The Whispering Muse
Sjón, Victoria Cribb (trs.)
The Whispering Muse
The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilisation, has had the singular good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travellers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on the Argonauts' legendary quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. En route the heroes happened upon the island of Lemnos and discovered to their astonishment, and considerable delight, that it was inhabited solely by women.
4.2 out of 5 based on 2 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardcover |
| Pages |
144 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
June 2012 |
| ISBN |
978-1846591242 |
| Publisher |
Telegram Books |
| |
The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilisation, has had the singular good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travellers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on the Argonauts' legendary quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. En route the heroes happened upon the island of Lemnos and discovered to their astonishment, and considerable delight, that it was inhabited solely by women.
The Blue Fox by Sjón.
From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón.
Reviews
The Guardian
Michel Faber
“For Sjón – a poet and a compulsively metaphysical thinker – this self-imposed handicap is a hazardous tactic. Haraldsson's text is laden with clichés and mealy-mouthed verbiage as Sjón dutifully keeps him within the linguistic parameters of a petit-bourgeois pillock. Of course there's plentiful humour at his expense, but there's also a limit to how many times we can find a dullard's dullness amusing. Fortunately, Caeneus comes to the rescue whenever the book threatens to degenerate into a drily whimsical exercise. ”
22/06/2012
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The Independent
Barry Forshaw
“Chekhov once noted how difficult it was to show bored characters without making them boring; is the same true of tedious characters? The Icelandic writer manages to make his pompous, dull narrator strangely compelling: one of the hidden pleasures of this slim but densely packed book.”
16/06/2012
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