Unlike the experience of most English-language readers, the first I heard of Sjón was not The Blue Fox or Moonstone or through his collaborations with Björk. It was when I reviewed CoDex 1962 for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2018. The review is fairly confident, but the truth is I was puzzled by the book, as I am by most literature not created under the compressions of American capitalism: it floats, it dreams, it gallops, it dances. Sjón seemed an imp, a meddler of tremendous skill and charm, a mind of extraordinary, but not permanently fixed, attention. (These were unprofessional notions, but I held them close anyway.) The first two books of the trilogy that forms CoDex 1962 were so different than the final one; I noted in my review that these three books’ publications were separated by decades, but I failed to get across how I experienced the difference as a reader. The first two were politically pointed, and they were brash, untidy. The third felt more sincere, more carefully polished, more the product of accumulating years and wisdom.
These were conclusions I drew based on this one trilogy and my knowledge of when the books in it were written, rather than knowledge of the writer. They were insupportable via the text, so I set them aside. But reading Sjón’s new English-language publication revived these ideas.
Under the Wings of the Valkyrie was published in Icelandic in 1994, and is only now being published in English. Reading it, I was reminded of those first two books of CoDex 1962. Valkyrie was written before Sjón became known worldwide as a postmodern Aesop, when his work leaned more toward Dada and less toward Ovid. In it, an architect named Fridjón B. Fridriksson (eagle-eyed readers will note that Sjon rejiggered this name for one of the main characters in The Blue Fox, naturalist Fridrik B. Fridriksson) writes a letter to his beloved, Áshildur, to confess a decades-long affair with another woman. The affair begins in Fridjón’s boyhood, when he sees a television broadcast about Gudrun Ensslin, along with the rest of the Baader-Meinhof gang (also known as the Red Army Faction or RAF), being arrested. He has visions and dreams about Gudrun, explicitly sexual ones, for many years. Throughout this narrative, Fridjón continues to insist to Áshildur that he loves her passionately: “You were everything she wasn’t: alive, funny and understanding. My first encounter with love. […] And ever since we moved in together, I’ve lived the best days of my life.” By the close of the narrative, he explains that he has freed himself from Gudrun’s spell — very literally, and surgically.
I had hoped to interview Sjón about this book. I wanted to ask him about publishing a 30-year-old book with a press, Isolarii, that has such an unusual model, and I wanted to ask him less practical questions about the purpose and meaning of this project. It turned out that Sjón was unavailable for my questions, for reasons I cannot fault. Fortunately, an opportunity arose for me soon enough.
While watching a documentary on the Baader-Meinhof collective, I fell asleep on my couch. I dreamed of walking across a frozen landscape, black mountains in the distance, the earth rumbling with impatience beneath me. A miniature blue fox, the size of a mouse, bounded ahead, pausing to look at me with accusation. I followed it, and it led me to an island of dark earth, steaming with warmth. Under a stunted tree sat a coyote, transplanted from my Los Angeles home to this cold place. As I watched, the coyote melted and re-formed into a human, an Icelandic writer of great renown, a songwriter and poet and screenwriter and postmodernist extraordinaire: Sjón, sitting in a lotus pose, grinning.
“What am I doing here?” I asked.
“This is your interview with me,” he said.
“You’re going to let me ask you questions about Under the Wings of the Valkyrie?”
“Yes!”
“How many?”
“You’ll know when you’ve asked enough,” he said.
* * *
KC: Why on earth did you choose Gudrun Ensslin as the sexual ideal for this book?
S: Perversity, I think. I wanted to shock in those days. The idea of her is quite different than the reality of her, just as the idea of RAF was quite different than the reality. Especially now, in a Germany that no longer has a wall. Then, they were rock stars. Also, remember your Americanness: there are no shades of gray between terrorist and rock star for you, just a black that turns immediately to white. My intention was to subvert, and there is so little art of yours that truly subverts.
KC: That’s my belief. I don’t know if it’s yours.
S: Relax into this format, Katharine dear. Be brave.
KC: You continually use Gudrun Ensslin’s full name, which makes me think she’s a kind of Foucauldian referent rather than a real person. The way some 2000s-era writers wrote stories including celebrities without exploring the celebrity’s actual possible personality. It could’ve been any celebrity. They just wanted a recognizable name to pique the reader.
S: That’s roughly correct, though I did choose her on purpose. My collages and artwork throughout the book are about the real RAF and the real Gudrun. The political element is unmistakable.
KC: I do want to ask you about the collages and the political element, but that’s two separate questions.
S: The collages were a fun way to exercise a new part of my creativity. You know I’ve never been restricted to one genre. You like to collage, too, don’t you?
KC: I focus so much on words. Collages help me with the abstract, not needing le mot juste for one hour of my life.
S: Exactly. And this novella is partially about public image, about imagery, about visual propaganda. Dreaming is all imagery. I had to put some of that in. Otherwise the reader would be stuck in a puddle of my words, and might not have a reference for the images of real life I drew from.
KC: I noticed that your books of the 1990s are far more political, and yet somewhat more playful, than your later books.
S: Oh, the arrogance of youth. I haven’t lost either edge, the political or the playful, but I felt the need to spell it all out in earlier books, and to be perhaps a little more careless than I am now. Look at how I handled it in Moonstone — the boy is harmed greatly by the political circumstances of a historical moment, but he himself is small, and not intentionally radical. This is not a concentration camp survivor, as in the first book of CoDex! That’s a hammer between the eyes.
KC: In that trilogy you went from stolen gold teeth to a full-on fable. All the way from literal to allegorical.
S: Well, Jósef is a baby Golem, too. I was interested in ancient storytelling traditions even early on. You’re not wrong, though — 22 years passed between the first bit I wrote on that trilogy and the last bit, and twenty-two years will make a mark on anyone’s politics.
KC: Where does Gudrun fit in?
S: I made her both a real-life boogeyman and a mythical one.
KC: But does that mean you disapprove of her actions? The real Gudrun’s real actions?
[Sjón winks.]
KC: Let me put it this way. Whenever I think you’ve written a setup that’s a genuine political allegory, you turn back in the direction of folk tale or fable. You lean away from the real. This concerns me, as it feels like I shouldn’t take your politics seriously.
S: Katharine, how can you of all people say that folk tales or fables shouldn’t be taken seriously? You believe storytelling is a sacred act. You loved the way I weaved film into Moonstone. You loved it so much it ached.
KC: True.
S: Then you must know that it’s all of a piece for me. Gudrun as a succubus—yes, that’s pretty funny, but it can also be serious, in how extremism drains the life out of a nation. Political revenge via animal transformation is no less valid than trials at the Hague. Fables are perhaps the most beautiful way to tell a hard story.
Blending the ancient wisdom of folk tales with the surreal 21st century makes something that helps us all survive, me included. I am blessed to be able to do this, to be a magpie of styles and circumstances, and to finish with something very nice I can give to you.
KC: I still don’t understand how seriously to take this book. How much of it is posture and fun, and how much of it is genuine commentary.
* * *
After that, I blinked, and a coyote sat under the stunted tree again. He lowered his nose, so I could see his eyes and oversized ears, not his teeth. A chilly wind blew, and I opened my eyes, on my couch. YouTube had autoplayed a video about the Weather Underground after the Baader-Meinhof doc ended. Wusses, I thought, rather unkindly.
I wanted to ask many more questions about Under the Wings of the Valkyrie. I wanted to ask about the timing of its release (it’s an unstable world right now, as it was during Gudrun Ensslin’s moment, but it’s possible no one until now wanted to publish a book that lusted so blatantly after a 20th century villain). I wanted to ask about the translation (not done by Victoria Cribb, his usual translator, but Brian FitzGibbon; why so, and had Sjón ever considered translating himself?). I wanted to ask about the process of working with Isolarii (whose idea was it to print the book in such a huge font? any necessary compromises with the collage element?).
Instead, I got a dream of the author.
Given the source material, I considered myself lucky.
/ / /
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