Moonstone

Sjón, translated by Victoria Cribb

Sceptre/Hachette

Otago Daily Times, July 9th 2016

One of the privileges of moonlighting as a book reviewer is the fact that I sometimes stumble across literary gems that I might otherwise never pick up. Moonstone, winner of the 2013 Icelandic Literary Prize, is one such treasure.

Written as a tribute to the author’s uncle Bósi ­ – sailor, alcoholic, booklover, socialist, and gay – it is not so much a novel as a portrait of a life in miniature that encapsulates a pivotal moment in time for both the story’s protagonist, 16-year-old orphan Máni Steinn, and Iceland as a whole. It opens in Reykjavíc the end of 1918, where Máni’s life revolves around the cinema, which he attends twice a day (an indulgence he funds by prostituting himself to both townsfolk and tourists alike) and through whose lens he reimagines every aspect of the world.

A natural loner, the boy is content to spend his time alone in the darkness of the town’s theatres and imagining adventures with the daughter of the local broker, Sóla G–, who bears an uncanny resemblance Musidora’s vampiric heroine Irma Vepp. Then reality and imagination collide when the cinemas are closed due to the Spanish Flu, and Máni and Sóla G– travel through the disease-ravaged city searching for survivors and disposing of the dead.

Moonstone’s author, Sjón (the penname of writer, poet and lyricist Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson), is one of Iceland’s leading surrealists, and this is clearly evident in the story’s construction. As befits a boy enamoured with the cinema, Mani’s life is presented to us as a series of symbolically layered scenes (and occasional photograph); servicing a client as Mount Katla erupts behind him, being discovered in flagrante with a Danish sailor on the day of Iceland’s independence, returning as a black butterfly to visit Bósi’s grandfather at the leprosy hospital where he spent his own earliest years.

A degree of reader’s discretion is advised as some scenes, including Máni’s fever dreams, and a sexual encounter with which the novel opens, are disturbingly blunt and graphic. Whether this is reflective of the original text or the choices made by its translator, Victoria Cribb, is an interesting question. But for all its unconventionality, Moonstone paints a haunting and evocative portrait of a specific time, place and character that should appeal to anybody willing to take a step outside their normal comfort zone.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/portrait-life-miniature-pivotal-moment