Moonstone by Sjón5/29/2023 ![]() One particularly eerie moment stands out, as Máni and Sóla G prowl the cinemas fumigating them with chlorine gas, dressed in black. When the boy contracts the illness, the novel succumbs to hallucinatory passages interspersed with foreboding images, a condition from which neither Máni nor the story ever fully recovers. The book itself is a love letter to the cinema, as Máni spends most of his waking hours enraptured in the black-and-white flickering images, even as the flu begins to cut down the people of Reykjavik in scores. His only occasional companion is a motorcycle-riding tough girl named Sóla G, beloved to Máni because she resembles the famous French actress Musidora. “The boy smoothes out the note and grins there are two of them, a whole fifteen krónur.” Despite dabbling in prostitution, Máni leads a solitary existence. ![]() ![]() “Without a word the man flings a crumpled bank note at him and hastens away in the direction of town,” Sjón writes. ![]() ![]() The story opens with Máni Steinn, a 16-year-old boy, engaged in sex with an older man, a matter-of-fact scene handled with workmanlike precision by the author. Award-winning novelist, poet, and Björk collaborator Sjón ( From the Mouth of the Whale, 2008, etc.) takes direct aim at Icelandic conservatism in this slim, meditative novella about a gay teen in Reykjavik on the eve of the Spanish Flu, circa 1918. ![]()
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