one with a child spotting a dwarf on a train, one where a kaiser can magically disappear in a forest, one where two little birds sweetly sing woof-woof-woof while a chubby gingerbread boy has an erection.
Stories, stories: a grandma keeps a pet tigress in her kitchen, a robot talks, a flyer of a biplane is immortal, a tramp stitched together from corpses of WWI dead soldiers pays a visit to war widows to give them a round of pleasure, nannies' shrieks of horror sound like holy music, a berserker thinks its his inner voice when a chick speaks inside his tooth.
Stories, stories: Will a peaceful group of Aborigines defeat the Tasmanian Werewolf? Is the One-eyed Man terrorizing the townsfolk in Jósef's home town? Will the Nazis get away with employing their Machine of World Destruction? Are outer space aliens following an ice-breaker to Iceland?
And more stories: Is speaking in tongues pleasing to God? What's the major event following the birth of Confucius? Who's the first child of 1962?
Oh, I could go on and on and on. But I'll stop here and simply say if this string of reviewer snips and flashes of storytelling whet your appetite and you decide to give Sjón's novel a go, then I (with a little help from my friends!) have done my job as reviewer.
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