The Blue Fox (old)

The Blue Black Wolf, c. S 2015

This is old, cos Google sucks. 11\15, probably.

I'm on to Icelandic fiction, having scoured the library for Finnish, Estonian, and some post-Soviet E. European lit.  The two non-mysteries that seemed most promising both turned out to be fantastical and straight out science fiction, respectively.

The Blue Fox (Skugga-Baldur), by Sjón.  In his headshots he looks like a hipster.  He wrote lyrics for Bjork.  He writes a lot of different stuff, but the interwebs give his title as Poet. 

Consistent with that, The Blue Fox is short but manages to compress a coherent and satisfying narrative into tiny little snippets.  Man immersed in Nature is no match for her.  Of course there would be no story if he respected her properly.  Don't mess with the Lady or her own, especially in deep winter. 

Virginia Cribb appears to be the go-to translator for Icelandic au courant literature, as well as at least some of the Arnaldur Indridason mysteries.  She translated the Sjon books I saw and Love Star by Andri Snær Magnason, the SF novel.  Her blurb: "works as a freelance translator from Icelandic to English. She has an MA in Icelandic and Scandinavian Studies from UCL, a BPhil in Icelandic from the University of Iceland, and lived and worked in Iceland for a number of years as a publisher, journalist and translator." Otherwise, not much on the interwebs but some poetry translation snippets.  Based on these and the books, she's damn good.

Magnason has an interesting blog, with content in several languages. 
Here's a recent Grist article about reinvention of an old coal plant that he was involved in.

His Swedish blurb sounds better, but the info impresses in English too:
Andri Snær Magnason är den ende författaren som fått Isländska litteraturpriset i alla tre kategorier: skönlitteratur, facklitteratur och barnlitteratur.

(He is the only author who received the Icelandic Literature Prize in all three categories: fiction , non-fiction and children's literature.)

I've only just begun Love Star, and so far it's a lot like Malindo Lo's Adaptation. I'm thinking there's no space aliens tho I could be wrong.

I'm hooked on Danish, Welsh, and French cop shows thanks to Netflix, one feminist and urbane despite the protag having moved back to her hometown of Aarhus, one brooding and very rural, and the last terribly lurid and morbid, so French, from the northern region: Dicte, Hinterlands, and Witnesses (Les Temoins).  Antigone 34 is good too, set in Montpelier.

According to Wikipedia, "Some critics complained that most of the actors' Copenhagen accents were not authentic for a show set in Aarhus, while other actors' accents were so overblown they seemed caricatures."

Everyone's a critic.  I know three words in Danish, all thanks to the show, so I can still enjoy it.  Tak.

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