Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

Pia Ingström on Robert Åsbacka’s novel Orgelbyggaren (‘The organ-builder’, Schildts 2008)

‘The organ-builder’ leaves me feeling sad, upset and happy, all at the same time. It seems odd that this gentle tale of an old man’s loneliness and sorrow after the death of his wife may be the most vibrant, intense and rousing novel I’ve read in a very long time. I am overjoyed that it is solid and substantial – a good, weight-bearing text, with plenty to unearth. I see now how Robert Åsbacka has been improving his craft as his career has progressed – and that his craft encompasses a great many talents.

He is capable of large-scale and patient construction, so that now, after four novels, we have a whole Åsbacka world to return to. He can write prose that is laconic, precise, and loaded with both humour and pathos. He can describe concrete objects, materials, work processes, different environments – and the emotional and intellectual dimensions contained within them.

Shipwreck

‘The organ-builder’ is a novel about how an old man, Thomasson, makes fragile new connections to the world around him, a world he has long ago turned his back on – precisely as a result of his vulnerability and his fading physical strength. He has been mourning the loss of his wife and avoiding all worldly concerns until a small boy’s cry for help makes him deviate from the path of his habitual walk, with results both good and bad.

Woven into the story of how he changes are his thoughts about his wife’s life and her death on the ferry Estonia, on its way from Tallinn to Stockholm through a September storm in 1994, in the worst maritime disaster in Europe since the Second World War, involving the loss of 850 lives.

Åsbacka, who himself worked on the ferry after it had just been launched, takes us inside the body of the ship, acquaints us with the cycles of food, drink, garbage, dirty linen, and with the sounds of steel and engines. As a result, we are able to participate in Thomasson’s fruitless brooding about what happened that night in September 1994 to his beloved Siri, a retired choir-mistress on her way to visit their grandchildren in Stockholm from Latvia, where she had been looking at church-organs.

He hadn’t gone with her, although he could well have done so. And now he is angry that she didn’t survive. She was ‘unusually fit, unusually energetic’, a woman who ‘walked, danced, exercised (…), always the one who took the initiative, first in line, the one with the best solutions.’

And yet she still died, on a ship that she ought to have known inside out – she had spent enough time on it with him, in the same corridors and the same stairwells, when the ship was still the Viking Sally and he had been its supplies manager.

Music

At home in his apartment in a coastal town in western Finland, Thomasson has spent the years after the disaster constructing a baroque organ for Siri, whom he genuinely loved yet betrayed during their long marriage.

With a sprained ankle and a broken arm – the rewards of his unpractised interaction with the outside world – he lies on his sofa listening to a recording of the seventeenth-century composer Dietrich Buxtehude’s organ composition ‘Mensch, willst du leben seliglich’. He thinks about how Siri played and pressed the pedals, her foot gliding from one pedal to another:

‘Beneath the music was the constant faint noise of all the moving parts of the organ. It brought the music to life, in the same way as a congregation’s coughing and foot-scraping on the stone floor contributed to a priest’s Sunday sermon. The word and everyday life united.’

Art

In much the same way, art and the everyday are united in Åsbacka’s novels. In Fallstudie (‘Case study’, 2004) we learn about the materiality of art by following two men who are constructing an installation out of scrap metal and magnets according to an artist’s plans. In Kring torget i Skoghall (‘On Skoghall Square’, 2006) we see a grimy fast-food kiosk transformed into a gourmet restaurant, and appreciate that food preparation can be conceptual, poetic art. The organ-builder, grumpy old Thomasson, fixed in his ways, shows us the point of Buxtehude’s music, Samuel Beckett’s drama, Sophie Calle’s conceptual art – Calle a figure familiar from earlier novels. They are there to help us to put up with ourselves in our misery and our striving for decency, to give shape to our bovine existence. So ‘The organ-builder’ is not just a novel about the Estonia, about physical frailty and the constancy of sorrow – it is also a novel of ideas about the place of art in our lives.

Sublime

I am delighted that the place of art is described as grand and important, yet fully accessible – Åsbacka has no embarrassed need to be ironic or profane about its importance, because he sees our contact with it as self-evident and unavoidable.

If only one dares, thinking can be as astonishing as this: Thomasson is listening to Membra Jesu Nostri, Buxtehude’s work about Christ’s suffering on the cross: ‘When death comes, O Jesus, let my breath flow into your side,’ the choir sings, and Thomasson thinks about the hole in the side of the ship: ‘He thought of Doubting Thomas, who wanted to put his finger into Jesus’ wounds in order to believe truly. For him, other people’s testimony was not enough. Thomasson felt for him. He too could no longer simply believe and accept things as before. He had to see the hole in the side. If it was there, or if it wasn’t there.’

I can’t discern any demand for religious sentiment here, but rather an invitation to a beautiful mutability of the sublime and our everyday sensory perceptions. Åsbacka presupposes with authoritative self-assurance that we can encompass both with our intellect and our emotions.

Humanity

I haven’t mentioned Thomasson’s human failings, or the other characters in the book and their merits. Or the pleasure of renewing acquaintance with characters from Skoghall or Döbelns grand (‘Döbelns Alley’, 2000). Or about how art can kill. Or how art nourishes and consumes other art (such as when Åsbacka niftily borrows from Buxtehude to arrange his material into chapters). Or about the overweight, thin-haired amateur actor, renowned for not knowing the script, who gets to play Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. And obviously I haven’t mentioned all the things I still haven’t discovered in this rich, multifaceted novel. But you can find that out for yourselves – read this book!

Translated by Neil Smith

Tags: novel