All guests of the European Literature Days from 2009 to 2014.

[ book tip by Beat Mazenauer ] In January 1883, a girl dies in a village in Iceland. Three days later the local vicar disappears without trace while hunting a black she-fox. The Icelandic author (born 1962), Sjón alias Sigurjón B. Sigurdsson, composes his story around these two extremes.

Baldur Skuggason is not only the vicar, but also an experienced hunter who will never lose the trail of an animal he is tracking. He has the necessary alertness, doggedness and patience that are required for this. If needs be, he will also get snowed in, so he does not lose the feeling of contact with the animal. When hunting the fox he forgets the sad burial mass for the dead girl only days beforehand when everyone mourned a poor creature called Hafdís. The girl was given this name by the philanthropic botanist, Fridrik B. Fridjónsson. He took in Hafdís who was previously sold and tortured – as children with Down’s syndrome were in those days.

Sjón, the author, has many different facets – he composes song lyrics for Björk and worked on Lars von Trier’s film “Dancer in the Dark”. He also writes poems that influence this atmospherically intense debut novel. With great precision and concentration, Sjón narrates a wonderfully simple, yet also artfully convoluted story. His elementary clarity verges on the numinous. The novel outlines in sparing phrases how Baldur Skuggason stubbornly reached his goal and ran down the animal. But nature takes its revenge for the sacrilege and buries the hunter. The sentence structure clearly shows how Sjón often prefers to trust empty spaces in his descriptive accounts rather than gushing descriptions.

The she-fox, the namesake of the title, casts no shadow and cannot be entirely grasped. She is an emissary from an intermediate world connecting the poetic depth of traditional folklore with real-life and harsh reality. Sjón and his narrator, Fridrik, who is an art loving, enlightened contemporary, maintain the balance of the two spheres in a poised and abysmal way. Although the plot dates from a far-off century, this novel retains intriguing intellectual perceptiveness. “Listen, a human” is the telling echo from the sound of the gunshot. The book is a real find!

[ book info ] Sjón, : Schattenfuchs. (original language: Deutsch) S. Fischer, Frankfurt / M., 2007 (2004).
Translated from Isländisch by Betty Wahl