The Blue Fox by Sjón (translated by Victoria Cribb).
Title: The Blue Fox.
Author: Sjón (translated by Victoria Cribb).
Genre: Fiction.
Country: Iceland.
Language: Icelandic.
Publication Date: 2003.
Summary: Set against the stark backdrop of the Icelandic winter of 1883, an elusive, enigmatic fox leads a hunter on a transformative quest. Leading up to this hunt is a story of a naturalist, who struggles to build a life for his charge, a young woman with Down syndrome whom he had rescued from a shipwreck years before, despite the surrounding judgment and ridicule. By the end of this fable, secrets will be revealed, hearts will be broken, and none of their lives will be the same.
My rating: 7/10
My review:
♥ Blue foxes are so curiously like stones that it is a matter for wonder. When they lie beside them in winter there is no hope of telling them apart from the rocks themselves; indeed, they're far trickier than white foxes, which always cast a shadow or look yellow against the snow.
A blue vixen lies tight against her stone, letting the snow drift over her on the windward side. She turns her rump to the weather, curls up, and pokes her snout under her thigh, lowering her eyelids till there's the merest hint of a pupil. And so she keeps an eye on the man who has not shifted since he took cover under the overhanging drift, here on the upper slopes of Asheimar, some eighteen hours ago. The snow has drifted and fallen over him until he resembles nothing so much as a hump of ruined wall.
The creature must take care not to forget that the man is a hunter.
♥ He waited for a long time before letting the weapon drop. The vixen wouldn't give him the slip now. Snow covered the land up to the roots of the glacier, not a bare patch of earth to be seen; the vixen would write the tale of her travels on the blank sheet as soon as she embarked on them.
Grasping the weapon in both hands, he set off.
All day long the vixen ran up hill and down dale, the man following hard on her heels.
She was in his letter of commission, setting him a task to perform in the material world.
♥ The rim of daylight was fading.
On the halls of heaven it was now dark enough for the Aurora Borealis sisters to begin their lively dance of the veils. With an enchanting play of colors they flitted light and quick about the great stage of the heavens, in fluttering golden dresses, their tumbling pearl necklaces scattering here and there in their wild caperings. This spectacle is at its brightest shortly after sunset.
Then the curtain falls; night takes over.
♥ ..it is the first sound he has uttered since Herb-Fridrik told him that his sweetheart, Abba, is dead, that she was the female corpse the Reverend had sent him to fetch, and that today the coffin he saw there on the parlor table would be lowered into the ground in the churchyard at Dalbotn. The news so crushed Hálfdán's heart that he burst into a long, silent fit of weeping and the tears ran from his eyes and nose, while his ill-made body shook in the chair like a leaf quivering before an autumn gale, not knowing whether it will be torn from the bough that has fostered it all summer long or linger there-and wither; but neither fate is good.
♥ "Tea?"
It's strange that so good a drop should have such a small name. It should have been called Illustreret Tidende, that's the grandest name the eejit knows..
♥ The figure in the corner became aware of him. She looked up and met his eyes; she smiled and her smile doubled the happiness of the world.
♥ The lotus-eaters were a group who modeled their way of life on the poetry of French writers such as Baudelaire, de Nerval, Gautier, and de Musset. They threw parties-which gave birth to many rumors, but few attended-at which narcotic plants bore away the guests swiftly and sweetly to new worlds, both in flesh and in spirit. Fridrik was a frequent guest at these gatherings, and once, when they stood up from their ether-driven roller coasters, he announced to his traveling companions:
"I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!"
"Spoken like en rigtig Islænding, a true Icelander," said the Danes.
♥ Down's Mongoloid children had therefore not attained full development; they were doomed to be childish and meek all their lives. But like other members of inferior races, with kind treatment and patience they could be taught many useful skills.
In Iceland they were destroyed at birth.
Unlike other types of cretins, where it cannot be seen until too late that they do not have their full wits, no one could fail to see that a Down's child was made according to a different recipe from the rest of us, even of different, alien ingredients: it had coarser hair, a yellowish complexion, stumpy body, flabby skin, and eyes slanted like slits on a canvas.
No witnesses were needed; before the child could utter its first wail, the midwife would close its nose and mouth, thereby returning its breath to the great cauldron of souls from which all mankind is served.
The child was said to have been stillborn and its body was consigned to the nearest priest. He confirmed its nature, buried the poor creature, and that was the end of the story.
But there were always some such unfortunate infants that managed to survive. It happened in godforsaken out-of-the-way places where there was no one to talk sense into the mothers, who thought they could cope with the children, odd though they were. Then of course they got lost, wandering off in their ignorance, leaving their bones on mountain paths, turning up half-dead in the summer pastures, or simply stumbling into the lives of strangers.
And as the poor wretches didn't know who they were or where they had blown in from, the authorities would settle them on whichever farm they happened to have ended up at.
The farmers were greatly annoyed by these "gifts from heaven," and the household found it degrading to have to share sleeping quarters with a defective.
♥ His successor was Reverend Baldur Skuggsson, who introduced a new era in church manners to the Dale. Men sat quietly on the benches, holding their tongues while the parson preached the sermon, having learned how he dealt with rowdies: he summoned them to meet him after the service, took them around the back of the church, and beat the living daylights out of them. The women, meanwhile, turned holy from the first day and behaved as if they had never taken part in teasing "the Reverent with the pupil." They said it served the louts to whom they were married or betrothed right, they should have been thrashed long ago; for the new parson was a childless widower.
♥ So it was that on Monday, January 8, 1883, Reverend Baldur performed the funeral rites on the company that Herb-Fridrik considered worthy of those who could not bring themselves to wallow a simpleton to sing out of key with her parish priest: a quilt cover stuffed with sixty-six pounds of cow dung, the skeleton of a decrepit ewe, an empty aquavit cask, some rotten barrel staves, and a moldy urine tub.
Abba deserved a different soul mate, fairer earth.
♥ Ghost-run is a name given by poets to their friend the moon, and it is fitting tonight when its ashen light bathes the grove of trees that stand in the dip above the farmhouse at Brekka. This little copse was the loving creation of Abba and Fridrik, and few things made them more of a laughingstock in the Dale than its cultivation, though most of their endeavors met with ridicule.
The rowan draws shadow pictures on the snow crust; there's a low sough in the naked boughs and the odd twig still bears a cluster of dried berries that the birds overlooked last year.
Fridrik toils slowly up the slope; he has a woman's body in his arms. In the middle of the grove is a freshly dug grave; on the edge of the grave stands an open coffin. The man approaches the coffin and lays the body inside. Then he hurries back, but the moon remains.
♥ Fridrik places the book on Abba's breast and lays her hands to rest in a cross on top. He inadvertently holds them tighter than intended and feels the small fingers through the mittens. This cheers him a little; these are the hands that comforted him after he lost his parents.
He kisses her brow.
He closes the coffin.
♥ The second in the introduction to a lost ballad. It tells of the equality that all living beings are ensured in death, without any need for revolution:
Earth fails,
All grows old and worn.
Flesh is dust-however it's adorned.
♥ The shot fires off. It blows away the divine peace of the wilderness like a scrap of paper. A shower of sparks bursts from the barrel. The gunpowder crack shouts: "HEAR THE MAN!"
The vixen is thrown up in the air with a pathetic whine.
♥ The weather was mild, with light cloud and a gentle southerly breeze; the winter sun floated over the wilderness, fat and red as the yolk of a raven's egg. This was the calm that had ridden on the wings of yesterday's storm.
♥ And now, as chance would have it, the raven pair obeyed. They fell silent as one, lifted off from the snowfield, and soared easily over the edge of the bowl without so much as flapping a wing. There the updraft caught them and raised them high into the blue.
Then they were beautiful.
♥ On the fifth day the priest under the glacier began to fear for his sanity, so he did what comes most naturally to an Icelander when he is in a fix. That is to recite ballads, verses, and rhymes, sing loud and clear to himself and, when all else fails, to recall his hymns. This is a fail-safe old trick, if men wish to preserve their wits.