From the Mouth of the Whale - Softcover

Sjon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846590833 ISBN 13: 9781846590832

Publisher: Telegram Books, 2011

Synopsis

Shortlisted for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize 2013 and The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012

The year is 1635. Iceland is a world darkened by superstition, poverty and cruelty. Men of science marvel over a unicorn s horn, poor folk worship the Virgin in secret and both books and men are burnt. Jónas Pálmason, a poet and self-taught healer, has been condemned to exile for heretical conduct, having fallen foul of the local magistrate. Banished to a barren island, Jónas recalls his exorcism of a walking corpse on the remote Snjáfjöll coast, the frenzied massacre of innocent Basque whalers at the hands of local villagers, and the deaths of three of his children.

From the Mouth of the Whale is a magical evocation of an enlightened mind and a vanished age.

About this title

Product Description

Title: From the Mouth of the Whale <>Binding: Paperback <>Author: Sjon <>Publisher: SAQI BOOKS

Review

'Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head. The most recent has been the Icelander Sjón, whose work is unlike anything I had read, and very exciting ... I think of Icelanders as erudite, singular, tough, and uncompromising. Sjón is all these things, but he is also quicksilver, playful and surreal ... [Sjón] has changed the way I see things.' A.S. Byatt, The New York Review of Books

'Hallucinatory, lyrical and by turn comic and tragic-an extraordinary novel.' Hari Kunzru'Sjón is the trickster that makes the world; and he is achingly brilliant... strange and wonderful, an epic made mad, made extraordinary.' Junót Diaz

'Sjón is a poet, and the aesthetic excitement is his own. He is an extraordinary and original writer. And his translator, Victoria Cribb, is also extraordinary in her rendering of the roughness and the elegance, the clarity and the oddity of this splendid book.' A.S. Byatt, Guardian

'The narrative is kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing, comic and poignant by turns. Victoria Cribb's translation brilliantly captures these multiple changes in tone and scene. Switching between the language of the learned, both superstitious and scientific, the invective directed at Jónas's enemies, ghost-laying poetry, and the dim twilight portents of the original Icelandic title which unsettle man and nature, the surrealism of Sjón's earlier writings has here been harnessed to an urgent ethical interrogation of what remains when community is destroyed, the truth-teller is exiled and when learning becomes suspect. From the Mouth of the Whale should open up a world of Icelandic writing beyond the crime novel and Reykjavik-based stories of disaffected urban youth, a world of nature and of ideas, which stands comparison with the Iceland of the Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness.' Carolyne Larrington TLS

'Sjón writes like a madman. His novel is by turns wildly comic and incandescent, elegant and brittle with the harsh loneliness of a world turned to winter.' Washington Post

'Sjón recreates a lost world of ignorance, superstition and sheer beastliness. Jonas's dry, lucid, witty voice makes this peculiar novel surprisingly enjoyable.' The Times

'Sjón's remarkable tale imagines a delirious 17th-century Iceland swithering between mysticism and a new scientific rationalism, and it is rendered brilliantly into English in Victoria Cribb's exuberant translation.' Nick Barley

'Beautiful prose, sharp observation of nature, folklore, poetry, grotesque violence, human loss, and outright comic chaos weave in and out of this confidently written novel in which the narrative tone is in perfect pitch with the story being told.' --New York Journal of Books

Shortlisted --International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize 2013
and
Shortlisted --The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012

Hallucinatory, lyrical and by turn comic and tragic-an extraordinary novel. --Hari Kunzru

'Sjon is the trickster that makes the world; and he is achingly brilliant... strange and wonderful, an epic made mad, made extraordinary.' --Junot Diaz

Sjón is a poet, and the aesthetic excitement is his own. He is an extraordinary and original writer. And his translator, Victoria Cribb, is also extraordinary in her rendering of the roughness and the elegance, the clarity and the oddity of this splendid book. --A.S. Byatt, Guardian

The narrative is kaleidoscopic and mesmerizing, comic and poignant by turns. Victoria Cribb s translation brilliantly captures these multiple changes in tone and scene. Switching between the language of the learned, both superstitious and scientific, the invective directed at Jónas s enemies, ghost-laying poetry, and the dim twilight portents of the original Icelandic title which unsettle man and nature, the surrealism of Sjón s earlier writings has here been harnessed to an urgent ethical interrogation of what remains when community is destroyed, the truth-teller is exiled and when learning becomes suspect. From the Mouth of the Whale should open up a world of Icelandic writing beyond the crime novel and Reykjavik-based stories of disaffected urban youth, a world of nature and of ideas, which stands comparison with the Iceland of the Nobel Prize laureate Halldór Laxness. --Carolyne Larrington TLS

Sjón writes like a madman. His novel is by turns wildly comic and incandescent, elegant and brittle with the harsh loneliness of a world turned to winter. --Washington Post

Sjón recreates a lost world of ignorance, superstition and sheer beastliness. Jonas' s dry, lucid, witty voice makes this peculiar novel surprisingly enjoyable. --The Times

Sjón's remarkable tale imagines a delirious 17th-century Iceland swithering between mysticism and a new scientific rationalism, and it is rendered brilliantly into English in Victoria Cribb's exuberant translation. --Nick Barley

Beautiful prose, sharp observation of nature, folklore, poetry, grotesque violence, human loss, and outright comic chaos weave in and out of this confidently written novel in which the narrative tone is in perfect pitch with the story being told. --New York Journal of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Telegram Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846590833
• ISBN 13: 9781846590832
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 275