⋙ Read The Blue Fox Sjon Victoria Cribb 9781846590375 Books

The Blue Fox Sjon Victoria Cribb 9781846590375 Books

Download As PDF : The Blue Fox Sjon Victoria Cribb 9781846590375 Books

The Blue Fox Sjon Victoria Cribb 9781846590375 Books

"The Blue Fox," by Sjon, is a dark, yet playful and humorous fable about a kind man, an evil man, a simpleton, and a blue fox. It is about fate, life, and human nature. The novella deals with evil cloaked in religion and justice being delivered in mysterious ways. It is full of hidden meaning, subtlety, and delightful intellectually amusing diversions.

This small book can be read easily in a single sitting...yet it is also the type of literature that benefits from a second reading. Personally, I enjoyed it far more when rereading it than I did the first time around. I had to use the dictionary frequently and had to pay special attention to Icelandic names and nicknames.

In my opinion, there  is no single right way to interpret this parable. Readers will uncover various personal messages that bear significance to their individual lives. But I feel strongly that the emphasis of this novel is not on the meaning behind the parable, rather it is on the joy, magic, and humor of the telling. Sjon is an imp of a storyteller; his stories can move off suddenly in any direction: dark, bizarre, touching, dazzling, brilliant, wise. He frequently uses contrasting literary styles--especially stark realism versus magical realism--to evoke synergy and literary counterpoint. Reading  Sjon is, above all, an experience. Allow yourself to feel his words. If you've read one book and liked it, then I suspect you'll eagerly want to come back for more. 

"The Blue Fox" is one of a trilogy of Sjon's prize-winning novellas that are currently being published (by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) for the first time in the U.S. in outstanding translations by Victoria Cribb. The other two books in this series are "The Mouth of the Whale" and "The Whispering Muse."  All three books are a steal at the current Kindle price if you consider that you are not only paying for the author's work, but also for the work of the translator...and a very fine translation it is!


Tags : The Blue Fox [Sjon, Victoria Cribb] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <DIV> “<B>The Blue Fox</B> is a magical novel.”—<B>Bjork</B> The year is 1883,Sjon, Victoria Cribb,The Blue Fox,Telegram Books,184659037X,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Literary,Literary,Modern fiction

The Blue Fox Sjon Victoria Cribb 9781846590375 Books Reviews

Must be read twice, ha! I loved this brilliant novel by one of Icelands finest. It is a quirky and tightly written, short lyrical story that is spiritual in nature, offering examples of the mythic level as well as a more fully realized religious practitioner. I liked it a lot and it made me think.
My daughter recommended this. Visceral, enigmatic. Leaves an after-image of mystery and unanswered questions.

I'll read more of Sjon's works, if only to experience the language. But, there is more. The landscape is as much a character in this small book as the humans and animals. And, the story is based on an old folk-tale. I want to know more. About the setting, the history, the writer and his works.
This is a story of wonder. I can imagine its birth In the lands of Iceland, on one of those nights that lasts for all but a handful of hours. It starts with the hunt of the blue fox, who is clearly more than any ordinary animal. The story shifts through lenses and minds, but I find myself drawn to Fridrik and his Abba. We suspect who she is and how the fox, and the hunter, and the servant who has come to call are linked, but we only learn it for sure until the end.

"Things change- nothing persists. The burden that is well borne becomes light." These two puzzles emerge, and it our job to discern how they impact our tale.
This book is like a parable. After reading, you are left with the sense that you must ponder it, turn over the details, find the meaning hiding behind its words. A beautiful, cold, mysterious novella. It also contains this line, which is the best line

“‘I have seen the universe! It is made of poems!’”

Can’t wait to read all Sjon’s other translated works.
The Blue Fox is a difficult book to judge. On the one hand it is beautifully, even poetically, written. One the other it is a bare bones story, one which takes only about two hours to read. Sjon focuses less on story here, and more on creating an atmosphere; a stark, brutal, and terribly beautiful atmosphere. And he does so wonderfully, managing to powerfully evoke a sense of time and place in a relatively few amount of words. The sparse nature of the book probably works in its favor here, giving little opportunity for the spell to be broken, but I can't help but feel that if this were a longer, more fleshed out novel it could have been truly great. Still, The Blue Fox is a very good little book, well worth the read.
Excellent story! Excellent writer! The novel may be short but is very, very good. Some comments mention that the translation is not fantastic. As a linguist myself, all I can say is that it is true that one feels the original Icelandic trying to break through, but then again, translating a literary phenomenon like Sjon who writes in a language which manages to be down to earth and poetic at the same time, is very difficult. Anyway, I prefer a translation where one feels a trace of the original, especially in the case of languages which share certain common traits, to a translation where the author is transposed more or less correctly, but where grammar and style are blandly perfect. Here, the translator has done a very good job as I felt deeply immersed in the story and could sense its natural environment, actually the third person in the book.
This novel is about the hunting of a blue fox. What is a blue fox? That's for the reader to discover. Obviously, it IS a fox, but its significance in this wonderful tale is what makes the book so fascinating. The harsh day to day landscape of Iceland, the harshness of life itself, the pain of existence, the journeying, the methods of survival - but that suggests this is an 'adventure' novel. It's not, at least not in any ordinary sense of that word. It is an adventure into the self, into the soul of the human faced with the loneliness of existence and the quest for what is essential. It is also beautifully, tightly, succinctly, poetically written.
"The Blue Fox," by Sjon, is a dark, yet playful and humorous fable about a kind man, an evil man, a simpleton, and a blue fox. It is about fate, life, and human nature. The novella deals with evil cloaked in religion and justice being delivered in mysterious ways. It is full of hidden meaning, subtlety, and delightful intellectually amusing diversions.

This small book can be read easily in a single sitting...yet it is also the type of literature that benefits from a second reading. Personally, I enjoyed it far more when rereading it than I did the first time around. I had to use the dictionary frequently and had to pay special attention to Icelandic names and nicknames.

In my opinion, there  is no single right way to interpret this parable. Readers will uncover various personal messages that bear significance to their individual lives. But I feel strongly that the emphasis of this novel is not on the meaning behind the parable, rather it is on the joy, magic, and humor of the telling. Sjon is an imp of a storyteller; his stories can move off suddenly in any direction dark, bizarre, touching, dazzling, brilliant, wise. He frequently uses contrasting literary styles--especially stark realism versus magical realism--to evoke synergy and literary counterpoint. Reading  Sjon is, above all, an experience. Allow yourself to feel his words. If you've read one book and liked it, then I suspect you'll eagerly want to come back for more. 

"The Blue Fox" is one of a trilogy of Sjon's prize-winning novellas that are currently being published (by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) for the first time in the U.S. in outstanding translations by Victoria Cribb. The other two books in this series are "The Mouth of the Whale" and "The Whispering Muse."  All three books are a steal at the current price if you consider that you are not only paying for the author's work, but also for the work of the translator...and a very fine translation it is!