THE BURNING

"But the leechbook would later land me in such desperate straits that I will never again be able to return to society but am fated instead to sit here talking nonsense to birds."

—page 46, From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (and translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb).

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"Yet although my body hair was not singed on their bonfire, I felt the heat of the animosity they bear toward me, the vindictive nature that drives a man to destroy his neighbor in a fire as if he were a banned book."

—page 47, From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón (and translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb).