In the belly of the whale with prisons

When he talks about his work, Sojon dismisses the word “awesome.” He says fantastic means unreal. He argues that even the improbable events in his books are not unrealistic – they grow out of the soil of Icelandic history, and are true to his characters, even if they only occur in their minds, like misconceptions or hallucinations. Instead, prisons prefer the word “cool”. His work and his country are full of wonders: strange things appear and flow, all the time, on the rocky foundation of reality. He insists that the wonderful surrounds us everywhere. We just need a vision to see it.

Sjón’s full name is Sigurjón Birgir Sigurdsson – a series of soft G and Rolling R sounds that, when he says it, sound like a secret fluid song, singing deep in his throat, to a shy little horse. He was born in 1962, in Reykjavik which was, in many ways, a village: small, boring, remote, conservative, monolithic. Iceland felt like the edge of the world, and prisons grew up on the edge of that edge. He was the only child of a single mother, and they moved, when he was ten, to a modern-day flowing neighborhood on the outskirts of town called Bridholt. (By Reykjavik’s miniature standards, suburbs mean about a 10-minute drive from the city center.) Bridholt was a housing scheme: a large complex of brutal concrete apartment blocks standing alone in mud. Every time it rained, the parking lot turned into a brown lake. However, that barren land was surrounded by an ancient Icelandic beauty: swamps, trees, birds, and a river full of jumping salmon. Sojon often thinks of this juxtaposition: these two completely different worlds, which he alternates between them as he pleases. He says the fluidity of the landscape helped create a similar fluidity in his imagination.

As a boy, Jason was a precocious, thirsty for cosmopolitan culture. He remembers watching the Mary Poppins movie when he was four and was finally struck by the strange moment when the handle of her parakeet, shaped like a parachute, suddenly opened its beak and spoke. (“I still haven’t recovered,” he says.) As a teenager, Jason fell in love with David Bowie, studying for years Bowie interviews like a curriculum, tracking down all the artists he mentioned, and educating himself about international books and music. Finally, discover surrealism. It just felt right: contradictory facts stacked on top of each other without explanation, transition, or apology. Prisons became a maniac – a surreal missionary. That’s when he adopted the alias Sjón. He was a perfect part of literary brands: his first name, Sigurjón, with middle extraction. In Icelandic, sjón means “to see.”

Iceland in the 1970s was a strange place for a teenager, especially one with artistic ambitions. Reykjavik, the only real city in the country, had two cafes and two hotels. The most exciting event for young people, Sjón told me, was a ritual known as “Hallaerisplanid” – a word roughly translated as “Hardship Square” or “Cringe District”. Every weekend, huge throngs of teens roam the city’s rickety little central square, then wander for hours in raucous noisy groups, wandering again and again through the narrow downtown streets. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, on a visit to Reykjavik, watch these thousands of children from their hotel window in amazement. It would have been quite an existential spectacle – restless hordes, in the face of immense nothingness, create meaning by order, through absurd, defiant, repetitive, arbitrary rituals.

For Cheon, the gloom of Reykjavik was impossible and idyllic. He didn’t have much help, but he was free to become whatever he wanted. So he did. At the age of 16, he published his first poetry book himself, then sold it to an audience captivated by the bus. From his brutal apartment building, he wrote grandiose letters to surrealists around the world, heralding a new Icelandic front for the movement. His mailbox is full of replies from Japan, Portugal, Brazil and France. In the end, Jason received an invitation to visit the old surrealists of Europe. While staying with the widow of Andre Breton, in France, he swam in a river and had a fantastical experience with a dragonfly: he sat on his shoulder, wiggling his wings, and then took off – and at that moment he felt that he had been baptized into a new existence.

Returning to Reykjavik, Jason helped found a surreal group called Medúsa, where he recruited other ambitious teenagers. One of these recruits was a girl from his neighborhood – a singer who, by the end of the twentieth century, would become probably the most famous Icelander in the world. Bjork was a musical prodigy. She got her first record deal at the age of eleven, after a song she gave at a school concert was aired on Iceland’s only radio station. She met Jason when she was seventeen, when he came to the French hot chocolate shop where she worked downtown. Bjork told me in an email that she was, at the time, a “super introvert.” She and Jason formed a loud and amazing two-person band called the Rocka Rocka Drum—the “liberating alter ego thing” each, she remembers.

Medúsa members made noises all over Reykjavik. They argued about literature, set up art shows in a garage, and threw themselves into bohemian-high junks. Once upon a time, all the Surrealists got drunk on absinthe and proceeded to roam the whole of Reykjavik on the roofs of parked cars – a night that ended in a famous club, where he bit a prison guard on the thigh, then recited André Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” while lying face down in a police car. Consider it The Surrealists won a great victory when I denounced them in the newspapers of Iceland’s conservative literary establishment. In one of the greatest excitement of his life, Sjón himself once heard being attacked in person, over the radio, while on a bus. Björk found it all exhilarating. She told me, ‘It was Like immersion in a wonderful organic university: hyperfertility!”

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