CoDex 1962: A Trilogy

(MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30) “Call it magic realism under Nordic lights,” said The Economist. Sjon, “a master of Icelandic fiction” who writes under a one-name pseudonym, invents stories that “skip gleefully among a dozen genres,” blending surrealism, pop culture, Icelandic folklore, and more. His new trilogy combines three recent novels narrated by a character who shares Sjon’s August 1962 birthday. Josef Loewe tells us he was actually brought to Iceland 18 years earlier as a clay golem smuggled out of Nazi Germany by his persecuted Jewish father. Nuclear bomb tests brought him to life but also rendered him an invalid. While the fatherson saga gives CoDex 1962 a through line, “the real action,” said in The New York Times, is to be found in the otherworldly vignettes that “cluster like pearls” along the book’s narrative spine. Unicorns, angels, and ruminations on myth normally turn me off, but here they dazzle. The novel becomes “a Norse Arabian Nights.” Though I prefer Sjon’s sparer books, CoDex 1962 “raised me up, let me down, and consumed me for the better part of a week.”