Jonas Eika’s After the Sun is a masterfully realised work of contemporary fiction. In potent combination of the lyrical and the visceral, the five stories that make up the collection span landscapes, relationships, and planes of reality, moving with intensity and poeticism to form characters and worlds which convince us of their reality through their strangeness. After the Sun was featured as our Book Club selection for the month of August, and Blog Editor Xiao Yue Shan spoke live to Jonas Eika and translator Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg about the exceptional qualities of this text—its dream logic, its musicality, and its radicalism. Their conversation is as follows.
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Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I had approached this collection from the underlying cohesion of dream logic—which seemed to me to be what rounded out all the narratives in this volume. So I was wondering—first of all—do you remember your dreams?
Jonas Eika (JE): I’m really bad at remembering my dreams. I used to be kind of good, but I lost it. One dream that I do remember—which is also relevant to this book—is the end scene of one of the stories called “Rachel, Nevada”, which is in the middle of the book. It ends with this old woman coming home from a concert in this very ecstatic state, telling her husband that the singer from the concert had and came to her and said, So good to see you. We’ve met before, we’ve met on the radio. And that dream is what sort of started the story—I just knew I wanted to find a way to get there, to find out what came before. But I must admit, it’s also rare for me that I use dreams so specifically in writing, or maybe it’s there without me knowing.
Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg (SNH): Actually, I often remember them. But I think my dreams are usually very easily interpretable. I’ve had a dreamscape that’s mapped onto every place that I’ve lived, which is interesting. So I have a Copenhagen scape, and a New York scape—slightly altered landscapes of the places. I grew up on Long Island and in the Long Island scape, there are wolves everywhere—though I’ve never seen a wolf on Long Island. I tend to remember dreams really vividly, actually, and then they kind of dissipate over the course of the day. But the scapes I remember.
XYS: There’s always these associations of dreams with the divine or the primordial, but what actually what related these narratives to dreams for me was the idea that anything could happen at any time, and no matter what was happening at whatever time, it always kind of made sense. There was this cohesion throughout the writing that allowed absurdities to occur without them seeming as absurdities. I mean, this might be just a cultivation of the stories’ surreal circumstances, but I also think it has a lot to do with the innate musicality and the structure of the writing. So I wanted to ask both of you—was this an intentional thing that you were constructing? Or is it something that was more of a stream-of-consciousness ideal?
JE: I really like that description—and I think that the dream logic you talked about is making sense for me now. One of the things I did attempt consciously while writing was to keep it very open in terms of genre and narrative, but with the scenes that seem to break most with the reality of the story, I wanted them to somehow come out of the same logic, or be born out of the same landscape—out of the same objects and emotions that are already in the realist world of the story. So I’m glad you think it feels sort of logical or that it makes sense, even though it’s surprising. And how that came about was actually by finding this musicality in the language. I feel like often when writing works for me, it is like I’m tapping into an underlying rhythm. I will usually have a few sentences, which are often the first sentences of the story that just play around in my mind, and then I really get into that rhythm, and then I start writing when I’m ready or when an energy has sort of build up. So there was something improvisational about it.
SNH: Maybe it’s the dream logic, or the musicality, that ties all of the stories together—because I do think it’s interesting that they are so different. They take place in different places, they have different tones, they’re shifting in perspective, they’re playing with different genres, but there still is something that makes it such a coherent work. Perhaps that does have to do with that specific kind of musicality, that maybe is also in its own way, connected to a logic—or this dream logic.
XYS: I’m always pleasantly surprised when I read prose writers who also kind of have this insistence on continuity of music in their work; we tend to think of fiction as a lattice built architecturally, and then ornaments placed on top of that, but there’s something attractive about the idea that prose writers are paying equal attention to the movement of one sentence to the next—as poets do. Do either of you read or write poetry at all?
JE: Maybe I write a poem now and then, and just hide it in my drawer quickly. But I do read a lot of poetry and I just came to think of the Japanese poet Hiromi Ito, who I really read while writing this book, actually. And, I mean, she writes poetry, but a lot of narrative poetry. I read mostly Wild Grass by the Riverbank, and there’s something about the way she used rhythm and repetition to make even the weirdest things—the scenes where the distinction between life and death or human and non-human totally dissolve—make total sense, because she introduces it by the same patterns and rhythms that constitutes the universe of those poems. So I do read a lot of poetry, and I take that into my prose writing as well.
SNH: One of my guilty pleasures is reading poetry really fast—reading it as if it was prose, because I love that feeling of just being completely overwhelmed by language. And sometimes I’ll go back and read it more slowly, but I think that also has something to do with the way that I translate—a sort of expectation of having this full sensory experience wash over you without thinking too much about it, just letting the craft that’s been put into it do its work.
XYS: That’s such a beautiful way to put it. And you guys also just both confirmed my suspicions that the best prose writers are also secretly poets. Actually, Jonas, I’m so happy that you mentioned Hiromi Ito, because that leads me perfectly into my next question—which is that you both have this commonality of distinct, almost brutal, physicality in your writing when you’re dealing with the body. Ito writes that very succinctly from the point of view of a woman, but what I noticed in your writing is that gender seems to move through this breakdown when you write about the body with such raw comprehension. It’s just very, very corporeal. Is that something intentional that you do to analyse gender?
JE: Yes—the intense, or brutal, corporality of these stories come mostly from the fact that they’re about people who have, in many ways, fallen outside of a secure life, but also outside of normative, meaningful temporality; there’s not really any promising future for them. It’s instead this cyclical, repetitive life where the promise of bright or radically different futures have disappeared. So that also means they mostly just have their bodies to work with, to build resistance or new emotions and new relationships from. But I am very interested also in gender; most of the characters in this book are male, or socialised as male, but I am interested, for example, in the basic fact that a male body can also be penetrated, and masculinity is always positioned as this impenetrable, uniform thing—which of course, it’s not. So there is something—once you go into all the things that go in and out of bodies, those binaries totally fall apart.
XYS: Yes, and I really felt that amidst specific descriptions in the book concerning sensations—the body being almost a container for action. There were sections in the narration, when, for example, one of the beach boys, when he’s describing orgasm, he’s talking about how the sun is setting inside him. I found those lyrical passages to be so beautiful, and it reminded me a lot of the way that women talk about pregnancy or childbirth. So it’s interesting to think that like a male container could contain females sensations or performances. Sherilyn, did you ever feel any incompatibility with the fact that—as far as I know—Danish is a gendered language, the way that English is not?
SNH: Well, yes and no. There are genders, but they don’t map onto male and female as in the romance languages. Danish is actually less gendered than English; you can, for example, use a genderless pronoun to talk about a child, who can be referred to as “they/it”. There are a number of words like that, where you don’t necessarily need the gender in Danish. Like, the word for girlfriend or boyfriend is the same, no matter the gender of the person. So in some ways, English is more gendered than Danish.
XYS: Was there any sort of impediment in the transition then?
SNH: There were certain moments, but my perception of reading and translating After the Sun was that Jonas was very aware and careful of how he uses gender in ways that do translate. So it was rare that those impediments happened compared to other texts I’ve translated; it’s almost like that had been thought through in advance. But there are these real ambiguities—as in “Me, Rory and Aurora” about the genders of these characters, especially the narrator, until you get pretty far into the story.
JE: “Me, Rory and Aurora” is very much about a person who is caught in this very unequal, intimate relationship, or actually enters into two other people’s relationship after having been homeless, and is sort of at their mercy—always in danger of being kicked out. And I was really interested, in that story, about making the moment where—and I think I refer to them as “they”, because I’m not sure exactly how they would want to be gendered—the moment they’re kicked out is also when they’re being gendered by another person. Aurora, who takes the authority in that situation, refers to them as “her”. It’s also the first point that anyone is talking about them in the third person, which is of course also distancing. The strange thing about pronouns is that it’s something someone else ascribes to you, and then you can, of course, take some autonomy over it, but it’s still there at the mercy of others who can choose to respect it or not. And I was working subtly with that in the story as well.
XYS: You’d mentioned before how most of your characters exist in this perpetual precarity, which is something that we’re paying more and more attention to—not only because the whole world’s been thrown into tumult, but also because we’re living in a new age of consciousness about our social paradigms, and how dangerous they all essentially are. Do you think that your characters ultimately try to alleviate this precarity by completely separating themselves from this societal infrastructure? Or do they try to re-integrate in a more aggressive way then what would be considered as normal?
JE: I mean, it is quite different, of course, because they’re also positioned very differently, but I think most of them are looking for a way out of society—this thing we call society. In many ways, they’re consciously or unconsciously trying to get to a point where they fully understand their situation and the oppressive systems that they’re in, so they can actually and subjectively be ready to leave them. But also for some of them, it’s not really a choice. And the main character in the story that we were just talking about, who gets a chance to hold on to a minimum of security—having a home, having a place to sleep—really tries to hold on to that desperately, but is pushed out in the end, which also means being pushed into the hands of an exploitative institution.
XYS: On that note of fiction’s political spectrums, I wanted to ask you, Sherilyn, being born in the US, and having done your schooling there—when we’re entering into an increasingly global political conversation, I feel the US is so often branded as a precarious, capitalist pit of despair by a lot of other countries around the world, whereas the Nordic countries are often equally erroneously branded as socialist paradises. Do you think that Jonas’s fiction is received differently by the political consciousness of readers in America versus the Nordic countries?
SNH: I would say yes and no. There are a lot of the same issues with precarity, but in Denmark, there is a much stronger welfare system; if you have a “yellow card”, then you have health care; there’s a lot of heavily subsidised childcare; education is free—there are those sorts of major differences. And the left in the US is really pushing towards so many of those things, more emphatically so than it has been for most of my adult life. Yet, in Denmark, a lot of that is being stripped back by the party in power—the Social Democratic Party. So the book might be received slightly differently because of those contexts, and the strange sort of shift that seems to be happening—where they’re almost moving in opposite directions.
JE: I think your description is true, Sheri, that the state has modified capitalism more here, and has distributed wealth more so than in the US. Denmark is also a very wealthy country, but what’s becoming clear for more and more people nowadays is that it is just a moderation, that even a state that tries to redistribute some wealth through taxes is still also a facilitator of capitalism. While we should definitely acknowledge that life is, for many people, much more secure here in Denmark—when we think with this dichotomy between the small neoliberal state and the big welfare state, at least from a Danish perspective, we don’t really understand the political changes that are going on, because many neoliberal policies and structural changes can work through social democracy or through the welfare state. It can be used exploit people for underpaid work, and especially for migrants and refugees, this society has been a catastrophe for at least twenty years. To relate that with the reception of the book, I feel that in some ways, here in Denmark, it was received as. . . I don’t know. It seems that when you write about something that is not only white, middle-class life, it’s received as a statement, or a distinct choice—which course, in some ways, it is.
XYS: So it was received as more radical.
JE: I would guess so, yes.
XYS: I’ve noticed a certain trend in Danish fiction—at least in the work that’s being translated in English—that they tend to take place in worlds that are more fluid than English-language fiction worlds, which have a tendency towards the solid. Is there a lineage of abstraction in Danish fiction that this work is tapping into?
JE: There’s definitely some Danish writers that I’m inspired by, who also write in some sort of alternative genres, but maybe it’s the things that are being translated because I would say there’s also a big realist and minimalist tradition in Danish literature. But many of the things that Lolli Press translates are on the more experimental side—definitely not representative of Danish literature as such.
SNH: I’ve thought about this quite a bit—coming from the US, the context of Danish literature is quite a bit smaller; there’s one main creative writing school, and it creates this really interesting environment for fiction and literary texts, because things tend to move at a much quicker rate, and both themes and techniques develop in this accelerated way. I’ve noticed it especially with certain theories and influences—it seems to be kind of a greenhouse. That being said, what attracted me to Jonas’ book is that it was completely unlike anything I’d read in Danish up to this point. But, yes, there is something with the Danish literary context that could lend itself to a kind of surrealism, or this style or tone that feels really distinct, because it does have this tighter framework.
XYS: I’m always curious of works in translation as to the distinctions between the abstract and the physical, especially in this work where the two are so osmotic towards one another: if something in the language, or the translation process, precipitated that.
JE: I find it hard to pinpoint myself, but it’s probably when you’re immersed in your own native tongue, you can’t see it. But one of the things about this book was that the style came from reading a lot of English language literature, especially William Burroughs but also Eileen Myles, who also writes in these short, concise sentences with a lot of intensity in each one—and I think I tried to carry some of that over to the Danish sentences, to cram them together and make them contain a lot in their briefness. That’s the good thing about reading in other languages, that it pushes your own in different directions.
SNH: What I did for most of the stories is that—because there are so many idiosyncracies—I started translating them first into a smooth English, where everything was very idiomatic and correct, but much flatter. Then I went back through it, often in conversation with Jonas, trying to figure out how we could rough it up and add idiosyncrasies back into it, and I don’t know how m any hours we spent on the phone just saying the same sentence five different ways. The sound of how each word felt in a sentence, or how the sentences connected to each other, was really important. Does it work? Is it weird enough? Is it too weird? And that was pivotal in the translation, to go back and forth about that strangeness, so it could find its way into the English.
Jonas Eika is a Danish writer and translator. He has published two books of fiction, Lageret Huset Marie (Warehouse, House, Marie, 2015) and Efter solen (After The Sun, 2018), which was published in English on Riverhead Books (US) and Lolli Editions (UK) in 2021, translated by Sherilyn Hellberg. He is currently working on a historical novel and on the Danish translation of Jackie Wang’s Carceral Capitalism.
Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg is a writer and literary translator. She has published translations from the Danish of Jonas Eika, Ida Marie Hede, Olga Ravn, Tove Ditlevsen, and Johanne Bille, among others. In 2018, she received an American-Scandinavian Foundation Award for her translation of Caspar Eric’s Nike. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet and editor. shellyshan.com.
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