The ash coats Reykjavik’s skies, wrapping the city in a hazy cloud that’s reflective of the island country’s seclusion from the rest of the world, as well as Máni’s isolation. To the concern of the old lady, Máni is “such a loner that rather than go out and play with his classmates he preferred to hang out at home, smoking cigarettes with her.” Besides smoking in the attic, he splits his time between trips to the cinema and prostituting himself.Įarly on in the novel, we witness the eruption of Katla, a large Icelandic volcano.
They live with “the landlord,” a man she raised as a nanny and who lets them stay in his garret space rent-free. The boy’s guardian is “the old lady”-his grandmother’s sister who took him in after his mother died when he was just six. Sjon’s latest novel, Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Books, 145 pages), set in Reykjavik in 1918, is the story of sixteen-year-old Máni Steinn (a.k.a.
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