Sjón - Moonstone - The Boy Who Never Was

A charabanc is parked in the drive leading to a workshop that is decorated in the same colors as the house. The sign painted on its sides reads:

SÓLBORG GUDBJÖRNSDÓTTIR — HOUSE PAINTER

TELEPHONE: 323—FOR DECORATING IN ANY COLOR

Leaning against the workshop wall on the garden side is an old Indian motorcycle — its red varnish peeling, its tires flat — and beside it stands a gleaming Triumph Model Q.

The windows facing the street are at head height and one of them is open. The curtain has been sucked out of it and flaps in the evening breeze. There is the sound of female voices inside.

* * *

M. Peter Carlson walks along the sandy shore in the direction of Laugarnes.

He’s glad he didn’t give in to the temptation to knock on the door of the purple house:

Sóla G— lives on untouched in his memory.

The last few years have been good to him. He trained as an electrician and has had plenty to do assisting lighting technicians and cameramen on films. His job title is Best Boy — in other words, he’s still a boy, though he’s now twenty-seven years old.

He rents a small flat in Chelsea with Richard “Buddy” Williams, a printer of whom he is very fond. Williams produces books of poetry and other slim volumes in small print runs of exceptionally high quality. That is how they became acquainted with the Pool Group, though Carlson had already been aware of their existence and had noticed H.D. at the parties he attended with Haraldur Hamar when he first arrived in England.

Carlson goes to all the films that come to London. Naturally, he has already seen Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld , which is showing at Reykjavík’s Old Cinema this evening. Bryher and Macpherson do not share his enthusiasm for Sternberg’s crime pictures — they prefer the psychological dramas of G. W. Pabst — but he recognizes the debt Sternberg owes to Feuillade’s Les Vampires and Fantomas , which is filmmaking to his taste.

In the hall of his and Buddy’s flat on Tite Street hangs a sign: BEWARE OF FALLING COCONUTS.

That’s their kind of humor.

* * *

Carlson is only fifty yards short of the Leper Hospital when he experiences a sudden sensation of weightlessness. Glancing at his hands, he discovers that he can see right through them. He gropes for his body and finds that he is clutching at thin air. He can’t feel a thing apart from the wingbeats where his heart used to be.

* * *

A middle-aged man comes around the corner of the hospital. This is Sigurdur Ásgrímsson, a farmer from Dæli on Lake Hópsvatn, who has been a patient here since he fell ill with the disease six years ago.

For an instant he thinks a young man is standing before him, but at the next moment a black butterfly appears, bigger than any he has set eyes on before. It flutters up to him and settles on the stump of the ring finger of his right hand. A thought crosses his mind:

“My Gísli would appreciate this.”

Gísli, the fourth of his seven children, is a boy of thirteen who has been employed on a fishing boat on the island of Málmey ever since the family was broken up.

Neither of them knows that in ten years’ time Gísli will have a son named Sigurdur Ásgrímur, or that his sixth child will be the son Steinólfur Sævar, known all his life as Bósi.

And it will be in memory of Bósi — sailor, alcoholic, booklover, socialist, and gay — who will die of AIDS in the month of May 1993, that Sigurdur Ásgrímur’s eldest son, Sigurjón, will sit down to write the story of Máni Steinn, the boy who never was.

Special thanks are due to A. S. Byatt and Neel Mukherjee for their inspiration and support.

Born in Reykjavik in 1962, Sjón is a celebrated Icelandic novelist. He won the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize (the Nordic countries’ equivalent of the Man Booker Prize) for his novel The Blue Fox , and his novel From the Mouth of the Whale was short-listed for both the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Also a poet, librettist, and lyricist, he has published nine poetry collections and written four opera librettos, as well as lyrics for various artists. In 2001 he was nominated for an Oscar for his lyrics for the film Dancer in the Dark. Sjón’s novels have been published in thirty-five languages. You can sign up for email updates here.