The subtitle of the Icelandic writer Sjón’s jewel-like novella is “the boy who never was”. Known to English-speaking readers for a series of beautiful short works written and translated in the 2000s, Sjón (a pen name that means “sight”, shortened from his given name Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson) has been involved in Reykjavík’s literary scene since the late 1970s, when he was part of a milieu of young underground artists and musicians that eventually gave rise to the Sugarcubes. The subsequent career of that band’s lead singer, Björk, has cemented the Icelandic aesthetic in the international imagination as a fusion of hard-edged modernist experimentation with a kind of folkloric whimsy. Sjón, who has written lyrics (and occasionally played air-guitar) for his elfin friend, shares both these qualities.
The “boy who never was” is one Máni Steinn Karlsson, a 16-year-old who has sex with men for money in Reykjavík. The year is 1918, and Máni’s reality is unstable, infected by cinema, always threatening to tip over into dream. In Sjón’s telling, this story is neither a fairytale, nor a study of abjection. Máni often enjoys his encounters, and his love of the cinema leads him to Irma Vep, the anti-heroine of Louis Feuillade’s seven-hour epic crime movie, Les Vampires, in which an “eponymous gang of nihilists ... hold French society in the grip of fear”. Irma, who wears a fetishistic black bodysuit (unthinkably shocking for 1915, when the film was made), “scales buildings like a shadow and breaks into apartments and government offices before making her escape over the rooftops”. Like the boy dreaming about her from his seat in one of the city’s two cinemas, she is outside society, committing her crimes “with the cheerful zeal of one who has turned her back on the laws of her fellow men”. Máni finds his own Irma in Sóla G, a motorbike-riding girl in black leather who seems to have escaped from the screen into the more mundane register of his daily life.
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