Sjón's post-modern novel is comprised of three novels he wrote over twenty years: Thine Eyes Did See My Substance ( a love story but not really), Iceland's Thousand Years (a mystery but not really), and I'm a Sleeping Door (science fiction but not really). All three are narrated by Jósef Loewe and purport to be his autobiography, but in the tradition of Tristam Shandy, he is not even born until the end of the second part. Instead, the bulk of the narrative is focused on his father's trials as a Jew who escapes Nazi Germany and settles as a refugee in Iceland.
The story itself is a metafictional narrative that plays with storytelling, weaving together folktales, history, Biblical stories, and fragmented accounts. And like a lot of metafiction, it's about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives and the world around us. Maybe Jósef is the child of a desperate woman so mired in grief and alcohol she has lost track of where she's been or who she's been with. Or maybe he is a golem, lovingly sculpted from clay by his father and mother and brought to life with the word "truth" and the seal from a gold ring.
Just as the bones of a patient afflicted with Stone Man Syndrome react to blows by swiftly forming a new layer of bone tissue over the site, so Jósef's mind wove a story every time he encountered a painful thought or memory.
Images and ideas recur throughout and characters are connected in surprising ways. Iceland is a small nation, but this is also a story being told to a listener. These elements, and the frequent interruptions from the listener, remind us of the unreliability of the narrative -- not to distance us from the characters, but to remind us that there is a storyteller behind the story.
Parts -- especially during the section that takes place in Germany -- can be quite vulgar and upsetting, and in that way it reminded me of Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum, but this book is far more humane. Despite the prevalence of evils like anti-semitism, greed, and violence, characters display kindness towards each other and a determination to make the best of what they have. The novel ends on a melancholy note, but also the recognition that whatever else is lost, the stories live on.
All stories have their origins long before humans discovered a means of storing them somewhere other than in their memories, and so it doesn't matter if books are worn out by reading, if the print-run is lost at sea, if they're pulped so other books can be printed, or burned down to the last copy. The vitality contained in their loose ends and red herrings ... is so potent that if it escapes into the head of a single reader it will be activated, like a curse or a blessing that can follow the same family for generations. And with every retelling and garbling, misunderstanding and conflation, mankind's world of and and stories expands.
