From the Mouth of the Whale

In 1635, Jónas Pálmason finds himself exiled to a barren island off the coast of Iceland, an old man whose family as all lost and whose country has been ruined by poverty, fear and religious persecution. He's a poet, and artist and a naturalist, a scientist from a time when exorcism and alchemy were part of the scientist's job; a lonely scout of the Enlightenment rejected by a country that's still in the Dark Ages. Sitting on his rock with nothing to expect but a cold and lonely death, he cycles through alternately ecstatic and terrifying visions of the universe, and recalls the events of his life: a childhood spent collecting crows' heads, a visit to Copenhagen, the riddle of a unicorn's horn; the exorcism of a ghost, the brutal massacre of a Basque whaling fleet, the births and deaths of his children.

The remarkable thing about From the Mouth of the Whale is the sheer power of its portrayal of a time, a place, and a mind. The author (an occasional collaborator with Bjork, and Oscar nominee for the lyrics he wrote for her part in Lars von Trier's pitch-black musical Dancer in the Dark) is one of the Nordic world's most prominent novelists, and his writing is as attached to Iceland - its hard landscape, its black winters, its textures of rock and bone - as that of his forbear, the Nobel-winning Halldor Laxness. But where Laxness was a social realist, a wry comedian and a grumpy fabulist, Sjón flies his freak flag with a vengeance: without overstatement or amplitude or the kind of wackiness that tries your patience, he's written a book that's unutterably strange and exotic. He sidles up out of the dark and the cold, and he whispers in your ear, and you stiffen.