The Blue Fox (novel)

The Blue Fox (Icelandic: Skugga-Baldur) is a 2003 novel by Icelandic writer Sjón. The book was originally published by Bjartur and first published in the United States in 2013.

The Blue Fox
AuthorSjón
Original titleSkugga-Baldur
TranslatorVictoria Cribb
CountryIceland
Language Icelandic
PublisherBjartur
Publication date
2003
Published in English
2008
Pages123
ISBN9979-774-43-6

Plot

The book takes place in Iceland in 1883. It opens with a priest hunting a blue fox, then jumps backward to the days leading up to the hunt. An herbalist buries the recently deceased woman with Down syndrome that he rescued from a shipwreck. It details their life together before returning to the present. The priest shoots and kills the mysterious blue fox he is hunting, but the sound from his rifle causes an avalanche. While trapped underneath the snow in a glacial cave, the priest starts to go insane. The fox comes back to life and argues with him about the invention of electricity and the priest kills the fox a second time, this time skinning her and wearing her fur. He then transforms into a blue fox himself. The book ends with a letter from the herbalist, who explains the girl with Down syndrome was the priest's daughter, whom he sold into slavery several years before the herbalist rescued her. [1]

Reception

It won the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2005.[2] It was a finalist for the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature (2011).[3]

gollark: Am I better at resisting peer pressure than other people: well, I'd *like* to think so, but so would probably everyone else ever.
gollark: Anyway, I have, I think, reasonably strong "no genocide" ethics. But I don't know if, in a situation where everyone seemed implicitly/explicitly okay with helping with genocides, and where I feared that I would be punished if I either didn't help in some way or didn't appear supportive of helping, I would actually stick to this, since I don't think I've ever been in an environment with those sorts of pressures.
gollark: Maybe I should try arbitrarily increasing the confusion via recursion.
gollark: If people are randomly assigned (after initial mental development and such) to an environment where they're much more likely to do bad things, and one where they aren't, then it seems unreasonable to call people who are otherwise the same worse from being in the likely-to-do-bad-things environment.I suppose you could argue that how "good" you are is more about the change in probability between environments/the probability of a given real world environment being one which causes you to do bad things. But we can't check those with current technology.
gollark: I think you can think about it from a "veil of ignorance" angle too.

See also

References
  1. "The Blue Fox". www.goodreads.com. Retrieved 31 January 2018.
  2. "The winners". norden.org. Nordic Council. Retrieved 2011-11-05.
  3. "The Jan Michalski Prize for Literature 2011". Foundation Jan Michalski. November 2011. Retrieved November 23, 2012.


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