{"id":103066,"date":"2016-09-26T15:31:57","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T19:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=103066"},"modified":"2016-09-26T16:14:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T20:14:21","slug":"story-shadows-interview-sjon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/26\/story-shadows-interview-sjon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story in the Shadows: An Interview with Sj\u00f3n"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sj\u00f3n.<\/a>

Photo: Gabriel Kuchta.<\/p><\/div>\n

Moonstone<\/a>, Sj\u00f3n\u2019s latest novel, has been called \u201cthe gayest book in Iceland.\u201d It follows the sixteen-year-old\u00a0M\u00e1ni Steinn,\u00a0a queer hustler and cinephile whose life becomes upended by the Spanish flu of 1918 when the pestilence ravages Reykjavik. With the country fearful of any bodily contact, M\u00e1ni can no longer pick up \u201cgentlemen,\u201d and the cinema houses are shut down. M\u00e1ni finds solace in a new friendship with S\u00f3la G, a beautiful feminist who rides a motorcycle and dresses all in black. When M\u00e1ni gets tangled up in a sodomy scandal that threatens to humiliate the homophobic country, S\u00f3la is perhaps the only person who can help him.<\/em><\/p>\n

As with Sj\u00f3n\u2019s previous books\u2014<\/em>The Whispering Muse, <\/em>The Blue Fox, and <\/em>From the Mouth of the Whale\u2014the magic of <\/em>Moonstone lies in language. M\u00e1ni Steinn doesn\u2019t just love movies but \u201clives in the movies. When not spooling them into himself through his eyes he is replaying them in his mind.\u201d M\u00e1ni is illiterate, and as he struggles to read, \u201cthe letters of the alphabet disguise themselves before his eyes, glide between lines, switch roles in the middle of a word, and might as well be a red cipher to which he does not have the key.\u201d Sj\u00f3n\u2019s easy way with words goes back to the Icelandic sagas he devoured as a child. He has internalized the lyrical language of epics, myths, folktales, and religion\u2014\u201cthe old great narratives,\u201d as he calls them.<\/em><\/p>\n

Moonstone\u00a0has been praised all around, with David Mitchell calling it \u201cSj\u00f3n\u2019s simmering masterpiece,\u201d and it has won nearly all of Iceland\u2019s literary prizes, including the country\u2019s most prestigious: the Icelandic Literary Award. Sj\u00f3n and I met once in New York in 2013, to discuss his earlier works; this month he was kind enough to answer a few questions I had for him about <\/em>Moonstone over e-mail.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your previous work reaches deep into Icelandic mythic history and saga, portraying an untouched, or at least premodern country, so I was surprised to read a book of yours that feels comparatively contemporary. How did you come to be interested in writing about M\u00e1ni Steinn?<\/p>\n

SJ\u00d3N<\/p>\n

The idea for Moonstone<\/em> grew out of three separate strands of research\u00a0I had been doing\u00a0more than fifteen years before I sat down to write it. Being a\u00a0cinephile from a young age,\u00a0I had, over the years,\u00a0collected material relating to the first days of cinema in Iceland. We have for decades been at the top of the list of cinemagoers in the world, per capita. I had also compiled a dossier of everything that had been written about the Spanish flu, and because it touches so\u00a0many social\u00a0front lines, I\u00a0had also\u00a0gathered stories from Reykjavik\u2019s\u00a0hidden LGBTQ history.<\/p>\n

I thought each subject would find its way into its own novel, but once I started thinking about writing a novel that took place during the days of the Spanish flu, the other two topics quickly\u00a0found their way into it\u2014the cinema because of the closing, fumigation, and reopening of the theaters, which were seen as breeding grounds for the epidemic, and the queerness because it gave an opportunity to situate the story in the shadows of our small capital town.<\/p>\n

This is quite\u00a0typical of how my novels come into being\u2014by juggling material that interests me, I start seeing which narrative possibilities they have to offer. Or maybe it is more like a kaleidoscope\u2014I shake it until the perfect pattern appears. Then I start looking for ways of telling the story. In\u00a0this case it called for a realistic style, which I then broke from at a crucial point at the very end. But underneath it all is a mythical pattern where M\u00e1ni Steinn has the character of\u00a0the moon, and S\u00f3la G, the sun.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The opening scene, if I\u2019m not mistaken, is not only the first explicitly homoerotic scene in Icelandic literature but Iceland\u2019s first literary description of a blowjob. Were you deliberately\u2014perhaps mischievously\u2014being provocative opening the novel like this?\u00a0<\/p>\n

SJ\u00d3N<\/p>\n

As soon as I knew that my main character was this queer, sixteen-year-old, hustling kid,\u00a0I also knew that to be true to his character and life\u00a0I had to start with a scene that would bring the reader into his world\u00a0right away and without any compromises. By exposing the readers to the kind of sex he is having with his \u201cgentlemen\u201d clients, I hope they simply accept that this is what he does and that\u00a0it shouldn\u2019t be\u00a0a\u00a0bigger deal for them than it is to him. It also serves the purpose of being a starting point for M\u00e1ni Steinn\u2019s journey. Once the flu starts gaining ground, this kind\u00a0of a corporeal involvement\u00a0with\u00a0his fellow citizens becomes impossible. He is pushed out of his routine and, temporarily, into\u00a0a more charitable relationship with the people of Reykjavik. But I must confess that it entertained the trickster in me to open the novel with this groundbreaking provocation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Another thing I noticed is that the novel seems to be capturing the moment when the modern, outside world\u2014Europe and America\u2014invades the relatively isolated Iceland. There\u2019s the influenza, the movies, the LGBTQ culture\u2014which some might feel is not a \u201creal\u201d or indigenous part of Icelandic culture. All while there\u2019s this possibility of the World War somehow coming up to Iceland. What are your thoughts on this idea of invasion?<\/p>\n

SJ\u00d3N<\/p>\n

Iceland was always as isolated as an island in the North Atlantic could be, which isn\u2019t as bad as it sounds. In the first\u00a0five centuries of settlement, there was much communication with the outside world. People traveled frequently to the Nordic countries, mainland Europe, and all the way down to Jerusalem, for\u00a0trade\u00a0and learning.\u00a0It was only after Iceland fell under the Norwegian crown that the contact became less frequent, and even more so\u00a0with the Reformation at the end of the sixteenth century. Still, there remained a great thirst for news and\u00a0knowledge from abroad.<\/p>\n

\"moonstone\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I think most of my novels deal with this situation in one way or another\u2014the struggle for keeping new\u00a0ideas coming to our shores, the historical moments when the small world collides with the big one. This is quite visible in The\u00a0Blue Fox<\/em> and From the Mouth of the Whale<\/em>.\u00a0And I perceive Icelandic literature as a literature that was always open for outside influence. The high points of our literary history are all marked by a strong dialogue with what was happening abroad. The Baroque, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Naturalism, and Surrealism all helped us\u00a0renew our heritage.<\/p>\n

But you are right, Moonstone<\/em> takes place at the moment when Iceland was about to get in step\u00a0with the rest of the world. Until then, it might take things\u00a0up to a century to make their mark on life in Iceland. In the autumn of 1918, it\u00a0looked like Iceland would escape becoming a part of the narrative of World War I, but once the Spanish flu arrived, we were hooked into that story at the very last minute, since the flu originated in the battlefields of Europe. So the flu can be seen as a metaphor for the impossibility of isolating oneself\u00a0and controlling one\u2019s own narrative. The cinema is another metaphor for the same thing but on a social level. And the fact that\u00a0M\u00e1ni Steinn is trying to\u00a0find\u00a0ways to live with his queerness shows how change\u00a0happens in the life of individuals, even though it would take sixty years before anyone came out as openly gay in Iceland. The history of an island is always a history of visits, invasions, trappings, and expulsions. What a lucky man I am to be a writer working with such dynamic material!<\/p>\n

Randy Rosenthal is the cofounding editor of the literary journals <\/em>The Coffin Factory and <\/em>Tweed\u2019s Magazine of Literature and Art. He is currently studying religion and literature at Harvard Divinity School.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Moonstone, Sj\u00f3n\u2019s latest novel, has been called \u201cthe gayest book in Iceland.\u201d It follows the sixteen-year-old\u00a0M\u00e1ni Steinn,\u00a0a queer hustler and cinephile whose life becomes upended by the Spanish flu of 1918 when the pestilence ravages Reykjavik. With the country fearful of any bodily contact, M\u00e1ni can no longer pick up \u201cgentlemen,\u201d and the cinema houses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1068,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[24760,20541,24745,24744,24751,16,22602,24757,24753,24763,8343,24754,24743,1822,24761,24758,241,24748,687,24741,504,24746,24750,24742,16090,14140,24747,24752,8688,24755,53,1786,1821,24759,17006,13964,10898,24756,24762,24764,2393,24749,157],"class_list":["post-103066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-24760","tag-at-work","tag-cinemagoer","tag-cinephile","tag-contemporary","tag-culture","tag-epics","tag-first-world-war","tag-folktales","tag-from-the-mouth-of-the-whale","tag-gay-lit","tag-great-old-narratives","tag-homoerotic","tag-iceland","tag-icelandic-history","tag-innovation","tag-interview","tag-isolated","tag-language","tag-lgbtq","tag-literature","tag-mani-steinn","tag-modern","tag-moonstone","tag-myths","tag-narrative","tag-north-atlantic","tag-provocative","tag-quotes","tag-randy-rosenthal","tag-reading","tag-religion","tag-reykjavik","tag-saga","tag-scandinavia","tag-shadows","tag-sjon","tag-spanish-flu","tag-the-blue-fox","tag-the-whispering-muse","tag-words","tag-world-culture","tag-writers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe 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