Sjón writes in the borderland between sleep and wakefulness
Published at 04:00
“Sjónorama” by Sjón
Before I had finished reading See you “Sjónorama” I wrote a preliminary beginning of this review which I was very satisfied with. I could almost see the rest of the review rolling out of the first sentence like a cornucopia. But by the time I finished reading, the beginning of my review had disappeared, as had the document.
Had I dreamed it all? It may very well happen, to read the Icelandic author Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðssonknown as Sjón, is to be in the borderland between dream and waking life. He writes as a sleepwalker but also as a private detective, a madman, a circus director, a bookseller and a gravedigger. Kafka doesn’t feel far away, either Borges or Sebald. Sometimes certain events—such as when a man begins to follow another man, who appears to be, if not the author of the text, then at least an uncanny doppelganger—smell both ETA Hoffmann and Paul Auster.
“Sjónorama” is, of course nothing more than a panorama of Sjón’s spheres of interest, through a series of texts spanning from 1982 to 2023. In a short story, the hero Leó Þór Samsonarson is born at the moment his father is thrown overboard from a boat and loses his lower leg to the sea. When the son is fished out of the sea a few years later, after throwing himself off the cliffs in a car, he is missing a leg. The debt is paid. In another, we meet an Icelandic geologist who believes that in our sleep we see through the eyes of dead creatures living on another planet – the kind of insane grandiosity that can only occur in a country of 300,000 inhabitants.
In a third text – or whatever it is, because I’ve lost track – the narrator goes on a seven-hour bus ride to a literary festival in an unnamed Eastern European country, only to find a zoo consisting of exactly one animal: a venomous snail from Iceland. I also come across satanic fairs where a monkey plays a very important role, German terrorists, atomic bombs, a laughing Christ, black snow, “unborn children” and a number of other oddities in this cabinet of curiosities.
Nothing seems to be Sjón alien, not even himself, in this both cosmic and comic book. Now I’ll figure it out! “Sjónorama” is in fact a reincarnation of Italo Calvinos “Kosmokomik” – a book full of mind games and crazy paths of association that connect everything with everyone in an ever-ongoing micro-macro dance. Of course, I may lack a psychological depth in the character drawings and clearer, more coherent lines of thought, but that would be to take the edge off Sjón’s particular writing style.
What Sjón is really doing here, which takes a while to understand, is that he asks a single question over and over again, in every text, with every figure: What do we inherit from those we never got to meet? The stories. The Icelandic geologist that Sjón makes fun of actually says something deeply true: that when we dream we see with the eyes of others, that the border between our own and the inherited consciousness is more porous than we want to believe. That we may never be fully ourselves, but always also try to write about those we were never allowed to be.
Sinziana Ravini is a writer, psychoanalyst and cultural journalist.
SHORT STORIES
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Trans. John Swedenmark
Ramus
