144 World Literature Today reviews ancient Greek histories—which the interpreter reads on his breaks—and the memoirs of a Soviet-era singer whose biography the interpreter is commissioned to write. In each story, Shishkin brilliantly reproduces a distinctive style, placing each story in a recognizable time and place. But once the stories enter Maidenhair, they start to bleed into one other. Images and motifs from the singer’s story appear in the asylum hearings, and refugees from a former Soviet republic run into an ancient Greek army. Themes, images, and even characters echo between discrete storylines in a way that transcends the usual rules of geography and time. In interviews, Shishkin has said that his novel takes place “everywhere and always.” This speaks to the universality of Shishkin’s themes, but more than that, it suggests that time and place are not the organizing principles of his work. Rather, they are the constraints his novel works to overcome, and other connections— thematic, visual, auditory—are the fibers that bring these disparate stories together into one novel. This array of connections forms a complex puzzle that can at times be dizzyingly intricate and even baffling . But disentangling Shishkin’s structure is one of the principal pleasures of reading Maidenhair. It is not only aesthetically satisfying but also reveals Shishkin’s unique worldview, which manages to engage Russia’s literary heritage while at the same time creating something new and altogether original. Bradley Gorski Columbia University Sjón. The Whispering Muse. Victoria Cribb, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. isbn 9781846591242 Valdimar Haraldsson, in The Whispering Muse, finds that fish are both sustenance and inspiration. His preoccupation with fish consumption by the Nordic race prompted Haraldsson to publish twenty years’ worth of the journal Fisk og Kulture; one can read the full account, he says, in his Memoirs of a Herring Inspector. When the father of an old friend invites him to join him on a merchant ship traveling from Norway to Turkey, Haraldsson accepts. He soon finds that the shipboard postprandial entertainment is provided by second mate Caeneus, who holds to his ear a splinter of wood that we later learn is from the talking prow of the ancient Argo. Caeneus relates a tale of the Argonauts visiting the Isle of Lemnos, where the men have been killed and the women now wish to begin the happy task of repopulating. Thus, the journey of the Argo is delayed while the journey of the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen is delayed. The captain has sailed up Fredafjord to a sawmill where logs are cut, pulped, and pressed into sheets of paper. His intention is to load two thousand tons of paper for delivery to the Black Sea coast. It does not escape our notice that this is the creation of the stuff upon which literature is printed. Haraldsson spends many happy hours watching as the hold is filled with pristine paper. Though the muse confers, the captain commands. Caeneus must attend to duties following dinner one evening, and Haraldsson finally receives the invitation to share his own work. He describes the physiology of fish and explains how the Nordic race benefited mankind with great inventions such as the steam engine and the airplane, while, on the other hand, Roman society, populated by short people, fell into ruin. Such are the benefits of eating fish. Haraldsson delivers the lecture with a self-described “consummate skill” and is puzzled when the reaction is much like his own review of the evening’s poor fish stew: “The resulting mixture was far from appetising and formed a grey gloop on one’s fork like spiky rice pudding.” For some it seems, the muse may whisper, and for others it may whisper sweet nothings. When a poet such as Sjón (Sigurj ón Birgir Sigurdsson) writes a novel, the reader may expect the elliptical in both senses of the word—economy and ambiguousness. Seamlessly translated by Victoria Cribb, the book suggests there are those who scrawl along, ultimately becoming connoisseurs of their own drab blatherskite, Georgina Harding Painter of Silence Bloomsbury Shortlisted for the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction, this elegant novel is set in post–World War II...