CoDex 1962: A Trilogy

by Sjón, Victoria Cribb (Translator)

Overview

Spanning eras, continents, and genres, CoDex 1962—twenty years in the making—is Sjón’s epic three-part masterpiece

Over the course of four dazzling novels translated into dozens of languages, Sjón has earned a global reputation as one of the world’s most interesting writers. But what the world has never been able to read is his great trilogy of novels, known collectively as CoDex 1962—now finally complete.

Josef Löwe, the narrator, was born in 1962—the same year, the same moment even, as Sjón. Josef’s story, however, stretches back decades in the form of Leo Löwe—a Jewish fugitive during World War II who has an affair with a maid in a German inn; together, they form a baby from a piece of clay. If the first volume is a love story, the second is a crime story: Löwe arrives in Iceland with the clay-baby inside a hatbox, only to be embroiled in a murder mystery—but by the end of the volume, his clay son has come to life. And in the final volume, set in present-day Reykjavík, Josef’s story becomes science fiction as he crosses paths with the outlandish CEO of a biotech company (based closely on reality) who brings the story of genetics and genesis full circle. But the future, according to Sjón, is not so dark as it seems.

In CoDex 1962, Sjón has woven ancient and modern material and folklore and cosmic myths into a singular masterpiece—encompassing genre fiction, theology, expressionist film, comic strips, fortean studies, genetics, and, of course, the rich tradition of Icelandic storytelling.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250238122
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/10/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	528
Sales rank:	822,161
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic author whose novels have been published in over thirty-five languages. He won the Nordic Council's Literary Prize for his novel The Blue Fox(the Nordic countries' equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) and the novel From The Mouth Of The Whale was shortlisted for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The novel Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was received every literary prize in Iceland, including the coveted Icelandic Literary Prize. CoDex 1962, a novel in three books written over 25 years, was published in Iceland in 2016 to great acclaim. As a poet, librettist, and lyricist, Sjón has published more than a half dozen poetry collections, written four opera libretti, and lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics in the film Dancer In The Dark. Sjón is the president of PEN International's Icelandic Centre and lives in Reykjavik with his wife and two children.

Victoria Cribb has spent the last twenty-five years immersed in Iceland’s language and literature. After reading Old Icelandic at Cambridge, she took an MA in Scandinavian Studies at University College London and a BPhil in Icelandic at the University of Iceland, before working in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist, and translator. Since 2002 she has lived in London, working as a freelance translator, and currently also teaches Icelandic at University College London and in Cambridge. Her translations include Sjón’s The Blue Fox, From the Mouth of the Whale, The Whispering Muse, and Moonstone, and three novels in collaboration with Olaf Olafsson, as well as countless other works of fiction and nonfiction, published in books, anthologies, and magazines.

Editorial Reviews

…this book is psychedelic, it's potent and it wants to consume the whole world…Sjon is a prodigal storyteller, in all senses of the phrase…CoDex 1962 sows plot upon plot, in the tradition of epics and sagas. Or perhaps they're all one plot, is the idea. Less obviously, but also less equivocally, Sjon is a prodigious student of the techniques of earthbound fiction. He is a master of atmosphere, a fine observer of the cross-hatchings of human motivation and a vivid noticer of detail…The title [Sjon's] chosen may put readers in mind of recent megaliths like 2666 and 1Q84, but those books, for all their size, were strategically linear. In its hunger to connect far-flung times and places, CoDex 1962 more closely resembles the wonder-cabinet approach to global fiction adopted in works by David Mitchell and Ruth Ozeki. At their best, these anthological novels are like Cornell boxes, disparate gleanings held in tension by a single sensibility.

The New York Times Book Review - Garth Risk Hallberg

★ 07/23/2018
Icelander Sjón (The Blue Fox) is something of a cult figure in the English-speaking world—but that should change with his genre-bending volume, a trilogy that has the zealous heft of a lifelong labor. The book begins in Germany in the chaos of World War II, as a Jewish man named Leo Löwe enters into an affair with a barmaid. Together they make a child of a sort named Josef—one made of clay and carried in a hatbox into Iceland. There, Leo gets caught up in a plot involving Nazi gangsters and a conspiracy to steal a golden tooth from the mouth of Leo’s archenemy. In 1962, Leo’s clay son Josef finally awakens and grows into a poet who attends medical school, where he encounters an unhinged geneticist with big plans for Josef, as well as Sjón himself. But all of this is still only half the story, as the main story line is stitched together with excerpts from Viking sagas, fairy tales, and creation myths. In fact, it might make more sense to consider this book an ornate frame story for the fables with which Sjón studs his narrative. Sjón is more than a novelist; he is a storyteller in the ancient tradition, and this work may be remembered as his masterpiece. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Sjon is a prodigal storyteller in all senses of the phrase . . . He is a master of atmosphere, a fine observer of the cross-hatchings of human motivation, and a vivid noticer of detail." —Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review

"The Icelandic literary maverick and Oscar-nominated songwriter Sjón writes with a poet's ear and a musician's natural sense of rhythm. [In] this extraordinary performance . . . the effect is hypnotic. The reader becomes a gleeful collaborator in an extravaganza in which Bosch meets Chagall, with touches of Tarantino." —Eileen Battersby, The Guardian

"A work of virtuoso narrative . . . An Icelandic 1001 Nights." —The Sunday Times

"[A] challenging and cacophonous epic by the talented Sjón . . . An amalgam of creation myth, surrealist absurdity, ancient saga, and contemporary satire." —Booklist

"Sjón is more than a novelist; he is a storyteller in the ancient tradition, and this work may be remembered as his masterpiece." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In this beguiling, surpassingly eccentric triptych, Icelandic novelist Sjón takes on, in turn, romance (classic, not Gothic), mystery, and science fiction to examine how people parse themselves into little camps and try to make their way through this harsh world . . . Sjón’s work is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Strange—but stunning." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Sjón 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 . . . Victoria Cribb deserves equal praise for bringing all this zest into English so well." —Cal Revely-Calder, The Daily Telegraph (UK)

"A work of virtuoso narrative . . . an Icelandic 1001 Nights." —Phil Baker, The Sunday Times (UK)

"A master of Icelandic fiction . . . Sjón's stories compound the dreamscapes of surrealism, the marvels of Icelandic folklore and a pop-culture sensibility into free-form fables." —The Economist (UK)

“No one can escape Sjón’s wild originality.” —Informatíon (Denmark)

“Sjón delivers a complex story in which violence and desire, voices and actions, are beautifully woven together.” —Politiken (Denmark)

“It’s as if Hans Christian Andersen is telling a story by Kafka, or vice versa.” —Dagens Nyheter (Sweden)

“Sjón’s book gives us hope for the novel as an art form.” —Sydsvenska Dagbladet (Sweden)

From the Publisher

★ 2018-06-18
A clay figurine becomes human only to join the ranks of those fated to die in a world cursed by division and nationalism.In this beguiling, surpassingly eccentric triptych, Icelandic novelist Sjón (Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was, 2016, etc.) takes on, in turn, romance (classic, not Gothic), mystery, and science fiction to examine how people parse themselves into little camps and try to make their way through this harsh world. Each part of the (sometimes very loosely) joined narrative offers origin stories—how Reykjavík came to be ("The universal boy found the earth beautiful and shrank his hand so that he could touch it"), how a chicken saved the people of a tiny German village "from being slain by a ferocious berserker who once rampaged across the Continent," how people live and die and are forgotten. The story begins with a Jewish fugitive who, hiding with a German girl, creates a clay child—a golem, that is to say. At war's end, the fugitive makes his way to Iceland. There, as the story shifts into a noirish procedural, Leo Loewe is caught up in a murder case that, among other puzzles, has him trying to distinguish Nazi from mere nationalist—no easy matter, as anyone studying today's headlines will know. Though a stolid Icelander assures Leo that "the Nazis had played truant from modern Icelandic history," it's an observation occasioned by the fact that he's circumcised, as different from his neighbors as his clay creation, who eventually comes to life through curious alchemy. Jósef's transformation comes about in a different world, though, a biotechnological dystopia ruled by "nationalism and greed," to say nothing of corporations and governments making hay of the Icelandic gene pool and strategic location. All humans, Sjón seems to instruct, are wanting, some more than others, but all bound to the same destiny, even as the ghosts of all those who came before await those "dear brothers and sisters, born in 1962," like Sjón himself.Though occasionally reminiscent of David Mitchell, Sjón's work is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Strange—but stunning.

Kirkus Reviews