Nordic Council Literature Prize
After the Sun
After the Sun is a story collection where cities, resort economies, finance, bodies, and desire collide. Realistic surfaces open into fantasy and violence as isolated people search for connection in a globalized world.
Work Information
Beneath the glare of the sun, fissures in the world appear.
Jonas Eika's Danish story collection, translated into English by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg, moves through Cancún, Copenhagen, and financialized spaces. It blends social critique with surreal intensity, exploring desire, exploitation, and fragile forms of communion.
Review Summaries
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The collection is admired for its unpredictability and dense imagery, while its abstraction and unease can be demanding. Its power lies in turning contemporary anxiety into strange, vivid fiction.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- 2022-08-23
- Pages
- 208 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 12.88 x 1.37 x 20.17 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780593329122
- ISBN-10
- 0593329120
- Price
- 2794 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense
“Relentlessly thrilling . . . an orgy of the unpredictable.” — New York Times Book Review “Like Thomas Pynchon taking on late capitalism. . . . surrealistic, granular in its details, and concerned with social entropy and desperate attempts at communion. ” — Wall Street Journal From a major new international voice, mesmerizing, inventive fiction that probes the tender places where human longings push through the cracks of a breaking world. Under Cancún’s hard blue sky, a beach boy provides a canvas for tourists’ desires, seeing deep into the world’s underbelly. An enigmatic encounter in Copenhagen takes an IT consultant down a rabbit hole of speculation that proves more seductive than sex. The collapse of a love triangle in London leads to a dangerous, hypnotic addiction. In the Nevada desert, a grieving man tries to merge with an unearthly machine. After the Sun opens portals to our newest realities, haunting the margins of a globalized world that’s both saturated with yearning and brutally transactional. Infused with an irrepressible urgency, Eika’s fiction seems to have conjured these far-flung characters and their encounters in a single breath. Juxtaposing startling beauty with grotesquery, balancing the hyperrealistic with the fantastical—“as though the worlds he describes are being viewed through an ultraviolet filter,” in one Danish reviewer's words—he has invented new modes of storytelling for an era when the old ones no longer suffice.
Jonas Eika has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Nordic Council Literature Prize. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker . He lives in Copenhagen. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg is a writer and a translator of Danish literature, most recently of Johanne Bille’s Elastic and Ida Marie Hede’s Adorable .
Reviews
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Unsettling
So Denmark is supposed to be one of the happiest countries on the planet. So Denmark is also full of Scandinavian types like me with a tendency for melancholy. The author seems to have escaped all of the former and inherited all of the latter. I have not read anything quite this strange and unsettling since Alasdair Gray’s “Lanark”. Yes, it has moments of unique prose and startling perspectives, but leaves one feeling wrung out and worse for wear. If you are feeling a bit manic and have a need to dull the edge, this book is for you. If you are feeling a bit down and confused by life, make your reservation at the nearest psychiatric facility before you read this.
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Fresh and impressive
I read this after it got longlisted for the International Booker. The stories are of varying quality, and some of the strangeness seems to be superimposed, merely for the desire to make strange rather than expand meaning. Yet, for all that, this is a pretty stunning collection: there are turns of phrase that feel utterly new and a freshness to the language which feels rare. The first story in the collection, Alvin, was utterly enthralling. This is a young writer to watch and who has great promise!