After the Sun by Jonas Eika (tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg)
Review by Elodie Barnes
In the first of Jonas Eika’s short stories in After the Sun, the titular character Alvin declares, ‘I don’t speculate about the future, I trade it.’ He is a derivatives trader, an occupation as far from a writer as it is possible to imagine. Yet in reading this startling collection, there is a sense that Eika too is swapping the conjecture and fiction of regular narrative for something altogether more audacious. In Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg’s translation, these stories are by turns lyrical and brutal, ultra-realistic and fantastical. They penetrate layers of life and experience in rhythms that are both full of music and full of horror, showing the reader an underside to our modern, globalised world.
In the first sentence of ‘Alvin’, the narrator, an unnamed Dane travelling from Spain to Copenhagen, declares that he is ‘halfway out of myself after an extremely fictional flight’. This unsettling beginning, in which the process of travel is declared to be unreal, a state of suspended belief thousands of feet up in the air, sets the tone for the entire collection. As we move from location to location — from Copenhagen to Bucharest in the first story, and then to London, Nevada, the beaches of Cancun in the others — we are confronted with familiar places imbued with the surreal. The anonymous narrator arrives in Copenhagen to find that the bank he was supposed to be developing software for has been blown up; there is nothing left but a pile of rubble, below which employees continue to work like robots. Alvin, the derivatives trader, appears like an apparition at the narrator’s side, and their ensuing relationship - based on stocks and shares and the world of the computer screen - is erotically charged. The seductiveness of money proves just as irresistible as the seductiveness of the body.
This erotic theme continues throughout the stories. In ‘Bad Mexican Dog’, the harsh glare of the Cancun sun provides the backdrop for an exploration of underworld desires; behind the facade maintained for tourists, a group of beach boys tend not only to sunscreen and shade, but pornography and sex. The landscape and seascape and the sun itself all become part of the dark sensuality: ‘Through the chink in the wall, the sun makes a window of light on his stomach. I can see the ocean in it. It’s throbbing in my hand.’ Here, too, the layers of Eika’s writing become apparent, emphasised by the narrator who, in a moment of contemplation, says that, ‘…I know there are sides of the ocean I can’t see, there are sides of the beach chairs and parasols that withdraw and turn their backs to me…’ There is always an underside, always a different view to any place or situation. What, then, constitutes reality?
Perhaps the most fantastical story, and the one that delves deepest into this question of what we think of as real, is ‘Rachel, Nevada’. Among a community of UFO enthusiasts and close to the boundaries of Area 51, a man consumed by grief attempts to merge himself with an other-worldly machine called the Sender. The desert landscape also becomes part of this experiment in separation and connection, as the narrator feels ‘an amorphous desert life unfold inside him with tectonic slowness’. With so many strands and so much depth, and with the surreal blurring against the paranormal, this is possibly the most difficult story to read at first sitting; not many short stories can pack so much in.
The shifting of boundaries is a little easier to grasp hold of in ‘Me, Rory and Aurora’, in which an unsettling London love triangle, threaded with connotations of underage sex and incest, collapses. Here, too, there is a strong sense of slightly-skewed place, at the same time as physical space seems to dissolve: ‘…we were always trying to open and extend the pleasure, with hands and mouths, across the mattresses, through the room, up and out of the building’. As in all of Eika’s stories, the reader is confronted with a degree of uncertainty, both thrilling and destabilising. After the Sun is not a comfortable read. Instead it is, in the words of ‘Rachel, Nevada’’s narrator, a ‘rupture in continuity’, redefining what the short story can do.
After the Sun is published by Lolli Editions, 24th August 2021