Ulla-Lena Lundberg

‘Knowledge enhances feeling’ is a motto that runs through the whole of Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s oeuvre – both her novels and her travel-writing, covering Åland, Siberia and Africa.

In her trilogy of maritime novels (Leo, Stora världen [‘The wide world’], Allt man kan önska sig [‘All you could wish for’], 1989–1995) she used the form of a family chronicle to depict the development of sea-faring on Åland over the course of a century or so. She gathered her material with historical and anthropological methodology and love of detail. The result was entirely a work of quality fiction, from the consciously old-fashioned rural realism of the first volume to the contradictory postmodern multiplicity of voices in the last – all of it in harmony with the times being depicted.

When Lundberg (born 1947) takes us underground or up onto cliff-faces in her new documentary book, Jägarens leende. Resor i hällkonstens rymd (‘Smile of the hunter. Travels in the space of rock art’), in order to consider cave- and rock-paintings in various parts of the world, she also reveals a little of the background to this attitude towards life that takes such delight in acquiring knowledge – an attitude that is familiar from many of the protagonists of her novels.

Jägarens leende is both an introduction to the subject by an extremely knowledgeable amateur and a loving memoir in honour of the author’s travelling companion in the world of this art, her sister Gunilla Lundberg–Kelly (1945–2005).

The book opens with a captivating portrait of two small girls, the victims of a family catastrophe. The younger one is a feeble, speechless little creature  while the older one is determined to survive. ‘Come and look!’ is the big sister’s command to the feeble younger one, and eventually this would become a sort of leitmotif in the latter’s authorship.

In Siberien. Ett självporträtt med vingar (‘Siberia. A self-portrait with wings’) Lundberg successfully managed to tell a story of infatuation, using the richness of expression, the exaltation and reproduction rituals found in the world of birds as her main motifs. Jägarens leende depicts the story of two sisters through their shared journeys together: the reader follows the two women on numerous interesting trips, practically able to hear those eager voices, ‘Come and look!’

Gunilla Lundberg-Kelly was afflicted with a muscular sickness that proved fatal, and their last journeys were made to places accessible by wheelchair. Between her brief depictions of the beginning and end of her sister’s life, Ulla-Lena Lundberg opens up an engaging world of ancient artistry, magic, social communication – in Zimbabwe, Altamira, Bohuslän, Valcamonica…

We also learn a lot about the questions that occupy researchers into rock art, both professionals and laymen. On the disputed issue of whether or not the animal motifs of rock art – the eland antelope in Africa, the elk and bear in the north, mammoths in Ice-Age southern France – express a form of hunting magic or shamanism, Lundberg adopts a neutral position. Does one necessarily preclude the other? Art always has many meanings. Aesthetics and magic can be united in the same artistically inscribed line. Myths have a realistic dimension, realism a mythical one. Human beings are ‘communicative and secretive, never easy to pin down’. When you read Lundberg’s description of reindeer herding in Alta, you realise how multi-layered the narrative is, both documentary and imaginary.

And in spite of the long distance of time, and everything we can never know about the origins of the images, it is still possible to imagine a common denominator – the need to record your experience somehow – between the person who long ago made the painting or carving, and someone wanting to translate their sensory experiences into words.

One of Lundberg’s main concerns throughout her entire writing career has been to get us to see the differences and similarities between us, her readers, and the distant times and places she brings to life in her texts.

As so often in her writing, Lundberg also shows how the objective exterior and the subjective experience, with all its clutter of experiences, disappointments and needs, are always blurring into each other. Whose feelings, for instance, is she conveying to the reader when confronted with a few slapdash lines painted at the far end of a claustrophobic tunnel in Santian? ‘Never have I seen a painting that so strongly expresses loneliness and desperation…. I hope they express some sort of meaning. But to me they mean the end of the road,’ she writes.

And the clumsily depicted elk in Astuvansalmi, on a rock in Lake Saimaa, eastern Finland, speaks to her directly, through her engagement with it back through the centuries – the elk’s torso is decorated by a mark that represents the beast’s heart: ‘I am moved when I see it, perhaps because I myself have had to learn not to wear my heart on my sleeve.’

Encouraged by her big sister’s smart attempts at distraction, the little sister put her bleeding heart in her pocket, wiped her nose on her sleeve and set out to take a look and be enchanted. She became one of Finland-Swedish literature’s most important reminders of the fact that the world is interesting, multifaceted, and worth writing about.

And you can write about the heart, our loving, bleeding hearts, in so many different ways.

Translated by Neil Smith

… The old people’s home is the strange hand of God with which he strokes
his thinning hair,
a sudden shower of cackling in the dry linen closet, slightly
sad and lonely
God looks out, stirring his cup of tea as if it were on fire.
If Jesus had lived to grow old and gone into an old people’s home,
he would have been like these.

Timo Harju was awarded the 2009 Kritiikin kannukset prize (‘the spurs of criticism’, 2009) of the Finnish Critics' Association, SARV. Photo: Pia Pettersson

This spring a young Finnish female nurse was sentenced to life imprisonment for using insulin to murder a 79-year-old mentally retarded patient. Not long after, sentence was passed on another nurse – this time a meek and submissive-looking middle-aged woman who had murdered a whole series of elderly patients with overdoses of medication.

These are the terms – those of ordinary crime journalism –  in which our recent public discussion of long-stay care of the elderly here in Finland was conducted. The discussion was followed by the usual misery of cuts, unchanged diapers, dehydration, over-medication, poor wages for hard work… No wonder that the concept of  ‘healthcare wills’ and ‘living wills’, in which people are supposed to say how they want to be cared for in the last stage of their lives – is acquiring a disturbing undertone of ‘better jump before you’re pushed.’

This is dangerous. Horror and social pornography are becoming the dominant genre of reporting on the care of the elderly. The horror is a part of the truth, but in the absence of  any counter-balancing narrative – the stories of good care, compassion, humour, grief, the preservation of individuality all the way to the moment of death – it simply leads to impoverishment of the imagination, and paralysis.

For this reason Timo Harju’s first collection Kastelimme heitä runsaasti kahvilla (‘We watered them abundantly with coffee’, Ntamo, 2009) is important and ground-breaking in not only a literary sense but also an ethical one.

The poems are based on his experience of working as a community service helper at a Finnish nursing home – a working environment filled with dentures, non-spill coffee mugs, diapers, dementia.

And don’t get the wrong idea – this is real poetry. The work involves communicating with people whose words and syntax are wasting away, or for whom the most basic routines of dressing, eating and taking care of personal hygiene are bizarre adventures.

It is work that not only requires physical strength and unshockability but also considerable linguistic prowess.

Harju (born 1980) has confronted the task with emotional openness and intellectual curiosity, describing it in different ways that range from things like

Hilma is a lozenge box full of talk, rattling and rustling to herself at the table.
One morning I went into her room: LOZENGE STORM

to

A dark toilet. Dingy clotheshangers. A dingy woollen blanket. At least five water mugs in different parts of the room. A dent. A wisp of hair. A wind. A white, flameless candle. The door a wobbly milk tooth. A crackling, a corridor. Blind stairs. Let loose.

There is something deeply ideological about Harju’s poetic project, his attempt to portray care work from a point of view other than that of social pornography. Devoid of all cutesiness or embellishment, he writes in an astute and nuanced way about the terrible, moving, sad but nonetheless valuable aspects of being old and needy. And I think that one of his aims is to  make us  understand something of vital importance about ourselves and our own destinies.

Each morning the nurses pull on rubber boots and leave
for the dark dark, for a dark swamp, in the dark swamp
when the gnarled pines howl, only a pack of diapers for a lamp.
Cotton-grass on granddad’s head, violence and homesickness they leave
for the dark swamp, with all their sighs and strained nerves
along hands elbows into the bogholes. They bake cakes
and open the oven door into the night, to make it cheerful with the smell.
A prize would be nice, but the nurses aren’t on the winning side.

The same thing is true of poets – they are also very seldom on the winning side. But luckily they go on writing all the same.

Translated by David McDuff

Obs! Klass

De andra. En bok om klass
Red. [Ed. by] Silja Hiidenheimo, Fredrik Lång, Tapani Ritamäki, Anna Rotkirch
Helsingfors: Söderströms, 2009. 288 p.
ISBN 978-951-522-665-5
€26.90, paperback

Me muut. Kirjoituksia yhteiskuntaluokista
Helsinki: Teos, 2009. 267 p.
ISBN 978-951-851-259-5
€27.90, paperback

At some time in their lives, all members of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland have been confronted with the phrase ‘Swedish-speaking better people’ [Svenska talande bättre folk], uttered in tones of contempt. Encouraged by news and entertainment media with little regard for the consequences, Finland’s Finnish-speaking majority is hopelessly fascinated by the image of us Finland-Swedes as a uniform and monolithic haute bourgeoisie that resides in the coveted Helsinki neighbourhoods of Eira and Brunnsparken.

To someone like myself who grew up with Swedish as the language that was spoken both at home and at the school I attended in the not very fashionable 1960s Helsinki suburb of Gårdsbacka [Kontula] (known during my youth as a ‘problem district’, or slum), with no links either to the Finland-Swedish cultural bourgeoisie or to the nation’s capital city nearby, this is both sad and offensive. And it’s a predicament I share with many Finland-Swedes – we don’t recognise ourselves in that hostile cliché, but whatever we say about ourselves falls on deaf ears.

At least now we have two really good books we can quote from when we try to present our arguments. By happy chance, two anthologies about class in Finland have appeared from the two leading Finland-Swedish publishing houses at the same time. The first, with the title Obs! Klass (‘NB! Class’), proclaims on its cover that class is ‘more intimate than sex!’. Which may be true in Finland, where the upper class is a social stratum so thin that it is barely noticeable in the city and even less so in the countryside – unlike Sweden, the nearest Nordic democracy, which has an aristocracy with its own peculiar anthropological features and a number of castles and country estates that shape the rural landscape. In Finland, for better or worse, major joint projects like nation building, war and the rapid urbanisation of a population of smallholders have overshadowed many of the special interests connected with class.

Although this has not prevented the segregation of rich and poor, it has been harder to describe in conventional terms of class. For this reason, a de facto Finland-Swedish mixed-class minority (small farmers, fishermen, workers, officials, impoverished academics and a few well-off individuals) has become the country’s only visible target for class hatred, long after most of the wealth and prosperity drained away into other channels, even from the tiny handful of representatives of the Finland-Swedish upper class that once existed.

Söderling’s and Sundström’s editorial choice of contributors to Obs! Klass is expressly designed to render visible the Finland-Swedes who were hitherto unseen – the ones who never owned a fortune, or who lost it long ago. In this they brilliantly succeed.

The other anthology, De andra (‘The others’, Me muut), was published in Swedish and Finnish editions at the same time, with contributors from both language groups. It makes a good companion to Obs! Klass, expanding and filling it out in a useful way. The book tends to concentrate on the distinctions that create the sense of familiar and other that we all live with in our everyday lives. This is all extremely interesting, but I am not sure that it is really about class.

The most insightful contributions in both books are those that concern education. In Obs! Klass Robert Åsbacka (born 1961) analyses his education all the way from childhood in a conscientious working-class environment to the status of published author and Ph.D. student in literary studies, including how long it took him to turn his ‘history’ into ‘capital’, i.e. convert his educational career through manual labour into cultural capital and a decent livelihood. All without a financial safety net, or role models at home.

Charlotte Sundström (born 1973, in the same book) describes her class journey from fisherman’s daughter in the small Ostrobothnian village of Öja to cultural journalist in Helsinki, calling it – correctly enough – an ‘educational’ one. In the 1980s, Finland still had an educational system that was based on a sincere desire to iron out class differences and give everyone an equally good start in life by means of good primary education, regardless of their background at home. The economic recession of the 1990s marked the beginning of the dissolution of that ambition, and the results have made themselves felt –we live in a society where some schools are ‘problem schools’ and others flourish, society cannot fix the problems with special initiatives and well-off parents are increasingly able to choose between different alternatives. Among today’s thirty-something academics Sundström’s story is not unusual – the hardworking girl who becomes part of a meritocratic system and is able to put her talent to use – but there is a danger that the country may become a new, harsher, socially segregated Finland.

Malin Slotte’s moving essay (she was born in 1973 in the same part of Ostrobothnia as Sundström, and is also a cultural editor) concerns a similar journey, but with a focus on the experience of alienation and uncertainty among those who enter the domains of middle-class education with no prior knowledge of cultural codes and who only have their reading skills to help them. Maria Antas (born 1965) is another example of someone who received a healthy, meritocratic education which none the less left behind a certain degree of mistrust and an awareness of differences that lie below the surface.
In De andra there is an essay that forms a sister text to the accounts of these talented women. But it also contains a complication they lack or (Slotte, Antas) only hint at: what does it mean to leave one’s parents behind, to become quite different from them and feel relieved about doing so?

Merja Virolainen (born 1962) pays tribute to the Finnish comprehensive school that freed her from a life of intellectual narrowness and uncouth manners – a school that offered her knowledge, aesthetic experiences, broader horizons. And not only to the school: ‘I view my class background and development from four perspectives: education, health, occupation and income. Our education system, public libraries and national health service have been crucial to my development in terms of class. I dare say that I have them to thank for most things in my life. ‘

Although I suspect that Virolainen’s home background was a lot more spartan than mine, I (born 1958) second her vote of thanks with all my heart. I have also chosen to highlight precisely these texts because they concern something precious that risks being lost – the Nordic welfare model, a state that wants its citizens to prosper.

In addition to the examples I have mentioned, if one reads these two anthologies together one can find countless interesting pieces of information about Finnish society as well as opinions on them. One can learn what it’s like to make the journey from middle-class daughter to suburban single parent in Helsinki’s lower middle-class slums, to teach at an élite high school while having obligations to one’s family in Ghana, what it’s like for a fox farmer to go bankrupt and how pängar (the Åland pronunciation of the Swedish word for money) talks on the Åland Islands [which lie between Finland and Sweden, and have Swedish as the dominant language] just as it does in the global economy.

Alas, what we discover least about is what it’s like to live without financial worries. The wealthy contributors (Maria Björnberg-Enckell, Niklas Herlin and Sophia Ehrnrooth, heirs of successful industrial families) have many interesting things to relate about class, culture, society and wartime experiences cutting across social barriers and having different effects. But even after this worthwhile read, most of us can still only fantasise about what it must be like to have money.

Perhaps having plenty of money just feels natural – ‘nothing to write home about’ – to those who have it? In her role of local politician and debater Maria Björnberg-Enckell has established a reputation for being able to provoke people. Many readers will also probably be made extremely angry by her partly clueless but also wise and thought-provoking contribution to De andra. It, too, is the story of a hardworking woman, but one who grows up to be an active woman with truly inspiring ideas about good upbringing, who believes that noblesse oblige, and whose family history is codified in real estate (the stately home, the summer retreats).

‘The attention, the demands and the respect I got from home have given me faith that my actions have meaning and that I myself have chosen them. For me as a parent, upbringing – both unconscious and self-taught – meant making demands on my children and giving them attention (…) Anyone can raise their children to be people who do well. Worldliness and a secure position in society do not come into being in secret rooms, but probably in homes where they are seen to be important. It’s the challenge that is the motivating factor,’ she writes. Perhaps for those of us who wonder ‘what it’s like to have money’, the key is hidden in those words. Björnberg-Enckell was able to choose to be hardworking. Some of us have no option. And motivation only works up to a certain point – the point where one’s money and strength run out. Perhaps being rich is simply never having been in that situation.

* In modern Finland the Swedish-speaking minority, known as Finland-Swedes, constitute about six per cent of the population. Finland is officially a bilingual country. Swedish was the language of the Finnish bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia throughout the 19th century, long after Finland was annexed to Russia in 1809 following centuries of Swedish rule. Finnish slowly gained status as the language of public education as the struggle for independence became stronger in the early 20th century.

Translated by David McDuff

Glitterscenen

In Glitterscenen Fagerholm reveals the shabby details of the murder mystery that was the essence of her celebrated Den amerikanska flickan, The American Girl (2006). In a sense, the two books are psychological thrillers, but they are also much more than that: the American girl’s death is a myth about destruction and creation – a narrative about love, death and glamour that attracts and seduces cohort after cohort of young women in the District, a place somewhere in Finland that is in the process of being transformed from the rural to the suburban. Like no other author, Fagerholm combines the advantages of plot-based realism with the deep psychological excavation of collective dreams and the secret layers of the unconscious. In the centre of the District there is a kiosk where the local priest’s daughter, fat May-Gun, presides over dirty magazines, sickly candy and magnificent dreams. Across the square, eyed by horny small-town greasers, walks young and blonde Suzette. The result is a deadly drama, propelled by grief and narcissism.  The Glitter Scene is the goal of our dreams, but also a dangerous place of instant gratification and sudden death.

Robert Åsbacka. - Photo: Leif Weckström

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

Kosmonautti is a reflective first novel by a mature author; Lipson (born 1965), a medical doctor, has succeeded in weeding out the non-essential. In a cold, dark Murmansk during the final decade of the Soviet Union, three people live out their dreams. Seryozha is the good boy who adores space travel and his beautiful music teacher, Svetlana Kovalevna. She is harassed both in the classroom and in the staffroom, and by her snooping neighbours in the communal apartment. Sasha is Seryozha’s cheeky and precocious friend. This triangle, completed by Seryozha’s mother, contains a world of longing and loss which may make the reader’s heart almost burst with sympathy. Death gets in the way of the dreams, cruelty gets in the way of love – and yet the characters know that it’s important to dream and love. For Lipson – who has never visited Murmansk – the city is a state of mind, not a geographic or sociological location. She succeeds in creating romance and passion – not as they look in popular entertainment, but as they feel in a suffering heart. The novel won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for the best first novel, and was one of the six runners-up for the Finlandia Literature Prize.

(First published in Books from Finland 4/2008.)