Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson uses the pen name Sjón--the Icelandic word for "light"--for his novels and poetry; he also performed in the Sugarcubes as Johnny Triumph and still writes lyrics for Bjork occasionally. The original Icelandic title of The Whispering Muse, his oddly thrilling mash-up of Ovid, Apollodorus and Joseph Conrad, is The Splinter from the Argo--and that should have been the English title of this delightful sea voyage stew, an amalgamation of different time periods and tales-within-tales.
The stuffy but good-natured narrator, Valdimar Haraldsson, has been obsessed for more than four decades with the inextricable "link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race," and has spent 20 years writing a 17-volume masterwork, Fish and Culture. In 1949, he receives a letter from the father of his late friend, inviting him on the maiden voyage of a family merchant ship, departing in April from Denmark to Norway, and from there to Turkey and Soviet Georgia.
Sjón's voyage is rife with suspicions, clues, curious omissions and suggestive slips leading the reader down all kinds of blind alleys. Soon, like everyone else on board, Haraldsson falls under the spell of second mate Caeneus, a muscular titan whose popular sea tales always begin with him listening to the whispers of a rotten chip of driftwood which he claims comes from the talking prow of Jason's immortal ship, the Argo. Caeneus turns out to have once been a lovely princess raped on the beach by Poseidon who, given a wish in exchange for taking her maidenhead, chose to be turned into a man so she could never be raped again.
The story this transgender sailor tells at the captain's table after dinner is a version of the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, and that tale-within-a-tale soon opens up into a Nordic version of the myth of Jason and Medea. Haraldsson interrupts this narrative tangle halfway through with an edifying lecture summoning all the forces of medicine and history to prove "that seafood is the healthiest diet available to man" and "the mainspring of the Nordic nations." But it's the storyteller inside the story who comically personalizes this time-warped retelling of Jason stories--a long-winded seaman whose eyes have a feminine twinkle. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: This translation of Sjón's 2005 novel comes with two other short novels, The Blue Fox and From the Mouth of the Whale, in matching covers.