The Blue Fox

March 25, 2013
This short novel begins like a fragmented poem as a hunter appears to be losing his grip on reality in the hopes of capturing an elusive blue fox in the snowy, secluded woods: “Now the man has a chance of lessening the gap between himself and the little fox”; “Then he did an about-turn and got on all fours, raising his right leg like a dog pissing on a tussock.” The story moves to the days before the hunt, with an eerie tale of a girl found in a ship’s hold, and then continues into her eventual legacy. The shifts in chronology—just before, just after—create tension, at once elucidating and perplexing. Agent: Trine Licht, Licht & Burr (Denmark).

May 1, 2013
In January 1883 in Iceland, Everything . . . is blue. Rural pastor Baldur Skuggason hunts a fox for its pelt, which he will sell to supplement his meager income. The herbalist Fridrik B. Fridjonsson is completing a hoax on Baldur that has allowed him, Herb-Fridrik, to bury his longtime assistant, who had Down syndrome, with more reverence than the grumpy, prejudiced minister ever could show. A flashback showing how Herb-Fridrik met his helper completes the action of this short novel by poet and pop-music lyricist (most famously for Iceland's international star, Bjrk) Sjn. The tale is tinged by metamorphoses, however, of animal into human and vice versa, and it is written primarily in the spare, concrete diction of nature poetryindeed, its opening section looks like a sequence of prose poems. Leavened by dry rural humor in the characters' speech and thoughts, it is magnetically readable. See also The Whispering Muse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)