Sjón's trilogy of stories, CoDex 1962 - making it resonate with world literature

Sjón’s CoDex 1962 (2018, in English) looks like one novel but is really three, a trilogy:

Thine Eyes Did See My Substance – a love story (1994)
Iceland’s Thousand Years – a crime story (2001)
I’m a Sleeping Door – a science fiction story (2016)

Sjón personally told me, and everyone else in the audience at the book festival, that he was born in 1962, and that everyone in Iceland would immediately recognize “CoDex” as a bookish parody of a genetic-testing company that advertises on television.  Yet the novels are not about the author, not particularly, but about his birth cohort, Icelanders born in 1962.  Or, as the subtitles of the novels suggest, stories about Sjón and his peers, especially one boy who is born in Iceland in unusual circumstances.

The stories include such characters as the golem of Prague, a werewolf, angels, and so on.  Saga heroes, of course.  Stories ancient and modern, for example from Fritz Lang’s M and Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.  Sjón is writing fiction that almost seems old-fashioned.  Remember postmodernism, or the aspect of it that was about story-telling?  When authors would enjoy themselves by mashing all kinds of stories together?  Readers, too, readers like me.

METAMORPHOSIS

One morning when Jósef L. woke up at home in bed after troubled dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant baby.  [A couple more sentences of this story, before it is interrupted.]

‘Not more stories!’

‘But this is a literary allusion.’

‘So what?’

‘It adds depth to the story of Marie-Sophie and my father, the invalid, making it resonate with world literature.’

‘I don’t care.  Tell me about the child, tell me about you.’  (Thine Eyes, pp. 64-5)

I guess there were, and are, many readers who share this exasperation.  They are likely also the ones who hate self-conscious postmodern screwing around like this.  I, by contrast, enjoy the self-aware playfulness.  Sjón piles on the tricks – dreams, poems, chapters in dialogue, a pageant of the dead.

The first novel in the trilogy is in some limited sense a Holocaust novel.  I have had doubts about the ethics of an author pumping up the significance of, say, his novel about adult literacy by attaching it to World War II atrocities, or writing about one’s love of Italian opera in the context of Maoist terrorism.  Sjón had me a little concerned early on.  But he has thought this through; later in the trilogy he addresses the issue directly.  Stories are in and of themselves powerful things.

Victoria Cribb is Sjón’s translator.  He could not  have said nicer things about her.