Publishers Weekly
05/24/2021
Five surreal, globe-spanning stories shape Eika’s startling English-language debut. The collection begins and ends with stories named “Bad Mexican Dog,” each of which recounts the travails of an otherworldly beach boy and the Cancún tourists he exploits and vice versa. In “Alvin,” an unnamed IT specialist scarred by his ex-wife’s abandonment embarks upon an illusive and homoerotic friendship with an eccentric derivatives trader while on assignment in Denmark. In “Rachel, Nevada,” a man mourning the deaths of his two daughters self-mutilates in ritualistic communion with a piece of alien shrapnel found in the desert. In “Me, Rory and Aurora,” a homeless woman inserts herself in the lives of a drug-dealing couple about to have a baby. Studded with shockingly visceral images (“Suddenly his windpipe popped out of the wet flesh, distended and fluted with cartilage”), these lyrical stories are preoccupied with a sense of psychosexual loneliness that penetrates even the most absurd moments of escapism. Eika’s fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula. Agent: Astri von Arbin Ahlander, Ahlander Agency. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
Praise for After the Sun:
“Relentlessly thrilling. . . . the sentences in these stories stretch past the limits of the ordinary to the luridly extraordinary, and some moments feel as if they are breaking through to the sublime. . . . an orgy of the unpredictable.” –The New York Times
“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
“[A] rare. . . talent that corrals flawed characters and explosive politics into a sweeping, searing collection. . . . a collage that gives voice to the dread of our time.” —Oprah Daily
“Bewitching . . .[and] scarily intimate. . . .What radiates from Eika’s gritty magical realism is ambient but potent: a grief so profound that it transfigures, a loneliness so abject that it fractures perception. . . . Dreamy, febrile and thoroughly twisted, After the Sun is . . . a bold debut from an author who understands the generative capacity of fiction.” —Seattle Times
“Confronts modernity and alienation in hypnotic prose, thrillingly translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg . . . . compelling, haunted, [and] radiant.” –TLS (UK)
“Urgent, deliriously discomforting . . . . Eika holds nothing back in his fiction, he goes into the tightest of spaces and most intimate and terrifying of moments in order to break through to places few have been before — or even imagined existing.” —Refinery29
“Eika deftly exposes the absurdity and harm of class, capitalism, and global oppressive structures. . . . utterly refreshing.” –BOMB Magazine
“Searingly beautiful. . . breathtaking in the truest sense. . . . [Eika’s] understanding of the alienation felt deep at the heart of so many, and the abstracted and byzantine nature of the systems undergirding our detached lives is unparalleled. But most of all. . . he’s able to realize the joy to be found, however fleetingly, in our shattered world.” –Chicago Review of Books
“The characters in these atmospheric, immersive stories are as arresting as the lives they lead. . . . [it] will leave you unsettled and mulling over our world's isolation and interconnectivity.” –Good Housekeeping
“Eika’s ability to combine foreboding with magic realism generates excitement in this English-language debut.” —Library Journal
“From a Danish wunderkind . . .mesmerizing . . .utterly brilliant . . .these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader's nervous system.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Surreal [and] globe-spanning . . . Eika’s fusing of the magic realist mode with the alienation of modernity makes for a winning formula.” —Publishers Weekly
“Gripping. . . . The global reach of these stories underscores the universality of the alienation that these characters endure. And the surreal debris Eika evokes from the fallout of capitalism has its own resonance.” –Booklist
"Political fictions aren't supposed to be this personal. Satires aren't supposed to be this heartbreaking. Surrealism isn't supposed to be this real. Giving a damn isn't supposed to be this fun. From slights of hand, to shocks to the heart, After the Sun is doing all the things you don't expect it to and leaving a big bold mark in what we call literature." —Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King
“How does it feel to be a native of the digital era? What effect does late capitalism have upon our intimate lives? A lot of people instinctively sense that time and space feel different these days, but few people seem able to capture that feeling in prose. Jonas Eika manages it. After the Sun is an inventive and exciting book – a true original.” —Zadie Smith
“Striking literary craftsmanship in an experimental mix of shock-lit, sci-fi, dada and Joycean glints presented as loose time scenes that slide in and out like cards in the hands of the shuffler. By the end, this reader had the impression of having been drawn through a keyhole.” —Annie Proulx, author of Barkskins and The Shipping News
“Eika's prose flexes a light-footed, vigilant, and unpredictable animalism: it's practically pantheresque. After the Sun is an electrifying, utterly original read.” —Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond and Checkout 19
“Jonas Eika blew the doors and windows of my imagination open, and now there is a galaxy in my head and a supernova in my heart. After the Sun vibrates with the aftershock of capitalism and reality flux. Its characters confront the world we've made as if they are facing off with ex-lovers who won't leave, caught at the instant before they will either flame on or flame out. Thrilling.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Thrust
“The young Danish author Jonas Eika completely destroys every safety net: his book After the Sun has a combustible power in its longing for another world—and it expands the term ‘fiction.’ No other poet has exploded onto the scene like Eika in a long while.” —Der Spiegel
“After the Sun has surprised and enthralled the jury with its global perspective, its sensual and imaginative language, and its ability to speak about contemporary political challenges without the reader feeling in any way directed to a certain place. . . . There is a real sense of poetic magic. Reality opens into other possibilities; other dimensions. There is something wonderful and hopeful in it that reminds us how literature can do more than just mirror what we already know.” —The Jury of the Nordic Council Literature Prize
Library Journal
09/01/2021
In this collection of five stories, Danish writer Eika explores the interaction between landscape and narrator. The first story "Alvin," previously published in The New Yorker, follows an IT consultant who returns to Copenhagen to find a pile of rubble covering the bank where he works. Coping with the infidelity of his wife and the breakup of his marriage, he meets Alvin, a trader, who takes him on a wild ride of derivatives speculation. The second and fifth tales focus on a beach boy in Cancún and his relationships with other boys as well as his customers. In the third entry, a retiree grieving for his dead children confronts the uncomprehending universe through ritualized mutilation with alien shrapnel in the desert. In the fourth story, a homeless young woman in London creates a family unit by temporarily moving in with an expectant couple who deal drugs. VERDICT Set in a dystopian universe, the stories describe each character's attempt to find meaning and intimacy as an antidote to loneliness and alienation. Eika's ability to combine foreboding with magic realism generates excitement in this English-language debut.—Jacqueline Snider, Toronto
Kirkus Reviews
2021-06-16
A collection of surreal stories from a Danish wunderkind.
This debut book brings together five strange, challenging works of fiction and has already won its 30-year-old author several Nordic literary awards. Difficult and mesmerizing, the stories range from formally formidable to downright mind-melting in their creative disregard for convention. "Alvin," relayed in one paragraph that spans 32 pages, follows a narrator who lands in Copenhagen for business only to learn that the building where he was heading has collapsed into rubble. Without a place to stay, the narrator crashes with the titular character, a wildly successful derivatives trader whose friendly economic advice quickly escalates into the two acquaintances absconding to Bucharest to make money and, maybe, love. The equally inventive "Bad Mexican Dog" centers around beach boys who wait hand and foot on guests at a resort in Cancún. The story is broken into two parts: Its first half features the unsettling death and resurrection of one of the beach hands, and it's an understatement to say that the second half then gets weird. Likewise, "Rachel, Nevada" follows a man's visceral, violent encounter with an extraterrestrial device known only as "The Sender"; beneath the shock value of the man's self-inflicted tracheotomy, sincere questions about reality and authenticity bubble. It's Eika's ability to plunge readers headfirst into discomfort or even disgust and then prod for uncomfortable truths that elevates his brazenly weird fiction from crass pyrotechnics to legitimately rewarding puzzles.
Utterly brilliant and occasionally confounding, these strange stories catch like fishhooks into the reader's nervous system.
