sjón, 'codex 1962'
‘More and more often’, Walter Benjamin wrote in 1936, ‘there is embarrassment around when the wish to hear a story is expressed’. He worried that newsprint removed stories ‘from the realm of living speech’, serving them up ‘shot through with explanation’. The old storytellers spoke more hospitably; their mazy words demanded, and repaid, your time. The Icelandic novelist Sjón shares his belief in fiction’s value, a value it’s taken centuries to accrue. ‘Most of the storylines that come up in human life’, he said in 2016, ‘as we have lived it for the past ten thousand years, have been explored before by the master storytellers of the past’. Or, as he puts it in his tenth novel, CoDex 1962: ‘Little do [authors] suspect that most of what they consider new and innovative in their works is actually so old that millennia have passed since the idea first took shape’.
CoDex 1962 took enough time itself. It’s a trilogy two decades in the making, published as separate instalments in Icelandic and now collected into a five-hundred-page English block. It wonders at the many complicated ways that it, as a lengthy novel, has of making time pass; it wonders at how its skilled narrator can give shape and colour to that passage. We’re in Reykjavík, where a man called Jósef Loewe is narrating the story of his life to a woman called Aleta Szelińska, from his parents’ meeting at the height of the Second World War to his impending death from a tissue disease called ‘stone man syndrome’. The story begins in a rural German guesthouse, with the chambermaid Marie-Sophie tending in secret to Leo, a Jewish refugee; it moves to Leo’s exile in Iceland, and his quest to give Jósef a life; it zooms out to Aleta finishing her interview with Jósef, after which she hands in her tapes to Hrólfur Zóphanías Magnússon, CEO of the genetics company CoDex, and her boss.
In another interview, from 2015, Sjón declared his belief ‘in the processing power of the reader’. He’s never written solely for those hung up on plot. Before he wrote novels, he published nine poetry collections, and in the Eighties, he co-founded a performance-artists’ collective called ‘Medúsa’. He’s described his work as ‘surrealist’, and has often written lyrics for Björk, who was a Medúsa satellite herself; in 2001, their song ‘I’ve Seen it All’, from Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, was an Oscar nominee. Introducing Sjón at a U.S. ceremony in 2013, Björk herself stressed his love of smearing past eras together and dancing away from the factuality of the here-and-now. ‘It may seem a little far-fetched,’ she said, ‘that Sjón and his group Medúsa introduced Twenties French surrealism to Eighties punk Iceland, but somehow it harmonised very well with Icelanders’ faith in magic and the supernatural’.
CoDex 1962 bears out her praise. Jósef is indefatigable, embellishing the acts of his parents with digressions, fantasies, and allegorical cosmic tales. While Marie-Sophie reads at night, the archangel Gabriel comes down to visit her; soon after, suspecting that Leo is more than a patient to Marie-Sophie, her thuggish boyfriend Karl transforms into his own nightmare double, like a figure from Henry Selick’s Coraline. Historical murderers and crime-lords blend with tales of unicorns and trolls. Even Jósef himself, we hear, wasn’t your average fleshly baby, but a creature made of clay. His soul was kindled by the sudden alchemy of love, sparking between Marie-Sophie and Leo, and he was finally born twenty years later, when Leo extracted some stolen gold from the tooth of a thug, werewolf, and stamp-collector called Hrafn W. Karlsson, melted it down into a seal, and pressed that magic ring to the little clay-child’s form.
All these tales are compared to rural pathways: ‘loose underfoot, precipitous, slippery, boggy and overgrown’. In this, despite his exiled blood, Jósef is as Icelandic as they come. His father, adrift in Reykjavík, had found his new compatriots ‘incapable of discussing things directly’. Instead, in Leo’s eyes, Icelanders ‘generally evaded all topics of conversation, using instead a philosophical mode of discourse’ – ‘a short anecdote’, maybe, or ‘examples from natural history’. Reading CoDex 1962, you’re aware that this memory must itself be a fiction; how could Jósef know what his father thought? It isn’t the only bind. Elsewhere, Jósef takes the ‘dear reader’ aside (isn’t he meant to be talking? so who’s writing?), and he promises that he’ll tell the story of an AA meeting – but, you must realise, it’ll be ‘nothing but make-believe’. Looking into the page like a window, all you can do is assent and move on. You’re at the mercy of the raconteur.
And Sjón, under Jósef’s mask, is a raconteur of talent. He can flick from angelic frolics to seedy violence as if each tale were a smooth refraction of the last. He has a knack for high comedy, too, as with the AA episode and its star, an amphetamine-munching Soviet spy. (Back in the real world, Victoria Cribb deserves equal praise for bringing all this zest into English so well.) CoDex 1962 has hundreds of narrative excursions, but very few are wearing or slow, and when they are, it only tends to be for want of a little light-heartedness. A few pages in the third volume, for instance, oversee God’s creation, then give a timelapse of 1962 as witnessed from heaven. This needs to be leavened by humour, or livened by a human touch, and when it isn’t, the taut skin of Sjón’s writing deflates; moments like these resemble Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, or the Wachowskis’ TV drama Sense8, the sorts of interminable drama that come off too earnest and too grand. But CoDex 1962 is long, and self-indulgence is human. If you love to hear someone tell stories, you’ll forgive them a few missed cues.
Aleta leaves Jósef’s home in 2012, shortly before his death. Cycling away, she reflects on everything that she (and we) have heard. She’s a canny reader herself. She saw how Jósef digressed ‘every time he encountered a painful thought or memory’, for instance. She saw, too, how the details of a story have the imprint of their author. Notice that Leo gets involved with the illegal trading of stamps, while Gabriel, who enters the narrative here and there, is the patron saint of messengers, and therefore of the Icelandic post. All of the minutiae gravitate home. In the end, Aleta thinks, Jósef was ‘a disabled man who had trouble telling the difference between fiction and reality’. But this needn’t be a judgement, still less a critique. A storyteller, wrote Benjamin, is someone who offers his listeners not facts, but the gift of his experience. Jósef, then, is someone worth hearing – a man, Benjamin would say, ‘who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story’.
[for the Telegraph, 28/7/18]
