Jonas Eika, as told to Karoline Markholst and translated by Hazel Evans

Jonas Eika on new writing opening up
“I initially imagined OPEN HEAVENS as a relatively short, concise historical novel, but time and again I felt the need to expand the fiction and explore new linguistic temperaments. Perhaps this had to do with the fact that I was trying to write about a movement, a new and diverse way of life. In any case, I felt a resistance to limiting the perspective to a single character, or to the idea that a grand shared ideology could erase all internal differences. As the plot unfolded and a collective expectation began to build around the main character Ida, it became especially important to widen the perspective to include other characters, to explore the different desires and sensibilities that exist within the same political struggle.”

 Jonas Eika on what drives their work
“Parenting is one of the things occupying me most right now. The slightly anachronistic experience of imagining – and trying to create – continuity in a world that is changing so quickly and unpredictably. All the hopes, ideas and anxieties that come with being someone’s primary caregiver. More broadly, I’m interested in the concept of time, and how to evoke temporalities other than our traditional linear understanding.”

 Jonas Eika on form and friction
“Every text is an ordering of the world. Something is centred, something else is pushed to the margins. I want my books not to rest too heavily on their form; I want the marginalised to also make their presence felt; I want the books to both build a world and tear it down again. So you sense that it could also be different.”

 Jonas Eika on the erotic
“When you write about a separatist women’s community in the Middle Ages, naturally the question of sex arises. It was as though it already existed before I even got into the material:

Were the Beguines (the Catholic women’s movement I write about) lesbians? Did they have sex? On the one hand, the answer is simple enough: Yes, some of them did. On the other, I didn’t want to satisfy the desire to categorise my characters through a contemporary lens of sexuality, which only took shape much later. I became more interested in the question of how one relates to one’s own desire when there are no representations of or discourse about it whatsoever, when it simply doesn’t exist in the shared imagination. So even though there is plenty of desire between my characters – and opportunities to act on it – I chose to postpone the more recognisable forms of sexuality until later in the book. This carries the risk of the female characters coming across as chaste, pure, innocent, but my aim was to expand the erotic.

To present it as a force that can also be found in ritual, in shared physical labour, in reading and thinking – a way of being fully and completely present in oneself and one’s body, which is also what holds the potential for change.”