Sjón

Harvard Book Store welcomes award-winning Icelandic author SJÓN and author of Find Me LAURA VAN DEN BERG for a discussion of Sjón's latest novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was: A Novel.

About Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was

The mind-bending miniature historical epic is Sjón's specialty, and Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was is no exception. But it is also Sjón's most realistic, accessible, and heartfelt work yet. It is the story of a young man on the fringes of a society that is itself at the fringes of the world—at what seems like history's most tumultuous, perhaps ultimate moment.

Máni Steinn is queer in a society in which the idea of homosexuality is beyond the furthest extreme. His city, Reykjavik in 1918, is homogeneous and isolated and seems entirely defenseless against the Spanish flu, which has already torn through Europe, Asia, and North America and is now lapping up on Iceland's shores. And if the flu doesn't do it, there's always the threat that war will spread all the way north. And yet the outside world has also brought Icelanders cinema! And there's nothing like a dark, silent room with a film from Europe flickering on the screen to help you escape from the overwhelming threats—and adventures—of the night, to transport you, to make you feel like everything is going to be all right. For Máni Steinn, the question is whether, at Reykjavik's darkest hour, he should retreat all the way into this imaginary world, or if he should engage with the society that has so soundly rejected him.

Praise

"The subtitle of the Icelandic writer Sjón’s jewel-like novella is 'the boy who never was.' Known to English-speaking readers for a series of beautiful short works written and translated in the 2000s, Sjón . . . has been involved in Reykjavík’s literary scene since the late 1970s, when he was part of a milieu of young underground artists and musicians that eventually gave rise to the Sugarcubes. The subsequent career of that band’s lead singer, Björk, has cemented the Icelandic aesthetic in the international imagination as a fusion of hard-edged modernist experimentation with a kind of folkloric whimsy. Sjón, who has written lyrics (and occasionally played air-guitar) for his elfin friend, shares both these qualities . . . . Sjón’s prose is never histrionic or overwrought, balancing rage and hallucination (there are echoes of Artaud and Ballard) with a gentleness of spirit, an affection for precision and the small scale. The result is sure to delight his fans and convert many new ones." —The Guardian