Sjón writes with a poet’s ear and a musician’s natural sense of rhythm ... [an] extraordinary performance ... From the opening pages and through much of a chaotic if playfully executed narrative, the influence of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum is evident. Sjón has mastered the earlier fabulist’s technique of merging history with high-speed comedy and surreal profundity ... His wild, subversive imagination is among his great strengths ... This wayward, exciting odyssey confronts death throughout.
It contains every fictional element and effect I’m leery of — unicorns, for example. Elaborate framing devices. Moist ruminations on mythopoeia. Angels. Everything I can scarcely bear in novels, I found in this book. And I was spirited away — for a time ... it toys with every genre under the sun ... One blindingly beautiful section comprises a list of surrealist images, the nightly dreams of a group of townspeople ... This book is a Norse Arabian Nights. Each section is a honeycomb. Stories are nested in stories and crack open to reveal rumor and anecdote, prose poems, tendrils of myth. This abundance isn’t an empty show of virtuosity but rooted in Sjon’s belief in the power and obligation of old-fashioned storytelling ... Where Sjon occasionally loses the reader is when he extols stories for their sheer existence, when he basks in their plenitude and his proficiency ... CoDex 1962 raised me up, let me down and consumed me for the better part of a week.
...it is undoubtedly Sjón’s masterpiece ... This playfulness is something Sjón is known for, his work often flitting between realism, fairytale, and the surreal. But here, genre is explicitly invoked, leading us to wonder how the titles come into play within the greater structure of the story ... CoDex is more an anthology of stories than it is a straightforward sequence ... by shunning traditional narrative structures, Sjón instead alludes to the greater patchwork of stories that make up world literature ... in CoDex, we really see Sjón’s storytelling style in epic scale — and it’s anything but serious. Important, yes. But as playful, and funny, and experimental as Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita ... in CoDex, he doesn’t mean to treat himself as an authority, but more to remind us that it is readers, not authors, who are in control — which gives us reason for hope, if we choose it.
Sjon’s tall tales celebrate...cultural contamination. Their style skips gleefully among a dozen genres, 'visionary poems' to 'futuristic films,' 'folk tales' to 'gossip columns' (all namechecked by Jósef). Victoria Cribb, the sure-footed translator, keeps pace with every swerve ... Sjon’s finale anchors his ingenuity to a moving plea for solidarity.
Yes, he writes beautifully, thoughtfully, leaping from bawdy jokes to lyrical considerations of life and death. The 500-plus pages of the trilogy clip along as if the book is half that length ... And his characters—even those as well trodden as the Archangel Gabriel—have lively voices and definitive motivations ... The tension of these mysteries makes every page hum ... However, the sprawl of the trilogy, the messiness, the tonal contradictions, the storytelling that often confuses and occasionally bores—all these qualities offer a window into the broader human story that a novel coloring strictly inside the lines could never achieve. It’s a risky, funny, sexy, entirely unique book, and its odd corners make it easier to love ... But then I consider the project of postmodernism, and whether a postmodern novel has to add up to or say anything, and it doesn’t, really ... Perhaps that’s why CoDex 1962 dissatisfied me: I sought a lesson in the Calvinist sense, but I shouldn’t have.
...this book is psychedelic, it’s potent and it wants to consume the whole world ... Sjon is a prodigal storyteller ... Sjon is a prodigious student of the techniques of earthbound fiction. He is a master of atmosphere, a fine observer of the cross-hatchings of human motivation and a vivid noticer of detail ... At their best, these anthological novels are like Cornell boxes, disparate gleanings held in tension by a single sensibility ... Sjon is a deeply personal writer, and the most powerful reading of CoDex 1962 is that it’s an attempt to wriggle out of the ultimate straitjacket: mortality itself.
In CoDex 1962: A Trilogy (515 pages; MCD/FSG), premier Icelandic novelist Sjón manages to transcend conventional genre expectations while still engraining himself within the rich tradition of fables and fairy tales ... The prose, translated by Victoria Cribb, exhibits the timeless cadence of a Grimm Brothers’ tale, yet is suffused with a profound nuance and ambiguity that evokes the surreal quirkiness of Italo Calvino (especially his Cosmicomics) or George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo ... CoDex 1962 makes the reader feel as though they are engaging with a master storyteller.
A firm believer in making readers work for their reward, Sjón offers an amalgam of creation myth, surrealist absurdity, ancient saga, and contemporary satire that is frequently bewildering. Dedicated readers and Icelandophiles may discover profundity within, and delight can also be found in Sjón’s poetic language.
...a trilogy that has the zealous heft of a lifelong labor ... Sjón is more than a novelist; he is a storyteller in the ancient tradition, and this work may be remembered as his masterpiece.
...[a] beguiling, surpassingly eccentric triptych ... Though occasionally reminiscent of David Mitchell, Sjón’s work is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction. Strange—but stunning.
