I also researched cinema culture in Reykjavík up to 1919 hardly anything had been written about that, and it surprised me how many good films were shown during those early years of the full-length feature film. I read whole volumes of contemporary newspapers in order to get the “vision” of those who were alive at that time, in the same sort of way I did with both Skugga-Baldur (The Blue Fox) and Rökkurbýsnir (From the Mouth of the Whale). SJÓN: Yes, I ploughed through all that’s been written about the Spanish Influenza epidemic and the history of gay people in Iceland in both instances remarkably little has been written to date.

Did you have to do a lot of research when you wrote this book?

When that bit of the jigsaw fell into place, the story appeared before me remarkably clearly, and it took me much less time to write than I had thought it would.įactual material provides to some extent the basis for all your books. But the reason for his being an outsider in society was missing for a long time, which meant that I couldn’t make much progress apart from working on the usual research I always do when I’m writing.Īnd then I read the novel “A Life Apart” by Neel Mukherjee, and I realised that Máni Steinn was gay, like the central character in that book. I then realised that of course he was crazy about the cinema, which made it possible for me to interweave that with his real life. Not until I had the idea of placing a young boy in the middle of the Spanish Influenza epidemic, a boy who, because of his situation, watches events from the outside, and is not emotionally traumatised like other townspeople whose close relatives and friends were dying. SJÓN: For many years I had been collecting material about the three elements that form the backdrop to the story of Máni Steinn – the Spanish Influenza epidemic which reached Iceland in the autumn of 1918, Icelanders’ interest in films right from the birth of cinematography, and the history of homosexual people in the microcosm that is Reykjavík – but I could never see a way to make use of it, neither in combination nor individually.

In your new novel Mánasteinn – Drengurinn sem aldrei var til (Moonstone – The Boy Who Never Was) a variety of threads are traced, disparate threads that nevertheless knit really well together in this unique story. A short interview with Sjón about his latest novel

Moonstone by Sjón