In April 1949, our aging protagonist and narrator Valdimar Haraldsson is invited on the maiden voyage of a Danish merchant ship, on its way to the Black Sea via a Norwegian fjord settlement and its sprawling paper mill.
A reclusive eccentric, his life’s obsession is the link between consumption of fish and the superiority of the Nordic race, the sole subject of his journal Fisk og Kultur. On board, a crewmember’s strange story begins to distract Haraldsson from his petty worries, and holds the key to reinvigorating the old chap. Every evening, the ship’s second mate Caeneus casts a spell over the travellers with tales of his time on the legendary Argo. The whispering of a rotten splinter of wood from the bow of the Argo, a gift from Athena to guide Jason and his men, unlocks each episode of the racy story of the Argonauts and the women of Lemnos. It is here that Sjón dares to depart from the Greek myth as we know it and seamlessly interweaves another story into the story in the story: the Norse legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, a mirror to Jason’s quest for the fleece and in Caeneus’s tale a prophecy of the great hero’s fate.
Just like Caeneus’s many metamorphoses, Sjón expertly evokes the rich details of life at sea, reflecting the cadences of mythology in his spellbinding writing and tickling the reader with the dry wit that increasingly laces the protagonist’s narrative. That the narrator transforms in so few pages engagingly attests to the power of Sjón’s characterization and storytelling. The Whispering Muse is a rollicking seafaring tale and an ode to the storytelling traditions that reclaims Iceland’s great heritage and enchants with its magical blend of Greek mythology, Norse legend and sharp observations of modern manners.
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