Former Sugarcubes member Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson uses the pen name Sjón--the Icelandic word for "light"--for his novels and poetry. The original Icelandic title of The Whispering Muse, an oddly thrilling mash-up of Ovid, Apollodorus and Joseph Conrad, is The Splinter from the Argo--and that would also have been a perfect English title for this delightful amalgamation of different time periods and tales-within-tales.
The stuffy but good-natured narrator, Valdimar Haraldsson, has spent decades studying "fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race." In 1949, he receives a letter inviting him on the maiden voyage of a merchant ship departing in April from Denmark to Norway, then on to Turkey and Soviet Georgia.
Sjón's voyage is rife with suspicions, clues, curious omissions and suggestive slips leading the reader down many blind alleys. Like everyone else on board, Haraldsson falls under the spell of second mate Caeneus, a muscular titan who claims to have once been a princess, transformed by the god Poseidon and carries a rotten chip of driftwood from the prow of the mythological Argo. Caeneus's story is a version of the legend of Jason and the Argonauts that soon opens up into a Nordic version of the myth of Jason and Medea. Haraldsson interrupts this narrative tangle halfway through with his own edifying lecture on how "seafood is the healthiest diet available to man," but it's the storyteller inside the story who comically personalizes this time-warped retelling of ancient legends--a long-winded seaman whose eyes have a feminine twinkle. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle, Wash.