CoDex 1962 by Sjón

Abstract

and much, much more. They learned that there are some one hundred books published each year, comprising all the literary genres; that Frisian music includes classical , pop, folk, opera, hard rock, ballads, hymns, and more; that the more universal poetry by Frisian poets like Obe Postma and Tsjêbbe Hettinga has been translated into English; that best-selling prose authors like Rink van der Velde and Hylke Speerstra have been translated into English as well as Nynke van Hichtem’s classic children’s novel Afke’s Ten; that classics like the Iliad and Odyssey and Ovid’s Metamorphoses as well as works by Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Tolkien have been translated into Frisian . And much more. They may have wondered, where did all this come from—the language, the culture, the literature? That’s where this compact introduction comes in. It’s a shortened evolution story of Frisian as a separate recorded language in the early Middle Ages to the flourishing of Frisian literature in our own time. In seven chronologically organized chapters, Joke Corporaal describes the most significant developments and characteristics of Frisian literature. The evolutionary trajectory was not necessarily a smooth one. It moved through periods of “mere scribbles,” ruralism, moralism, regionalism, Romanticism , experimentalism, and unabashed, raw realism since the 1960s. And all along the way there were tensions in visions and viewpoints . But there were also foundational Books in Review Sjón CoDex 1962 Trans. Victoria Cribb. London. Sceptre Books. 2018. 517 pages. ICELANDIC AUTHOR SJÓN’S masterful tome CoDex 1962 is now available in English translation—and this is cause to celebrate. The work is in three parts, identified as “a love story,” “a crime story,” and “a science fiction story,” but what it really is is an intellectual playground, one where the author can exercise his considerable gifts roaming modern Western civilization . In spirit, this novel feels like a noble descendant from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which Sjón describes as a formative early influence. This places it in such immediately contemporary company as Georgi Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow, Louis Armand’s The Combinations , certain works of Pynchon, and so on. Yet as with all such works, it’s not the categorizing, of course, but the work’s own strikingly individual, grounded yet independent streak that is such a delight. Sometimes sentences balloon to nearly Krasznahorkai scope and complexity; in other places, traditional dialogue and pacing situate scenes squarely in more familiar twentieth-century literary territory . References permeate throughout, making this work less distinctly a novel at times and more a metacommentary—a sort of thinking script, which benefits the more cultural ballast one can bring to it. Pushkin and Kafka seem as present at times as the book’s ostensibly main cast: Leo, Marie-Sophie, Karl, the Archangel Gabriel, and all the rest. Principally, it is a satisfying romp of forms. Fragments, scenes, and ideas, filtered through a kaleidoscope of textual lenses, do all hold together, by sheer authorial force of will, even though this text was first published as three separate novels in the original Icelandic. Behind all this play, of course, lurk serious matters. The author has been quoted as saying that CoDex 1962 is “a novel about a dying man trying to find a place for himself within the grand narrative of human history.” The story revolves partly around a new version of the Golem myth, of a man created from clay. Sjón was SJÓN 96 WLT WINTER 2019 pillars like Gysbert Japiks who, in the seventeenth century, elevated Frisian to literary status through the quality of his poetry, which was fit even for the literati and the academics at the Franeker Academy. Later, in the nineteenth century, it was the Halbertsma brothers who awakened Frisians to the charms of literature in their own language. In the more turbulent twentieth century it was Wadman, Riemersma, and others who aimed to push Frisian literature far outside its provincial boundaries, though many authors were content to continue to write and improve the quality of a more regional literature. This short history is not intended for scholars but for students and a general public interested in learning more...