Tuuve Aro. Photo: Liisa Takala

Interview with Tuuve Aro, author of Himokone (‘Desire machine’): in these short stories she borrows titles and ambiance from the silver screen

A dark theatre, the smell of popcorn, expectation quivering in the air. Since childhood, the author and film critic Tuuve Aro (born 1973) has loved that magic moment when a new, exciting story is about to begin once again on the silver screen.

The stories in her fourth short story collection Himokone (‘Desire machine’, WSOY, 2012) have taken their names from films – Vertigo, Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example. The book’s title comes from a certain Dr Samuel L. Brimstone, member of the ‘Royal Film Academy of Suffolk’: according to him, a film projector is a desire machine: it doesn’t give anything, it only shows, and for that very reason it is hard to resist.

A-L E: What kinds of frames do the films form for your stories?

TA: Mostly suggestive ones. The events in the stories don’t correspond with those in the film, but the atmosphere of the stories comes from the films. I feel that films offer an interesting frame for examining various phenomena. For instance, the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers was basically a metaphor for the spread of communism: in my story, however, the human-eating monsters are babies, from the viewpoint of a single, childless woman. Naturally, I don’t have any children…

A-L E: Your filmic stories paint a perceptive portrait of our times. They examine consumer hysteria and the absurdity of working life, and also loneliness. In Fight Club, you write about Karoliina Järvi, a young poet hungry for fame, who creates a literary career through social media long before her first collection is published.

TA: It definitely feels quite absurd that nowadays networking and building a literary career comes first – before publishing anything, you create a product of your self and your life. In this phenomenon-first culture, it’s the person or the trend that’s being sold, not the literary worthiness of a book.  A writer today has to know how to sell herself, like sausage. I don’t want to accept that.

A-L E: What is your relationship as a writer to social media?

TA: In my thirteen years as a writer, I’ve been adept at avoiding the pitfalls of competition and envy. But this has been feeling more and more difficult since I joined Facebook a few years ago. Suddenly careers, successes, prizes and disappointments are all on display, and it’s easy to slip into the habit of comparison. It makes no sense. It just diverts attention from what is essential – the writing. You can see the change of mood in literary circles – a vague uneasiness, public poses, sniping. The storms in the publishing field and the general coarsening of values doesn’t help the situation.

A-L E: In your story Tappajahai (Jaws), a woman thirsty for love accidentally destroys the objects of her affection. The way the story arc takes a sudden, strange turn, the dark comedy, the highly original characters, are these signature features of your work?

TA: I like to tweak reality into new and strange configurations in my books. There’s also typically a visuality to the text. I see the events of my stories as images.

A-L E: You’ve published four collections of short stories, two novels, and one children’s book. Which genre is nearest to you?

TA: Definitely the short story. The encapsulation, building ‘short form suspense’ fascinates me. Stopping at the right time is its own skill.

A-L E: Your first film review was published in 1998, your first book, Harmia lämpöpatterista (‘Trouble with the radiator’) came out in 1999. How do fiction and criticism overlap?

TA: Quite naturally. They’re completely different styles of writing, but they feed each other. Reviewing is a deliberate, analytical act. I progress more instinctively when I’m writing fiction. Excessive deliberation in fiction can easily become dry.

A-L E: At the end of Himokone, Samuel L. Brimstone is quoted again: ‘When all is said and done and we’re pondering what life was all about, we no longer distinguish between what we have seen and what we have experienced.’ Is this also a summation of the life philosophy of a film buff author?

TA: In my own life, fact and fiction, sleeping and waking, film and life are definitely mixing together all the time. We live nowadays amid a flood of entertaining stimuli where it’s hard to distinguish between what’s true and what’s made up… This can be disorienting, even oppressive. On the other hand, without films, without my bizarre dreams, I wouldn’t be me. Movies have made me who I am.

Translated by Lola Rogers

Kristina Carlson. Photo: Tommi Tuomi

Interview with Kristina Carlson, author of William N. Päiväkirja (‘William N. Diary’, Otava, 2011)

‘Monsieur W. Nylander had died alone, his head resting against his desk. We’d known for a long while that your beloved relative was not well, but whenever he was walking along the street and someone enquired as to his health, he always replied that he felt fit and well.’

Finnish-born Monsieur William N. lives in Paris at the end of the 19th century. The grumpy old scientist spends his days studying lichens in his small, dusty apartment and writing bitter comments in his diary about the way of the world, all things meaningless, and the glory and reputation that he never achieved.

William Nylander (born Oulu, 1822 – died Paris, 1899) is a historical figure who truly existed, and the remarks quoted above are taken from a letter sent by William’s housekeeper to his sister Elise in Finland, but other than this William’s diary is entirely the work of Kristina Carlson. The hermetic botanist has now become the protagonist of a novel written in 2011.

SL: Monsieur N. is the central character of your third novel, written in monologue form. What was it you found so fascinating about this grouchy old man that he ended up coming to life as a character in your novel?

KC: I was interested in William’s well-documented obstinacy, because it would seem that then as now both scientific and artistic success have required a certain level of social aptitude. At the very least they required good manners. William’s opinions and pronouncements are mostly my own creations, though it is true that he was very upset that even his status as a professor didn’t provide him with a decent apartment in Helsinki.

In our time, one’s social skills are almost de facto put in the spotlight. I doubt William would have had a single friend on Facebook. I wanted to examine what life must be like for such a recluse – not least because I recognise some of the same traits in myself. As I was writing, I wondered what readers might think of someone as unlikeable as William. I’m rather pleased with him because he’s also aroused a great deal of empathy, pity and even sympathy. That’s the way I reacted to him too. William was and continues to be a respected researcher, but his problematic character traits made his life very lonely.

SL: How did you come across Monsieur N.? By chance?

KC: About ten years ago I read A.G. Morton’s book A History of Botanical Science. The translated edition also contained an appendix written by Finnish researchers in the field. That’s when I first encountered Mr Nylander, a man who interested me far more because of his persona than because of his scientific achievements. So yes, it was by chance.

SL: There are conflicts and dichotomies in every one of us. Monsieur N. is an ascetic scientist with a scornful disdain of imagination, a man who from day to day subsists on milk, bread and soup but who, when given the chance, would happily tuck into a dish of braised hare and knows better than to spit in his Burgundy. He never reads novels or listens to music, but a painting by Georges Seurat makes a great impression on him. According to N., paintings are different from novels or music because ‘you don’t have to imagine them’. N. believes that Seurat’s manner of painting is ‘scientific’ because he doesn’t attempt to copy reality but breaks it up and puts it back together again; under the microscope ‘the eyes fix on the tiniest elements and in our brains we perceive their significance, their being.’ Did you consciously set out to look for William’s inherent contradictions or did his personality take shape spontaneously? How do you write when you’re trying to characterise a fictional person?

KC: Biographical information about Nylander and his life provided some material, but for the most part his character came to life in my head. When you look inside a fictional character, when you really get into their heads, the creative process is quite a spontaneous one. I didn’t need to search for dichotomies or contradictions; they arose out of William’s character all by themselves. A person with no contradictions, a ‘rounded’ character, wouldn’t be the least bit interesting. We all have conflicting impulses pulling and pushing us at the same time. We don’t necessarily notice these traits in ourselves, but in a fictional character they are far easier to pinpoint. William’s interest in good food – whenever someone else is serving it – is a manifestation of the other side of his miserly persona: the gluttonous side. In fact, many phenomena that seem so contradictory are in fact simply the other side of another aspect, and in a way they are logically linked to one another.

SL: The novel highlights the parallel natures of and the differences between art and science. Your previous novel Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’, 2009) examines the right of an individual to be different within a homogenous group, in this case a small village community in Victorian England, and the extent to which this is ultimately possible. This time the setting is the crowded city of Paris, but as with the previous book, it seems that at the heart of this novel too is an examination of the price an individual must pay in order to retain his integrity against the pressures of time and society. In his final diary entry before his death, William N. comments that ‘perhaps my soul is reminiscent of a dried raisin, but I cannot hate myself, for I have no one else.’ This is a person who avoids the pursuit of ‘happiness’, but surely he too has an idea of what it is?

KC: William certainly spends time considering what happiness might be. From his perspective it is a stagnant, airless, stuffy state of being. To a great extent he equates happiness with the bourgeois high-life, something that requires certain elements that might be considered markers of respectability: a family, a house and possessions. He doesn’t seem to appreciate that happiness might be something else, a state or a peace of mind that can exist entirely independently of any external factors. Even the comfort or happiness of religion is something alien to him. William is constantly growling and grumbling. He seems anything but happy – and yet I believe that his high self-respect and the knowledge that he has retained his integrity in difficult circumstances give him a level of satisfaction. Perhaps this too is happiness, albeit of a somewhat sour kind.

Translated by David Hackston

Johanna Holmström. Photo: Irmeli Jung

‘In my writing I try to give as many angles as possible, and my agenda is to show that there’s not just one truth, that there are always several ways of seeing what one perceives at first sight. So I often have more than one main narrator. I constantly aim to question accepted truths. My stories always begin with indignation about something I feel I must write about. Fiction is a way of distancing oneself. After all, books are literary, invented things. When you work on the subject of a literary text it becomes less personal.’

This is how Johanna Holmström (born 1981) describes her approach to writing. Since her first collection of short stories published in 2003 she has produced a book every two years: three short story collections and one novel. Her books have been variously described as imaginative, committed and uncomfortable. Her short story ‘Stormen’ (‘The storm’) is a precisely observed account of a day when everything changes for its young protagonist.

TS: You’ve written three books of short stories. Did you deliberately choose short fiction as your genre?

JH: I’ve written a novel, too, but even as I was writing it I noticed that I was using the same techniques that I do when I write short fiction, and that didn’t really work. In a short story you can focus on every small detail, whereas in a novel you have to employ a style that’s more sweeping. The short story is stylistically compact, it often describes brief moments and yet it should also say as much as a whole novel. When I’m writing I am very precise, I do a lot of work on the language and spend an endless amount of time polishing details.

TS: What do you think the short story of the future will look like?

JH: The short story is going to increase in popularity. It’s already making progress in Europe – and Africa – for example. There is so much room for the form to develop. Anything can happen with that form, it’s able to use all the components of literature. I’m constantly preoccupied with trying to develop it, to see what can be done with it.

Before I started out as a writer I had read so many bad short story collections. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to write short fiction – I wanted to write the kind of thing I had wanted to read myself. And I knew what I was going to write, and how. I think a good short story collection can’t consist of disconnected narratives, it has to hang together in some way. That is what I’ve wanted to work towards, and it’s what I did in Camera Obscura. The publisher asked me if I would write it as a novel, but I wanted the words ‘short stories’ on the book’s cover.

TS: But now you’re working on a novel?

JH: Yes, it wasn’t that I thought I had to write one, but the topic I wanted to write about needed that kind of scope. The novel is about a Finland-Swedish Muslim family. It’s a book about fundamentalism, Islam, culture and the rebellion of children against the ideologies of their parents. I did a lot of background work – I borrowed over 200 books from the library, and I also had to make a break with short story thinking. And I was pleased to notice that I’d been wrong in my own assumptions – how much I had really been influenced by the media and the public debate on the subject the book is about, much more than I’d thought, but I was able to revise that picture. A novel takes more time to mature than short stories do, and this one is no exception. I’ve been thinking about the topic and working on the book for nearly five years.

TS: You’re a trained journalist. Has that affected your writing?

JH: I’ve learnt an enormous amount from my profession: the ability to try to remain objective, to do a lot of research if it’s necessary, to write in a pared-down way when required, the disciplined ability to edit and the interest in finding out about things. I read newspapers a lot and I react to external stimuli that I have to get to grips with and write about. I don’t think I could write a historical novel – I want to write about topical issues.

I write a lot all the time, and I’m disciplined about my writing.  I also welcome comments and feedback from others, because I can’t always know what will work for every reader. If someone points out that something I’ve written just doesn’t work, I take it out.

I’ve never suffered from writer’s block. When I was nineteen I took part in a creative writing course where we visited the author Monika Fagerholm and she gave us a useful tip, though I’m not sure that she knows she did: always stop when you know how to go on. Never write everything out of yourself – and that has worked for me all these years.

TS: I read in an interview that you think you have a moral responsibility as an author, that you can’t just write in an aesthetic, literary way? Some of your stories also have a socio-political agenda.

JH: For me it it’s not clear-cut who is good and who is bad. It’s a person’s actions that decide that. My characters’ actions decide what happens to them. I’ve been criticised for making my characters unsympathetic – but for me the characters are less important than what they do. I don’t feel sympathy for them, and sometimes they have to suffer so that the story can go the way I want it to.

I also think about my responsibility as an author, what it is I’m giving to the world and what is the best way to do it. Maybe not everything is material for literature – sometimes it’s better to write a column, and sometimes it’s better to write a diary.

TS: Where is your literary home? How would you place yourself in Finland-Swedish literature, a minority literature that has rather broad and fuzzy outlines, a tolerant one, perhaps, but still relatively traditional?

JH: I would say that I’m slightly outside ‘typical’ Finland-Swedish literature. I wrote my master’s dissertation on the typical Finland-Swedish novel. Statistically that’s a book about a middle-aged man in a midlife crisis written by a middle-aged man. The action is set in Helsinki. Or it’s about Finland-Swedishness, what it means to be a Swedish-speaking Finn. Now there’s a new generation of young writing women who write about things other than themselves. Perhaps I see myself as a bit of an underdog. Not that I’m outside the literary establishment, but I like to adopt the perspective of those who are weaker.

Translated by David McDuff

Johanna Holmström’s works: Inlåst och andra noveller (‘Locked up and other stories’, Söderströms, 2003), Tvåsamhet (‘Twosomeness’, short stories, 2005), Ut ur din längtan (‘Get out of your longing’, novel, 2007), Camera Obscura (short stories, 2009; it will be published in Finnish by Teos in September)

Leevi Lehto. Photo: Lotta Djupsund/Savukeidas

Founded by poet Leevi Lehto, ntamo is seen by many as the black sheep and enfant terrible of the world of Finnish publishing.

From its inception, ntamo (shortened from the word kustantamo, publishing company) has striven to subvert the familiar conservative models of publishing that audiences are used to.

Ntamo publishes books for small circulation, such as poetry and experimental prose. Its catalogue includes works both by celebrated writers, such as Kari Aronpuro, and by a whole host of authors making their literary debuts.

Lehto’s objective has been to publish as many books as possible, using a system of print on demand, and to have as little to do with the books’ content as possible. What’s more, ntamo’s publications are not marketed at all. Readers can find information on new publications by following the publisher’s blog [in Finnish only]. I met up with Lehto a while ago and we discussed ntamo’s current situation, new trends in the publishing world and the future of books and literature in general.

Teemu Manninen: When ntamo was first founded, I couldn’t help thinking it was some kind of performance or a work of conceptual art. What do you think of ntamo nowadays? How have your decisions not to actively market books and not to edit them worked out as a business strategy?

Leevi Lehto: I’ve been surprised at how effective a marketing strategy of not marketing your books can be. It’s made it possible for us to establish and develop a brand that’s easily recognisable. I’ve received a lot of feedback on my refusal to edit books. At first I just thought that books should be released exactly the way they were written, but before long I came across situations where I ended up having to edit some books in the traditional way. That being said, I still think one of the reasons larger publishing houses seem so stiff is because they won’t budge when it comes to editing new works.

The tradition of editing always comes back to the issue of technology and the fact that, once an edition has come out, you can’t recall it. But with the advent of modern technology, polishing each and every new work for publication seems utterly senseless. At the same time, the internet has removed the distance between producer and consumer: anyone can produce a book and publish it. In order to remain competitive, paper books will have to be able to do the same, which will involve publishers’ thinning out their vast organisations and essentially cutting out marketing altogether, because it will no longer be cost-effective.

TM: We could soon move to e-books. What do you think about that?

LL: Whenever a new technological medium is created, at least at the outset it’s always filled with content from the old media: for instance, in the early days of the wireless, the radio used to broadcast plays, and so on. In the same way, the e-book currently preserves the whole idea of a book, and is actually strengthening it. As long as this is the case, e-books will not challenge the dominance of paper books. From the markets’ point of view – for the time being, at least – e-books and paper books have to be seen as fully interchangeable with one another.

TM: You’ve often said that the era of large publishing houses as gatekeepers and guardians of good taste is over. This prediction seems to be coming true – only recently, Jacques Eijkens, the CEO of the largest publishing house in Finland, WSOY, commented that the financial significance of works of literature was just ‘small potatoes’. At the time, people were shocked at this comment, but I remember thinking that ‘potatoes’ is in fact the future of literature as a whole: there will no longer be such a thing as an international bestseller; instead there could be a vast amount of books with small print runs aimed at smaller audiences. That’s the reason online bookstores like Amazon have been so successful.

LL: Absolutely, and in fact ntamo has already proved that, in this changing environment, publishing poetry can actually make for profitable business. This too is linked to the notion of the larger publishing houses’ role as the guardians of good taste: from the perspective of traditional publishing houses’ marketing strategies, it was important to keep up a fictional assumption of the existence of a ‘refined’ taste and the literature of national significance, and that every now and then we could graciously accept new members into this closed clique. In fact, this is precisely the kind of fiction the traditional houses have succeeded in destroying, because it no longer meets the needs of the current market conditions, as Eijkens’ comments aptly demonstrate. But isn’t it ironic that it is this kind of fiction that has made publishing poetry look like a fruitless endeavour, the idea that selling marginal literature constitutes some kind of aesthetic and financial risk.

In reality, things are now the other way round: literature published in small print runs has to sell lots of different titles in order to be profitable. Of course, it’s taken a certain amount of courage to start a publishing house based on this theory alone. The fact that I dared to do it links back to the idea you mentioned of conceptual art: at first it didn’t matter whether I succeeded or not, the important thing was just to give it a go. That same spirit of adventure is still at the heart of what I do, and it’s for that reason that I should say ntamo will never become a real publishing house. Whenever I manage to make ntamo look more like a real publishing house, it increases the pressure on me to do things differently.

TM: Finally, I’d like to give you a comparison. When people talk about ntamo with a sort of moral superiority, I’ve often heard them say it’s like a light-footed woman, and that getting involved with it would be like entering into a sinful relationship. On the other hand, a large publishing house is like the most desirable bachelor in town, with whom writers strive to enter a loyal marriage. The reality is that this partner too flirts with hundreds of other lovers, and nobody thinks there’s anything indecent about that.

LL: Exactly, because a large publishing company is a male! This is a pretty good metaphor. It’s clear that every book published by ntamo is something of a one-night stand, and I want to make sure it stays that way. And not just to make sure you have the freedom to sleep with other people too, but so that, if you want to, you can also sell the books you have published with ntamo somewhere else. All I ask is that, if you get me pregnant, I get to keep the baby.

TM: So in other words, I could effectively clone our shared child?

LL: Precisely.

Translated by David Hackston

Hannu Väisänen. Photo: Paula Kukkonen

Interview with Hannu Väisänen, author of the novel Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, 2010)

For the painter and writer Hannu Väisänen, colour speaks volumes.

In the novel Toiset kengät (‘The other shoes’, 2007, Otava) awarded the Finlandia Prize for Fiction), teenage wannabe artist Antero manages to escape his grey northern hometown of Oulu; he is heading for the eastern Finnish town of Savonlinna, where he will go to art college. Triumphantly Antero dyes his blond hair black in the bus station toilet.

‘Perhaps it was all a question of the right colours and the right timing of colours,’ Antero thinks. In Kuperat ja koverat (‘Convex and concave’, 2010), he leaves for the capital, determined to get into the academy of art. His hair is still black.

But ‘colours do not really have timing; it was an ironic reference to calculation, a mode of working that I hope I will not be forced to use as an artist’, Hannu Väisänen (born 1951) pointed out when he last spoke to us at Books from Finland (2/2007): ‘The bourgeoisie and manuals of good taste paint interiors in correctly timed colours. But colours must be left their capacity to surprise. A colour must not only be a bringer of pleasure – it must also be allowed to challenge.’

In Kuperat ja koverat Antero learns more about shapes than about colours: in studying the three-dimensional world he has to negotiate shapes and forms, and in his graphics class he returns to the shades of grey. In the woollen duffel coat of someone he falls for he discerns a colour resembling ‘the grey of the robe of Saint Francis of Assisi and the hopeful beige of a newborn camel’.

Antero embarks on his first trip abroad on a scholarship to Budapest. There he falls head over heels in love both with fellow art student Tamás and with a Sienese painting the size of a chocolate box showing Saint Thomas Aquinas at prayer. It has a particular shade of green with which Antero becomes enchanted.

SL: It turns out that, unfortunately, Tamás is not right for Antero. But what about the shade of green?

HV: The green is absolutely right. It’s a chromium oxide green, in a technical sense one of the most durable shades of green. And flexible in the extreme, meaning that you can get almost any tone of green you want form it. In Sassetta’s time, artists didn’t have access to as wide a colour palette as those of today, but that chromium oxide made possible a wide scale of greens. He who has the why also has the how, as the philosopher put it.

Now that I’m in a painting phase again, I’ve dug my colours and brushes out of a two-year sleep, almost the first thing I did was to check that I had some chromium oxide. I did, and I use it. The kitchen table, cupboard and benches that appeared In my first novel, painted ’Sassetta green’, still exist, now in different parts of Finland, in the care of my sister and brothers. In the colour elements of my own home all I have kept is a tray painted by my aunt; it, too, wanders through my trilogy of novels.

’A gentle scale of greys, full of contrasts, Antero, but I should have thought colours might have suited your nature,’ says one of the academy’s teachers at the opening of Antero’s first exhibition: the works are pencil drawings on bone-white paper.

Perhaps the fact that colours matter so much to both Hannu Väisänen and his alter ego Antero is due to his childhood, which was somewhat devoid of strong colours. In the single-parent family of an alcoholically inclined NCO, four boys and a girl, life in the austere, post-war Oulu with its harsh winters was not exactly colourful as regards things material.

And yet the grey of the barracks, army uniforms and blankets is a colour, too, with an immense number of shades.

In Väisänen’s first volume of the fictionally autobiographical – or autobiographically fictional – trilogy, Vanikan palat (‘Pieces of crispbread’, 2004), the school’s spring festival tableau is immersed in perfect blue, and little Antero is overwhelmed by it; he discovers the language of colours in making art.

SL: Your third novel ends with a viewing of space through a telescope, the examination of the convex and concave surface structures of the Moon. So Antero remains in a pretty monochrome world, and your series of novels is at an end. But does Antero, in fact, begin to speak the language of colours?

HV: Certainly. If Antero is anything like me. In my paintings, I’m using more and more unmixed colours – that is, colours straight from the tube. It feels as if, after writing – which I always experience as black-and-white – I need to paint in pure primary colours. What a lot a large yellow surface can say!

A recent experience was to spread pure bright yellow for a week on to a canvas measuring 2 by 3 metres. I don’t believe in colour therapy, or particularly in the metaphysical dimensions of colour, but when there began to be more colour before my eyes than my own physical size, it really felt like bathing or swimming.

The trilogy is finished, but writing continues. I’m working on my next novel, in which Antero doesn’t appear. But colours do. I can’t help it. (Happily!) Even in this first drafting stage, colour makes its presence felt. In addition, it’s very invigorating to use words to describe colours and the way they behave.

The basic difference between writing about colours and painting with them is, I suppose, that in painting a colour refers only to itself, without references. Within sentences, a colour, however accurately it’s described, appears like a symbol, within the framework of the agreements of language.

Roman Schatz. - Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

Animals exist to make people rich. This wretched and wrong capitalist obsession is gleefully debunked in Roman Schatz’s first children’s book, with illustrator Pertti Jarla’s zany depictions of an animal revolution. Maria Antas interviews the author.

Zoo – eläimellinen tarina (‘The Zoo, a bestial story’, WSOY, 2009) is a children’s book that also appeals to the kind of adults who might love the exploits of John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kevin Kline in the film Fierce Creatures – this book, like the film, is about attempts to make animals seem more dangerous and attractive to an ever more jaded audience accustomed to the pace of action movies.

Christmas is coming, and a dynamic new Zoo director wants to make an unprofitable zoo into a money spinner. The zoo’s inhabitants, however, refuse to be slaves to the market economy: led by an old Sumatran tiger called Gandhi, the militant mandrill Che, dreaming of revolution, and a bat named Mother Teresa who sees the world upside-down, the animals rise up in a wild, but ultimately non-violent, insurrection. Schatz’s story evokes 20th-century utopians, and the animals’ expressions, as visualised by illustrator Pertti Jarla, awaken the reader’s conscience and our  nearly forgotten ability to laugh at the way the world works.

MA: You’ve combined Christmas, satire, and humanity’s most important revolutionary figures from various cultures. What part of the work was challenging, and what was inspiring?

RS: Well, the characters came into being as if of their own accord – it felt like Gandhi, Che, and Mother Teresa were an unstoppable trio, in their own separate ways. So the characters and bringing together satire and Christmas weren’t the challenge. The challenge was writing for children. Children are an absolutely merciless ‘audience’ – they don’t believe in compromise, they sincerely see things in black and white. They either like something, or they don’t.

MA: Why did you choose to use animals as your main characters?

RS: Because animals are much more sympathetic than people, and it’s easier to identify with them.

MA: What about your book makes it a children’s book, and in what ways does it speak to adults – or do you think there’s a meaningful distinction between older and younger readers?

RS: That kind of division is artificial to me. Are The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland for children or adults? A good story works for readers of all ages, you just have to write it in a way that everyone will be able to read it.

MA: In Finland in the last few years there have been a lot of books that take a critical look at the economics of the past decade and howit has affected us and our concept of society. You yourself have joined the discussion with your novel € (2007), which follows a single coin equipped with a microchip as it crosses Europe, critically and humorously examining its reality-TV adventures as they grow ever stranger. What do you think were the most frightening developments of the market economy and media society in this golden age – which now seems to have arrived at a turning point?

RS: The scariest thing was that people’s lives were made into a product, a project that can either succeed or fail. No one seems to remember that life is meant to be lived, that the value of a life doesn’t depend on how well you run the rat race.

MA: What are your hopes for the first year of the next decade – or, what would the animals in the zoo want to say to us humans? ;-)

RS: For myself, I hope that my book spreads around the world, of course, translated into many languages… The animals’ message to people might be: ‘Listen, you stupid people, you’re just full of yourselves and utterly two-dimensional! You think you’re the ultimate creation and that you can control the climate, nature, and the future. Stop messing around, dare to be animals and relax a little!’

Translated by Lola Rogers

Poet ahoy: Herbert Lomas in Aldeburgh. Photo: Soila Lehtonen

The prize-winning British poet Herbert Lomas has been translating Finnish poetry – much of it for Books from Finland – for more than thirty years. Soila Lehtonen, our Editor-in-Chief and his long-time collaborator, interviews him on the occasion of the publication of his collected poems, A Casual Knack of Living

The shoreline and the seaside promenade stretch out along the windy East Suffolk coast in Aldeburgh, where Herbert Lomas lives in a pink house called North Gable.

In summer thousands of tourists frequent the picturesque village, particularly during the music festival in June, founded in 1948 by the local composer Benjamin Britten. A poetry festival, too, takes place every autumn, this year for the 21st time.

Herbert – Bertie to those, like us at Books from Finland, who know him well – has just published a handsome tome of poetry, A Casual Knack of Living, containing poems from nine earlier collections plus a selection of previously unpublished poems, entitled Nightlights. The home of his publisher, Arc Publications, is in the village where he was born, 85 years ago, Todmorden in the Pennines.

Night fishing

They sit on the shoreline, under
a green umbrella, wielding quidsworth
of equipment and catching a few whiting.

At the eye clinic, behind me, a lady said,
She’s so much older than him, you know.
She won’t leave him alone. He’s had to

take up night fishing. But no: they munch
a sandwich under the wind, share it
with their dog and stare at the silver

the moon’s unrolling to their feet,
feeling how the world was before it was
so well-organised and understood,

and in the dawn a red ball rises
swiftly out of the sea
and disappears inside a cloud like a god.

From Nightlights (in A Casual Knack of Living)

In the 1940s young Bertie left Yorkshire for India – where he served for two years as a lieutenant in the 6th Battalion of Garhwal Rifles during the war – and, after the war, for Greece, to teach English, and then, to Finland.

HL: I studied English at Liverpool University, but knew I really didn’t want an academic career. Then in 1952 I was offered a scholarship, and out of Holland, Germany and Finland I chose Finland, as I had become very fond of Sibelius’s music. So I taught English at Helsinki University for 13 years. I came back to England in 1965, and while I had been away, it had luckily transformed itself from dreary post-war gloom into the swinging England of the 1960s.

His first collection of poetry, Chimpanzees are Blameless Creatures, appeared in 1969. His Letters in the Dark (1986) was an Observer book of the year, and he has been awarded several literary prizes.

He has also been made Knight First Class, Order of the White Rose of Finland – as, while in Finland, he got seriously involved in translating Finnish literature, poetry in particular. Bertie has turned out hundreds of translations, of which the readers of Books from Finland in particular have been able to enjoy since the 1970s. The anthology Contemporary Finnish Poetry won him the [British] Poetry Society’s 1991 biennial translation award. How did he find learning Finnish?

HL: There were no proper text books or dictionaries those days of course. Kept reading Pooh Builds A House and Alice in Wonderland in Finnish as well as talking with peasants, that’s how I made progress. Professor Michael Branch, who taught Finnish in London, asked me to translate for Books from Finland.

Who are his favourites among the Finnish poets whose work he has translated?

HL: I now think Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952; a selection of new translations were published in Books from Finland 2/2007) and Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995). Manner is a metaphysically inclined, visionary, enigmatic poet, and expressionist and modernist Hellaakoski is a master of rhythm and rhyme.

Bertie Lomas likes to play with rhymes and words, ‘solving’ poems like riddles or sudokus – definitely among his best work are the hilarious and ingenious, limerick-inspired verses for children by Kirsi Kunnas.

The poems in The Vale of Todmorden are memories, fragments and glimpses of a time past. Revisiting that ‘lost history’ has resulted in 80 poems with vivid and detailed observations of people, incidents and places in the 1920s and 1930s. ‘…farmers, millworkers, / dyemasters, soldiers, survivors, sometimes / impregnated by randy gentry, we went / down in the world, and up, and down again, / till there were none of us in the valley, / though the valley was still in us.‘ (‘Pennine way’)

HL: My parents ran a pub called The Black Swan – until they lost everything in the Depression; I was placed with my auntie for a while. I was an only child and spent lots of time outdoors, climbing the rocks and wandering on the hills with my dog. In those days children were allowed so much freedom.

Listening

The wind’s listening, and the rain on Whirlaw,
and the valley’s long shadows in the evening.

A late blackbird breaks in on the quiet
of moss and lichen, and I know I’m here.

The trees know I’m here, and someone else
knows I’m here, listening, as I’m listening.

It seems like myself, only older, stranger,
knowing I’m not really the little boy I am.

Before leaving Aldeburgh for London I take a stroll on the broad, motley, crunchy mattress of pebbles on the shore. Those zillions of brown, grey and white stones, polished by the mighty cold swell of the North Sea, are so beautiful that I just have to steal a dozen to take home, to place on the windowsill in the office of Books from Finland.

And yes; Bertie has agreed to solve a few more riddles in Finnish, a handful of new poems by Ilpo Tiihonen, so watch this space.

Kristina Carlson. Photo: Tommi Tuomi

Time: late 1870s. November. Place: the village of Downe, Kent, England. Villagers gather in the church on a rainy Sunday. Thomas Davies stays at home with his two children.

After the death of his wife, Thomas has been unable to get over his grief and anxiety. The villagers don’t approve of Thomas’s way of living – he isn’t sociable, keeps to himself, doesn’t go to church, and reads too many books. His employer is Charles Darwin: a famous – or notorious – man who writes too many books. ‘Mr Darwin lives here, and atheism is a worse threat than in the neighbouring villages,’ says Stuart Wilkes, voicing the views of the villagers.

Thomas is the central character in Kristina Carlson’s new novel, Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’, Otava, 2009). Ten years ago her previous novel, Maan ääreen (‘To the end of the earth’), set in 19th-century Siberia, won the Finlandia Prize for Fiction.

As 2009 is the second centenary of Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species (published in 1859), the first question that comes to mind is whether this is coincidental or not…

KC: Well, I didn’t have the anniversary in mind at all when I started writing the novel at the beginning of the 2000s. Aside from Darwin and the clergyman Innes, all of the characters are fictional. The geography of the village is also largely imagined, although I did visit Downe in the middle of the 2000s – I may have added a few hills where there weren’t any.

The voices of the narrative alternate between the villagers and Thomas himself. Petty-bourgeois virtue and self-satisfaction are amusingly abundant when villagers meet on the street, at the pub, or at the parish reading circle: rumour and scandal get around. The slim volume (176 pages) contains a dozen or more humorous, minimalist portraits, but characters can also be seen sincerely pondering serious questions on religion and the philosophy of life.

Although his presence is felt, Mr Darwin is not among the voices in the book himself. Neither is God – but he visits Thomas one night: ‘I saw God the evening before last – he was short, thickset, swarthy, hirsute, with long hair, I saw him walking past the house with his head bowed, he said something just before he walked to the edge of the forest and vanished from sight….’

In his grief, in ‘anger and disbelief’, Thomas has prayed to the ‘God that doesn’t exist’, ‘against my better judgement, out of necessity’. When God goes away, Thomas begins to recover from his anxieties. With his children, he begins to experiment with the influence of electricity on farming – science, condemned as Godless, infuses him with a belief in life. ‘Mr Darwin is a tree that spreads light, Thomas Davies thinks.’

It seems, then, that there are four main characters in the novel, as it were – Thomas, the multi-voiced flock of villagers, Darwin and God.

KC: God is in the picture, because the church was still a strong influence on social life in the late 19th century, despite the fact that secularism – as well as industrialisation and capitalism – were gaining ground. But I think the essential thing is that people’s loneliness and despair is crying out for a god, and everyone seems to have a god suited to their own needs. Even Thomas, although he doesn’t really believe. I’ve always been interested in the relationship between faith, knowledge, intelligence, and people’s internal needs. In its day, Darwin’s work raised questions that shook the faith of those who believed the Bible. It still does.

But how did you come to find yourself in Kent in the 1870s, in Darwin’s garden?

KC: It was because the first idea that came to mind for the book was the title. I could have dealt with the subject as an allegory, of course, and the story could have been set in any era, but it was easier to go back to when there wasn’t as much commentary, discussion, and other materials as there are now.

A simpler world, where there was still a strong consensus about the feeling of security that faith gives to believers?

KC: Yes.

The village’s rich flora (trees, flowers, crops) and fauna (cats, hares, birds, frogs) also appear in your book. How did you learn about them?

KC: I wrote about plants and animals that I’m familiar with – I’ve seen large European hares in Brandenburg in Germany, the village where I stay in the summer has a colony of jackdaws, and so on – and then I checked to see if the same species exist in Kent. I would have like to have written about the Mourning Cloak, which is an exquisite butterfly, but it doesn’t live in the British Isles. In timing the spring  my friend the translator David McDuff, who lives in Kent, helped me. I read a lot to acquaint myself with the place and time. Judith Flanders’ The Victorian House, for example, was very interesting. But, as often happens, and as it should, only a few crumbs of borrowed facts remain in the novel. What happens in people’s head is the most important thing.

In Finland (too), works of fiction tend to be categorised, put in marketable pigeonholes (thriller, historical novel, light fiction etc.); I suppose one could say that Herra Darwinin puutarha is a postmodern Victorian novel? And my guess is that you don’t like that definition, for ‘postmodernism’ is, after all, such a dubious, worn-out and uncool term?

KC: Yes. And no.

Once upon a time there were two remarkably round-headed, thin-haired brothers. They were named Tatu and Patu and their principal personal attributes were curiosity and adventurousness. In the boys’s hometown of Outola (‘Oddsville’), things were done a little differently from around here. So when the boys leave their stomping grounds on an expedition into our world, perplexity and amusing situations ensue.

Tatu and Patu’s adventures are brought to us by Aino Havukainen and Sami Toivonen. This married couple works together as children’s authors, illustrators and graphic designers. Havukainen and Toivonen’s first Tatu and Patu book, Tatu ja Patu Helsingissä (‘Tatu and Patu in Helsinki’), appeared in 2003. Subsequently, four more books have followed, and now Outola’s native sons are known all over Finland. Their reputation has reached other climes as well: the pair’s adventures have been translated into Japanese and Hungarian.

A-L E: How was the idea for Tatu and Patu born?

AH: The characters just popped into my head, I guess from my subconscious. Originally our intention was to do a concept of an entirely different sort, but it went straight into the bin when we came up with this idea.

ST: Because the characters are pure Aino, it took me a little while to get used to Tatu and Patu’s ways. For example, sometimes I would draw 35 sketches of some pose before it looked the way it should.

A-L E: The newest book in the series, Tatun ja Patun Suomi, recently received the Finlandia Junior literature prize. The book has also appeared in English under the title This is Finland, translated by Owen Witesman. What sort of feelings did this recognition bring?

ST and AH: The prize was a great joy and quite a surprise; we didn’t believe you could win with a humorous picture book. The extent and duration of the festivities following the prize were also a complete surprise. It took a long time before we got back to normal life again.

A-L E: In the book, the brothers roam through Finland from north to south and really get down to the nitty-gritty detail of what Finland is made of. In the historical section, the boys relive Finnish life in different decades. Back in the modern day, they peek into the Virtanen household, where they find proto-typically Finnish stuff like Marimekko Unikko curtains, an Alvar Aalto vase, and Nordic walking poles. I imagine it wasn’t an easy task to distil the 90-year history of Finland into a picture book.

ST and AH: This was undoubtedly the most laborious Tatu and Patu and will probably remain so. Usually we squeeze our books into one intense work jag in the spring, but this one ran on into the summer as well. We had considered the Finland idea before, but back then the enormity of the task was too draining and we let the idea rest. When the 90th anniversary of independence began to approach, we thought that it was now or never. Just to give one example, it was difficult to choose the perspective for the section about the present day. We settled on the perspective of a parody of a television announcer. Above all, we wanted to re-examine the cornerstones of Finnishness using a mildly anarchic lens.

A-L E: The book offers a lot of information, seasoned with humour. Did you learn anything new about our country yourselves while working on the book?

ST and AH: At least that the pedestrian reflector, as worn by people on their bags or jackets during the dark winter months, is a Finnish invention. Everyone knows that Nordic walking is a Finnish invention, but few people can guess the homeland of the reflector.

A-L E: In your books there are a lot of delightful details. For example, in this newest one, the sharp-eyed reader can spot the same issue of Donald Duck in many different homes.

ST and AH: The details are the icing that we add last to the books. They also have to have different levels for different ages of readers. We like books where there a lot of details to spot ourselves.

A-L E: Let’s move to extra-literary concerns for a moment. Last fall you moved from western Finland to Vammala, near the city of Tampere, in the middle of the country. Why?

ST and AH: It was sort of by accident. In the summer we visited the annual Fair of Old Literature in Vammala to tell about Tatu and Patu, and we fell in love with the area so thoroughly, that here we are. We’ve gotten on famously here.

A-L E: You have two small girls. Do you read the Tatu and Patu books as bedtime stories?

ST and AH: Sometimes we test out the raw material for a new book on the girls, but otherwise we don’t generally pull out our own books. We don’t really know how to react to them as books, just as past work.

A-L E: What were your own favourite childhood books?

AH: Well, at least the French Le Petit Nicolas and Asterix books, in Finnish translations.

ST: I really liked the French illustrator Tomi Ungerer’s books for kids, and Richard Scarry’s books.

A-L E: Tatu and Patu aren’t the only things that keep you busy. You also illustrate Tiina and Sinikka Nopola’s Risto Räppääjä (‘Risto Rapper’) series and you draw the comic strip for adults Himaset (‘The Homebodies’) that appears once a week in the Ilta-Sanomat evening paper. Is this sort of varied work a blessing or a burden?

ST and AH: A blessing — no question about it. It’s good to do several things: if you get bogged down in one thing for a while, you can just move right on to tackle the next thing. Illustrating Risto Räppääjä is liberating in the sense that we don’t have to worry about the plot at all. While with Himaset, sometimes we end up using things from our own family, done up a bit. This spring, the first Himaset album is coming out. Its name, Juustoon ei saa piirtää! (‘Don’t draw on the cheese!’) is a line straight from our own life.

A-L E: What comes first in your books, the words or the pictures?

ST and AH: They come at the same time and are equally important. In our way of working, word and image can’t get along without each other.

A-L E: And what is your division of labour like?

ST and AH: We do things overlapping and interconnected; we can’t say that one of us just draws and the other one just writes. But we each have our own strengths: Aino is better at composition; she notices immediately if something is off. Sami is the master of technical details. We complement each other well. It was a real stroke of luck that we met back in the day at the Institute of Design in Lahti!

A-L E: Is the sixth Tatu and Patu already percolating?

ST and AH: We’ve settled on the subject, but we haven’t got any further than that.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Photo: Otava/Petri Puromies

Colours, smells and sounds paint a vivid word-picture of a small, northern Finnish town in the 1950s in Hannu Väisänen’s first novel, Vanikan palat (‘The pieces of crispbread’, 2004; see Books from Finland 2/2004).

Little Antero, the novel’s protagonist, is an alter ego of the painter and graphic artist Hannu (born 1951). Antero has four brothers, a sister and an alcoholically inclined widower NCO father. The queue of potential stepmothers is a long and tragicomical one. The title of the novel refers to the stone-hard, thick rye crispbread produced for army consumption; the greyness of barracks life and a small town with incredibly harsh winters did not add up to a colourful life.

But Hannu became an artist to whom colour speaks.

In the sequel to the novel, Toiset kengät (‘The other shoes’, Otava, 2007, see page 90), Antero, now an adolescent, continues to dabble with colours and art. He attempts painting an icon to be given as a Christmas present to a friendly library lady, but his home-made emulsion of codliver oil, water and egg whites (stolen from the kitchen cupboard) turns out to be disastrously smelly, and the recipient has to return the gift, with apologies.

When the teenage Antero longs for a pair of fashionable suede shoes, dad won’t buy them. Most of us remember some intensely desirable object we were not allowed to have and without which life was sheer torture, for a couple of days at least.

S.L. Your book, Hannu, is not called ‘Suede shoes‘, but ‘The other shoes’ – is this also a reference to Antero’s otherness, his desire to go away, towards himself?

H.V. ‘The title could just as well be “other people’s shoes”. Shoes are a fairly accurate indicator of where, in terms of growth and wealth, a person is. Are the shoes one’s own, or still other people’s? Decided on by other people. When can you buy your own shoes and, through them, become your own self? I realised as I wrote that, since the book still did not have a name, the theme entered the text from a number of angles. Antero realises quite early on that his own shoes are not only a physical mark of the self, but also the thing that will help him escape. The youth’s desire for suede shoes is also naturally linked with mating displays and the need to integrate with society, but behind them there also lies a hope of selfhood. Toiset kengät became the title of the book without seeking. I also very much like the imposing nature of the plural form; I also used it in my previous book, Vanikan palat. The partitive would loosen the idea. Not “Other shoes”, then; not “Pieces of crispbread”!’

S.L. At the end of the novel, Antero is finally given permission to leave Oulu for another town to study in an art sixth-form college. Triumphantly departing, he dyes his blond hair black in the bus station toilet. ‘Perhaps it was all a question of the right colours and the right timing of colours,’ he thinks. Hannu, how has that ‘colour thinking’ influenced you in your later life, in your art? You have said that ‘in colour and the use of colour the question is above all of trust; colour emerges fully only when trust in it is complete.’ So, what happens when trust is complete?

H.V. ‘Without any higher metaphysics I can say that, after a long period of writing, it seems as if colours are dancing around me like children about to start a game, coming toward me, surrounding me, making demands. I don’t have a favourite; I would like to use them all at once. Spreading some bright yellow colour for hours with a small paintbrush is to me as lovely as singing is to someone who has a beautiful voice. It may be that the result is not immediately very prepossessing, but the colour causes a feeling to grow physically in front of one’s own body and that overtakes other demands for quality. Once more increases faith in colour, in colours.

‘A writing painter may have a particular perspective in describing in words phenomena in which colours play a central role. For me, at least, it is extremely pleasant to immerse myself in describing, for example, the hundreds of different shades of grey, their links with different materials and temperatures: the greys of military coats on a hot day in a cloudberry bog and on special guard duty in the frosts of Christmas Eve.

‘I have made a statistical analysis of the colours in my second novel. The most often recurring colour is red, in all sorts of weather conditions and materials, water, fire, clothes, veins etc. As accurately as I wish to describe the surface structure of things and materials, I try to depict the colours and particularly their effects on the characters in my book, especially of course Antero.

‘By trust in colours I believe I mean an unselfconscious, immediate, unpremeditated way of dealing with things through colour. My novel’s Antero acts as I wish to act myself. I can only compare it to a flower which, in the most natural way, ignoring any possible objects, opens its petals without asking whether the colour is suitable and what its value might be. Antero and I know that you must not associate values with colour. And as few moral and aesthetic questions as possible – you can deal with those questions elsewhere.

‘This “correct timing of colours” is really an ironic reference to calculation, a mode of working that I hope I will not be forced to use as an artist. Colours do not really have timing. They are not dressing gowns or evening jackets. The bourgeoisie and manuals of good taste paint interiors in correctly timed colours. But that is precisely what one should not agree to. Colours must be left their capacity to surprise. And a colour must not only be a bringer of pleasure. It must also be allowed to challenge.’

Timo Parvela

According to a celebrated 2003 report, Finnish schoolchildren emerged as world leaders in mathematics, science, literacy and problem-solving. In his books for children, the writer Timo Parvela, himself a former teacher, reveals a keen understanding of the mayhem that must lie behind such assessments. Interview by Anna-Leena Ekroos

Timo Parvela (born 1964) has received a particularly enthusiastic response to his Ella series for primary school-aged readers. Parvela has written picture books, CD-Rom scripts, books for young people and scripts for television and radio. His popular Ella series records the adventures of second-grader Ella and companions, including Pate, the headteacher’s son who’s fond of disguises, Tuukka, the young genius, Samppa, the copious weeper, and the pugnacious Buster. The gang of kids means well, but somehow, through misunderstandings, things always end in chaos.

In Varokaa lapsia! (‘Look out for children!’), the newest Ella book and eleventh in the series, they end up in the soup again. The mess begins when the children suspect that their teacher is ill, and a yarn unfolds that mixes, among other things, a giant duck-billed flying squirrel, school inspectors, a pilfered doctor’s coat, and a teaching teepee.

A-L E Where do the steady stream of Ella stories come from?

T P I wish I knew. Maybe there’s an eight-year-old living inside me. Or, even more worrying, maybe there are several.

A-L E Do you get a lot of feedback from the Ella stories? What kind of feedback do you get?

T P I do. According to the feedback I receive, they’re rather silly books.

A-L E Is it different writing for children than it is writing for adults, generally speaking?

T P If you think about the work – blood, sweat and tears – the answer is no. My own language contains a lot of humour, and putting it together is a considerable puzzle, grinding it out, tightening it up. I certainly don’t experience it as easy in any way. On the other hand, I don’t believe the claim you often hear that children are a particularly demanding audience to write for, either. You can write trash just as well for them as you can for adults, and do fine. The challenge is to write well, all the time, every time. You wreck your head, neck and nerves in the process, but it’s rewarding, too, whether your audience is adults or children.

A-L E That sort of comedy is undoubtedly the elixir of the Ella series. Is writing something funny a cheerful task?

T P At its best, yes. A new insight, a surprising turn, Pate, or the teacher often makes me smile, sometimes even laugh out loud. But sometimes making comedy is a strenuous and demanding task that starts out making you smile and ends up being a slog and a grind. In the Ella books there are a lot of scenes that took off flying as soon as they were born, but there are even more that were the result of a tough give and take, grinding it out.

A-L E Is it possible to predict what will make young readers laugh?

T P Pee and poo are funny, but farts are the funniest of all. Kids the same age may laugh at very different things, depending on their language at the moment and other developmental factors. But yes, you can make children laugh in a very calculating way by sticking with bathroom humour. There are abundant examples of that kind of book in existence. I myself would hope that in my books there is no separation between comedy for children and comedy for adults. There’s just good comedy, humour in fact, because that’s a language that can speak to people of many different ages at the same time. I don’t fret over whether children can understand everything in my books. Perhaps the best situation is when they end up asking their parents and each other questions now and then – and hey presto, a literary discussion ensues.

A-L E Over the course of the series Ella has moved up from first to second grade – the whole gang actually was held back at one time. Will Ella and her friends continue to grow up?

T P No. Ella will be a second-grader forever. If we make it to the end of the school year again, Ella, her friends, and her teacher will stay in the same class again, I’m sure. And it’s right for them. No, but seriously, third graders are big enough that the style of the Ella books won’t feel true to their experience any more. As time goes on, the series has changed until, in the last four books, there is about three or four times as much text as there was before. It comes from my desire for broader stories, deeper truths, and more readers.

A-L E You’re a schoolteacher by education, and before you became a freelance writer you worked for six years as a teacher. Does your former profession show in your books?

T P I’m sure I never would have created the Ella books if I didn’t have a background as a teacher. It’s only recently that I’ve realised that I’ve continued my career as a teacher virtually, by becoming a writer. It’s better this way, though. If I had become a teacher like the one in the Ella books, I’m sure Finland would have fared much worse in the PISA study of learning.*

A-L E What do you think about instructional children’s books? Are there reasons they should be that way?

T P No reasons, but in my opinion they can be instructional. It’s sometimes a pain in children’s books when people try to use brute force to find something instructive, some moral or something else to justify the book’s existence. A children’s book can be, as they say, entertainment. I’ve written both sorts, and every sort in between.

A-L E You have two children. Does your family do a lot of reading at home?

T P We used to read bedtime stories, until my daughter Hilma started middle school. I recently borrowed Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I’m trying to sell it as our new evening project. I’ve also hung a string from the ceiling and I’ve fastened two-euro coins to it with clothes-pins. I put a stack of books on both my kid’s desks, and whenever a book gets read, they can take a coin from the string. All’s fair in love, war, and stimulating your children’s interest in reading.

A-L E Books do have a lot of competitors now, fighting for children’s leisure time – do you believe that the printed word will hold its own?

T P We’ll always need stories. Without stories there wouldn’t be any history of today, or any future time. Without stories we would be like dogs whose masters have left them at home. They sit behind the closed door and they can’t understand what’s on the other side. The world ends at that door, because dogs don’t have any stories. For us people, the other side of the door is Narnia.

A-L E If you could be a character from a story, what character would you be?

T P Winnie the Pooh. Then I’d be a good and loyal friend.

Translated by Lola Rogers

* The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and administered to 15-year-olds in schools. At least 58 countries will participate in the third assessment in 2006.

Hannu Luntiala. Photo: Jukka Uotila

In his first collection of short stories Hannu Luntiala reinvents the form to examine the lives of 16 men. One story consists of just one long sentence; another is written in the made-up ‘Katalanian’ language; a third omits all the commas

A successful IT boss; a humble Greek Orthodox monk; an old man lying like a vegetable hooked up to a life-support machine. Hannu Luntiala’s collection of short stories presents us with sixteen men’s emotional landscapes. Entitled Hommes, the collection is the debut by Hannu Luntiala (born 1952).

Variety is to be found not only in the characters themselves, but in the language and style of each of Luntiala’s stories. For him language is an integral part of the story; it can open up new perspectives that a simple plot cannot.

‘I’ve tried to step into the characters’ skin, as it were, and speak the way they would speak. I wanted to explore various new ways of writing. One of the stories contains just one long sentence. The story ‘Musta’ (‘Black’) is written from the perspective of an African immigrant. I entered this text in a competition under the pseudonym Ahmed. When I heard I had won the competition I initially thought that the jury had actually selected a real immigrant as a winner, though apparently they had guessed that the writer was a Finn,’ Luntiala recalls.

Luntiala is a linguistic wizard who can shape language at will. The writer’s occasional lack of attention to the rules of punctuation stems perhaps from his day job. For over half his life Luntiala has worked at the Registry of Births and Deaths, and for the last few years has been its senior director.

‘I find that writing is one of the most effective ways of detaching myself from work. The further I stray from official gobbledygook the more dramatic this detachment is. For instance, while writing the story ‘En ole mikään luontoihminen’ (‘Nature’s not my thing’, see page 98) I noticed that leaving out all the commas lent the story a new dimension that suited well the idea of an urbanite venturing out into the wilderness,’ he explains.

The man in the short story has been in the forest barely an hour when already he feels that he is ‘[losing] weight with every moment that passes’. Does urban Mr Luntiala feel the call of the spruce grove too?

‘For ten years I owned a summer cottage on the outskirts of Helsinki. For ten years I sat on its terrace staring out at the forest. I didn’t understand the essence of cottage life and ended up selling the place. I’m sure spending time out in the woods is very nice, just as long as you can get away again quickly.’

A trait common to many of Luntiala’s characters is the fear of death — or of life. ‘Death comes knocking on the door in quite a few of these stories. This obsession of probably typical of men and women once they reach middle age. Now I no longer think about it every day the way I did a couple of years ago. Sometimes I can go for days at a time without it crossing my mind. But eventually it always returns, that same fear of death.’

Luntiala claims that his stories can be divided into two categories: traditional stories with a clear plot and a familiar structure, and stories that, as he puts it, ‘simply write themselves’.

‘They often start with a single word or a sentence that begins to grow out of itself — and that’s when the text starts to lead its writer. Writing texts like these I often find myself in a sort of verbal stupor, an overwhelming feeling of satisfaction,’ he explains and says that he hopes this is something readers will be able to experience too.

Luntiala describes the particularly profound verbal stupor he experienced in writing the story ‘Hombres’, which he tongue-in-cheek informs me he has written in the ‘Katalanian’ language.

(To understand it the reader requires some knowledge of at least English, Swedish, Latin, Spanish, French as well as Finnish. The story begins like this: ‘Mi closo accentura “Advanced Bookkeeping Ltd.” for quattro wecos. Calendra pois plocka ['dispose of'], informae la Posta, no lettros, windows o dooros alla ferme, no criminale insido, an message ona wall: On Holiday!’)

‘There were many occasions while writing “Hombres” when I would laugh to myself out loud. People in my old apartment block must have though I was a lunatic, so I had to move out. My new apartment has such good sound-proofing that I no longer need worry about ruining my reputation. But people still wonder what I’m doing when I sit on my windowsill — on the inside, of course — looking down at the people walking past, searching for ideas for new stories. As “Hombres” progressed even I was surprised that the text ended up questioning ideas of morality and sexuality. Perhaps using a “foreign” language like this frees a writer of their inhibitions,’ ponders Luntiala.

His next book is already finished. Luntiala is currently nervous about his publishers’ reactions.

‘A book like this has never been published in Finland, or anywhere else in the world. It could be a breakthrough and become a bestseller. Or then again, maybe not. Who knows?’

Translated by David Hackston

Photo: Irmeli Jung

Finland’s most famous cop, Chief Superintendent Timo Harjunpää, is the fictional creation of another policeman, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu. The long-awaited eleventh novel in the Harjunpää series, Harjunpää ja pahan pappi (‘Harjunpää and the priest of evil’) appeared this autumn after a gap of a decade. Joensuu talks to Jarmo Papinniemi about crime, the creative process and the powers of darkness

Matti Yrjänä Joensuu (born 1948) is one of the best-known Finnish crime writers and is certainly one of the most respected. He writes novels about ordinary policemen and ordinary crimes; bleak tales of murder which do not pander to the reader with complicated plots, non-stop action or glamorous settings. Like the Swedish writers Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö or Henning Mankell, Joensuu’s narratives focus on social reality and expose the darker sides of society and the day-to-day misery and suffering which gives rise to crime.

Like the protagonist of his novels, Chief Superintendent Timo Harjunpää, Joensuu also works as a policeman in Helsinki. In addition to their common profession, author and hero also share a strong social conscience and a tendency towards melancholy. The world of the Harjunpää novels – the first of them was published in 1976 – is seemingly realistic, something which in Finland, at least, appeals to a very wide readership. The critics, too, have acclaimed Joensuu’s social criticism, his strong sense of drama, his logical narration and precise use of language.

Seven of the Harjunpää novels have been translated into a total of twelve languages; Harjunpää and the Stone Murders was published by Victor Gollancz in 1986.

Timo Harjunpää is one of the most well-known policemen in Finland. This is perhaps slightly odd, as there is nothing at all special about him – he is a conscientious officer who solves crimes committed by ordinary people. Harjunpää resembles his creator in many different ways. His colleagues, however, have sometimes not been very pleased that Joensuu chooses to write about problems rife within the police force. Prejudice, greed and abuse of power are a smear on the police as well as on the rest of society. The new Harjunpää novel, however, does not criticise the police quite as much as in the previous novels.

‘This is partly because most of the stern old dictators have left the force. This new generation of superintendents is a world apart; they’re highly trained and know how to do their job well,’ Joensuu comments on recent changes in the police force.

Ten years have elapsed since the last Harjunpää novel. For Joensuu, those years were very painful.

‘For the last ten years, I’ve been struggling with writing. I wrote hundreds if not thousands of pages, but you just can’t force creativity. There has to be a sort of ordered chaos in your mind in order for writing to flow properly, and my chaos was out of control.’

The result of this is perhaps the darkest of Joensuu’s novels to date, Harjunpää ja pahan pappi. In this – the tenth – Harjunpää story a disturbed clergyman worships a mythological goddess and sacrifices people to her by pushing his victims under metro trains. Thus the Chief Superintendent Harjunpää is faced with a very rare phenomenon in Finland – a serial killer.

Although the manner of these crimes is rare, Joensuu is very familiar with the perpetrator’s mental problems, as they are all too common in Finland. He works in the division responsible for fire and explosives, and he claims that as many as 90 per cent of crimes he deals with are committed by mental patients. Their numbers began to rise in the early 1990s, when Finland was in the grip of economic recession and spending cuts started to affect mental health wards.

‘Nowadays money is no longer spent on treating people; instead, it is used to pay the police to get them off the streets. It seems outrageous to be putting people in jail, when what they really need is treatment,’ says Joensuu.

However, the evil depicted in the novel is not only a result of society’s pressures, it is something deep within the individual. Joensuu paints a desperate picture in which evil keeps reappearing and repeating itself, and in which children are made to suffer as parents vent anger at their own traumatic experiences. Meanwhile, children often let out their despair through acts of violence.

‘People have recently been discussing why children from so-called “good families” end up committing terrible crimes. The relative “good” of a family doesn’t depend on their social status or income. Depraved and abusive hell, targeted particularly at children, could be hiding behind the façade of of respectability. Violence against women is something people are prepared to talk about, whereas children are simply forgotten.’

In his new novel there is a bullied little boy who shares a name with the writer. The boy tries to escape his tormentors by retreating into an imaginary world; Joensuu says that, in Matti, he has depicted his own experience of his creative reawakening. Things suddenly begin to look different, grains of sand become music, a green rug can become the jungle.

‘When my writing starts to flow, it’s the greatest source of pleasure I know. You can switch off from the real world, and the world of the novel suddenly becomes real. If you’re writing a night scene, and you’re really living that night, then you go out on to the balcony where the sun’s shining, it’s difficult to grasp how it can all be possible.’

One of the other characters in the novel is an author who is experiencing the same writers’ block which plagued Joensuu himself for a decade. Writing about his own experiences helped Joensuu forward with his writing, but in this novel, describing the process of writing also has a far deeper significance: Harjunpää ja pahan pappi is a novel about the power of the creative imagination, which can be both liberating and highly destructive.

The young boy Matti and the author experience the blissful power of the imagination, but the disturbed imaginary world of the ‘priest of evil’ ultimately threatens the safety of everyone in the city.

Joensuu still has a reputation as a very accurate realist, but with every novel he seems to be moving further into the inner worlds of his characters, into their dreams, their thoughts and delusions.

‘My sense of realism comes from what I’ve learnt in my work as a policeman. In describing the scene of a crime, you have to be extremely precise, so that your description is an accurate reflection of the truth. Still, writing about the evil priest was very enjoyable, because imagination allows you the freedom to depict this terrible person’s strange theology and what he wanted to achieve.’

Matti Yrjänä Joensuu has finally managed to sort out his inner chaos, but he is still concerned about the way the capital city is changing. All his novels are firmly rooted in Helsinki and its surrounding areas, but this is not as easy as it used to be.

‘The film director brothers Aki and Mika Kaurismäki have talked about how difficult it is to find places in Helsinki which are suitably untidy and disordered to be of interest to a director. Timber yards and old industrial warehouses have been disappearing around the city, and everywhere you look there are white-brick, Spanish style houses. The sorts of places which really spark the imagination are few and far between nowadays.’

Translated by David Hackston

Kristina Carlson. Photo: Sari Poijärvi

Kristina Carlson’s novel Maan ääreen (‘To the end of the earth’, 1999) tells the story of a young man who seeks to escape himself by travelling to the most distant corner of 19th-century Russia. Interview by Hildi Hawkins and Soila Lehtonen

BfF We’d like to begin by asking you about the setting of your novel. Most people think of 19th-century Siberia as the place to which the undesirables of the Russian empire were deported – one imagines it full of petty criminals, violent brigands and political dissidents. It comes as quite a surprise to find your Nahodka peopled by civilised Europeans busily engaged in building their futures, with impressive houses, women in pretty lace dresses, social occasions with champagne, orchestras and whist drives. Could you say something about what led you to choose this setting for your novel, and the real historical circumstances on which it’s based?

KC From my own point of view, Maan ääreen is not so much a historical novel as a novel set in a historical context. The difference, I believe, lies in the fact that the latter attempts – in a sense like scholarship – to cast light on the past from a new perspective. In my book, Siberia is above all the mental landscape of the main character, although it is also of course a real and existing place.

The roots of Lennart’s story lie in the destiny of a distant relative of mine. He travelled to Siberia as a civil servant, like Lennart. That was why I began to explore that period. Russia wanted to secure its power at its borders; there were civil servants, soldiers and merchants. It was known that there were natural resources in the area: minerals, fur-bearing animals, coal. The coast was also important for trade with the east, even if the climatic conditions were difficult. (By the way, at present electronics are imported to Nahodka from the Far East and transported via Finland back to Russia!) Because the state promised privileges to pioneers and civil servants who moved to Siberia, it was advertised as a ‘land of plenty’, particularly the Amur region.

A restless mind, Lennart’s and my own, seeks a home for its dreams far away, wishes to discard the familiar and the secure. What was fascinating about Siberia was that it was not possible, in the then Russian empire, to travel farther. The associations of Siberia are remoteness, cold, poverty, primitiveness; and of course the fact that it was the place to which criminals and wrongdoers were exiled. In fact, Siberia is a gigantically large area with different areas.

The Russian civil servants, officers and merchants formed the same kind of upper class as the English or other colonial lords in the former colonies. They took their way of life into their new conditions. And it is precisely here that the paradox which interested me lies. These people travel a long way, to exotic conditions, and in this remote place they build a society which to a large extent recalls the former and the familiar – in Lennart’s case, in fact, everything that he set out to escape. How far does a person have to go to escape his own self – or to find himself. This is Lennart’s question, Siberia its stage.

BfF The novel takes the form of a kind of thriller, the search for the solution to a crime. The main, and palpably unreliable, narrator – also the victim of the crime – is the main character, Lennart Falk. He is attacked by an unknown assassin, but recovers, telling the reader his story. Falk’s story is framed by a narrative by his friend and doctor, Theodor Gantz. At the end of the book, yet another narrator reveals a letter which shows that Gantz is telling less than the truth. As this writer says, in a crime novel the truth about Falk’s death would be unacceptable. Whom are we to believe?

KC It is up to the reader, of course, to decide whether to believe all the narrators – or not. For me, as the writer, the different characters are different manifestations and tenses of the same person, all of them pondering the sense of their lives in relation to their environment, social and private, their own self.

Gantz does not tell the whole truth about Lennart because he, an aging man, wishes retrospectively to give Lennart the meaning and importance that he was seeking in the last months of his life, and thought he had achieved. Since there are still years to come, perhaps Gantz wishes, through Lennart, to give meaning to his own life. This is, of course, self-deception.

The third narrator (essentially myself) understands Gantz’s self-deception and reveals it. At the same time she nevertheless understands that she herself is reverting to escape and self-deception, just like Lennart in his search for his life elsewhere and far away.

BfF No one, in other words, holds all the pieces of the jigsaw – there is no omniscient narrator, and everyone must try to make sense of the picture as best they can. The final piece of the puzzle, offered by the third narrator, makes sense of the story, but at the same time consigns it to the sidelines of a quite different drama. You worked as a reporter for the weekly current affairs magazine Suomen Kuvalehti for 22 years – what bearing did your writing about the real world have on the way you approached your novel?

KC The book took its initial impulse from a true story, but is entirely fictional. What do the novel and reality in general have to do with one another…. Of course it was necessary for me to study the period etcetera, but for me writing was a journey into the mind, thoughts and feelings. My work as a reporter and my fiction do not, I think, have very much in common, except that both involve writing. The starting-points, the freedoms as well as the limitations, are completely different.

BfF You have been actively involved in literary debate in Finland and internationally for some time, as chairman of the Eino Leino Society and through your participation in the Lahti International Writers’ Reunion. Maan ääreen has been translated into German, and now you have been appointed editor-in-chief of Books from Finland, beginning next year. Do you feel closer to the work of other Finnish writers, or to foreign writers – or do you see that as a useful distinction? And what do you see as the limitations and possibilities of writing from a small country in the international context?

KC Finnish writers are undoubtedly always Finnish writers, wherever and however they write, as long as they continue to write in the Finnish language. Naturally writers from such a small country and such a small language area are in a different position from those writing in a majority language. At the moment I am in residence in an artists’ castle which also contains composers and visual artists. Their work is, in principle, immediately understandable to everyone.

Like me, Finnish writers certainly feel themselves to belong to the European tradition and contemporary writing. Nevertheless, we are bound to the Finnish language, and our culture in that language. I do not know whether there are any advantages to existence on the linguistic periphery. Perhaps there are, if the writer can, because of this, give something original which is of interest in other languages and in other countries. That is not easy in the current markets, which increasingly concentrate on the so-called big names – and big print-runs.

A German publisher’s editor told me that the publishing of poetry in Germany is unprofitable, even though the population base is large. In Finland, the situation is good in the sense that poetry is written and published, even though the sales figures are not exactly dizzying. I believe that poetry is, in a way, the measure of the vitality of literature as a whole.

Ins Land am Ender der Welt was translated by Stefan Moster and  published by Alexander Fest Verlag of Berlin in 2000

Photo: Marica Rosengård

Kjell Westö (born 1961) is one of a generation of younger, urban Swedish-language writers who are at home in both Swedish and Finnish. An extract from his novel Vådan av att vara Skrake (‘The perils of being Skrake’, Söderströms, 2000), which traces the fortunes of the Helsinki family of Skrake from the 1910s to the present day. Here, Westö is interviewed by his alter ego, the discontented poet Anders Hed, editor of the cultural journal Bokassa (now sadly extinct)

Anders Hed: So, to get us going: do you write any poetry at all nowadays?

Kjell Westö: No. The last poem I wrote comes at the end of the title story in Fallet Bruus (‘The Bruus case’). And that book came out in 1992.

It’s a poem about human face and the search for ‘the Thou’, isn’t it?

Exactly.

It doesn’t hold up, in my view. An ill- digested mlange of Buber and Levinas.

You’re entitled to your opinions.

Was it a deliberate policy, or…?
What? The ill-digested regurgitation of other people’s thinking?

Hee hee hee… no. Not to write poetry.

By no means. The poems just stopped coming. And I’m no adept at forcing them out. I can’t sit at my desk and decide: ‘Today I might write a poem about the flight of the White-tailed Eagle.’ If the White-tailed Eagle isn’t in me at that moment, in my body and therefore in my soul as well, then nothing will come of the whole project.

That’s a rather widespread notion, I think, and a risky one. That poems are a sort of magic: they only come spontaneously, while the other literary genres – and pretty-well all other writings – are, well, rough stuff? Was it thinking along these lines that led you to prose ten years ago?

Ah, from Dedalus to Drudge – is that how you see me? No, that’s not how I experienced it. In fact I’ve carried wishy-washy intuitionism even further than the proponents of the magic of poetry. For me it often holds good for prose, or at any rate short stories. I’m not going to be able to write about Aunt Elsie’s crack-up, or even the advent of Coca-Cola to Finland, unless the story’s begun to live within me. Sometimes I’ve dreamed of telling a certain story for years. The structure, or at any rate the plot, is all set up in my head; it’s sizzling there, my fingers are itching. But the words are missing: that particular story’s language hasn’t yet come to fruition in me. And without the language nothing else is there. And all that I, the potential writer of that story, can do is wait, however painful it sometimes may be.

But isn’t that risky? You get an idea, you find a story. But then you tell yourself: Damn it, I haven’t the right language for this one. In a way you’re giving yourself leave to kill time…. I mean, if storytelling’s a certain process, then can’t you speed the process up by simply bashing on, worrying at the story, till it consents to be told?

Well yes, often that’s how it does go. The trial-and-error method, with its mistakes and blind alleys, does speed up the creative process, and a result is squeezed out. But I’ve also had dire experiences of how you simply can’t force a story. Or rather, you can, but the result’s forced too – bad, in other words…. Nevertheless I want to emphasize that though I do stress intuition and unconscious processes in writing, I don’t take them as an excuse for lolling about on a sofa, passively waiting for so-called inspiration. That way stories definitely do remain untold. But every writer knows how painful the periods are when a poem or a story or part of a story is seeking its form. For someone passionate about writing it’s like waiting for a resurrection….

You’re speaking to a poet who hasn’t published a poem for ten years.

Apologies. I wasn’t meaning to hurt you.

Nor have you. You’ve hit a sensitive spot, though…. Well, when we met last summer you said there was a pile of books at your bedside about Helsinki and its recent history. Have you read them all?

I read a lot, mostly when I’m unable to write when the stories are seeking their form. In recent years I’ve been more and more fascinated by the recent history of Finland and Helsinki. I’m mad about Finnish memoirs from the early nineteen hundreds, for example. We Finns – like other nations of course – were so earnest then, so much in earnest about our mighty, far-reaching thinking. If that earnestness hadn’t so often led to crypto-fascist or Stalinist thinking I’d say the Finns of that time were a little absurd. Anyhow, I feel a sympathy for them. And sometimes envy. My psyche is so constituted that I’d have been usefuller in a world fitted out with more ideas than buying and selling.

So you regret you were born too late to be a fascist or Stalinist?

The subject’s more serious than you think. I was born on the sixteenth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, just a few days before they started building the Berlin Wall. I have – like most people of my age, evidently – found myself assessing what I think about the twentieth-century’s ideologies and wars. I consider that all those political ideologies ruined the twentieth century, a century where there was otherwise a great deal of admirable development. And one shouldn’t forget that the threat of totalitarianism hasn’t decamped somewhere, quite the contrary. The threat will abide as long as man refuses to study himself, his inner being. Our own time’s full of cruel and frivolous thinking nurtured by self-deception, and it isn’t even concealed. Our Weltanschauung, with its manic fixation on profit and profiteering, is kin to the superman-ideal in fascism and Stalinism. Our media-dominated technological society on the the hunt for constant pleasure recalls Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World of the early 1930s. And a world like that is very far from being an ideal democracy. As for myself, I picture myself as comparatively immune from totalitarian thinking. I’m no good at lining up in the ranks of anything. And, on the other hand, I’m rather a coward. I’m also hot-tempered, and I can’t bear being put down. So that if I’d been born at the wrong time, under unfavourable stars, I might have put up a poor show.

You’re now somewhat under forty, like myself. Have you considered this: Are we twentieth-century people or twenty-first-century ones?

I have a powerful impression that certain childhood experiences and emotions relating to twentieth-century history have eaten deep into my psyche. I grew up in a family where both grandfathers were killed, one in the Winter War, and the other in the Continuation War. This left its mark on each of my grandmothers, it marked my mother and father, and has left its mark on me and, I’m sure, my younger brother and fellow-writer Mårten. Wounds like those are not healed in one generation. And then of course there was the Cold War and all its side-effects….

My view is that it’s growing up during the Cold War that makes us irrevocably twentieth-century people.

Yes. We belong to the generation that had to take all the ddrs, brezhnevs and reagans seriously. We didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but it must in fact have been a pretty horrible experience.

We’re pitiful relics of the Sputnik period. If you watch some DDR documentary along with anyone born in the 70s or 80s, they look at you with big eyes, and those eyes are asking: Did you really take all that stuff seriously? And it makes me want to shout: Take it seriously? We bloody well had to, with all those long-distance missiles pointing their noses every which way…?

And the insidious way we internalized that world’s bipolarity. So that whenever the Russkies did something it had to be compared with what the Yanks were doing, and vice versa.

You’ve sometimes stressed the weirdness of the atmosphere at the beginning of the 1980s. You’ve said that the Zeitgeist of those years had left its stamp on you.

Ever since my childhood I’ve felt somehow, in my being, unbelieving. I’ve had a strong feeling of the uncertainty of everything, and I could never reconcile myself to any kind of right-mindedness, either bourgeois or leftist. Nor did I care for the prima-donna lifestyles cherished by artistic souls, where ‘the clothes you chose’ really are ‘your pose’, as the popular song has it. The suddenness of the changes in the 1980s strengthened this uncertainty-based world-outlook of mine. Everything seemed to be going arsy-versy. When I was growing up, a generally left-wing attitude could get you into the gang of progressive intellectuals. Ten years later the left had de facto become conservative, to protect the enduring values…. Or think of this: one summer everyone was copulating like rabbits all over the place, but the following summer we were queuing up pale-faced for HIV-tests and contemplating death, as it had finally dawned on us that the microbes didn’t take account of sexual orientation or the colour of your skin…. But the greatest and suddenest change was certainly in that magic autumn of 1989 and the winter following. I was living in Portugal at the time, and I stared disbelievingly at the television news, trying to guess what the Portuguese commentary was reporting. And the really big impression came from Nelson Mandela himself – walking out of the prison gates after almost thirty years, not the least bit embittered, but full of life and the desire for reconstruction. If you’ve grown up in a tightly enclosed world founded on linguistic falsification and you experience – at under thirty as well – a time of possibilities like that, it really does mark you with indelible traces. If there’s any optimism in me, it comes from 1989.

Let’s now turn to your childhood. Can you pick out one situation or fact that influenced your becoming a writer?

In that case I must tell you about a certain key-change.

Dear chap, you’re a writer, not a musician.

Yes, unfortunately. But I loved music long before any other art. And I loved it so fervently that I began wondering while I was still a child why some pieces gave me gooseflesh and others left me cold. And then, after I’d made a little progress on the guitar, I noticed I had a weakness for a certain key change, and…. But there’s a problem here….

And that is….

That this isn’t about the finer points of classical music, and therefore it embarrasses me to bring this up in an intellectual magazine like Bokassa… where anyway my books are always written off as dull and hackneyed. But well, OK. We’re talking about the simplest of simple musical figures. If some musical piece began in, say, C major, then I was always floored when the key changed into the relative minor, or, in this case, A minor….

Hold on. I’m not sufficiently versed in music to take the point. You’ll have to give an example.

All right, let’s take, say, Ben E. King’s soul classic ‘Stand By Me’. It starts in A major. The singer begins ‘When the night has come’… after which there’s a change to the relative minor, F sharp minor, and over it King is belting out ‘and the land is dark’…. Can you imagine how sold I was when I first heard that piece on the radio? My avidity for that chord-change went on and on, and it’s continued to this day. When I was twentyish, early in the 1980s, my favourite piece was Dire Straits’s ‘Tunnel of Love’: that has the key change as well. Round about the same time I discovered classical music. It happened through one of Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances – which also had the key-change. Again, if I’d been asked to choose the most compelling song of the 1990s, I’d have chosen Daniel Lanois’s post-modern gospel-song, as sung by Emmy-Lou Harris: ‘Where Will I Be?’ And that has the key-change in it. But it was only a few years ago, after I’d been listening to music for over a quarter of a century, that I got the point….

I hope I’ll get the point too. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re on about.

I realised there was a phase in the history of light music when that key-change was an obsession in practically every composition, and the period was 1960-1963. In those years that key-change is everywhere. It’s in Ricky Nelson’s ‘Hello Mary Lou’ and ‘Travelling Man’, and in the piece I just mentioned, Ben.E.King’s ‘Stand By Me’. It’s in Sam Cook’s ‘What a Wonderful World This Would Be’, Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’, Pat Boone’s ‘Speedy Gonzales’, Roy Orbis’s ‘Only the Lonely’, Elvis’s ‘Devil in Disguise’, and many other electric-guitar hits. It’s also on Olavi Virta’s November 1961 translated hit-disc, ‘Moody River’, which always gives me the shivers.

What are you trying to say? That through your paranormal powers you composed all those pieces while you were still a babe in arms?

No. What I’m saying is that my mother or my father or my grandmother, or whoever was looking after me, must have plonked me on a transistor radio in the daytime, and that while I was lying in the cradle or on the floor this key-change – in spite of Finnish Radio’s starvation diet of pop in those days – rooted itself in the innermost recesses of my soul. So when I write, I unconsciously try to make the key-change audible in my text. And because the key-change – that change from major to minor or the other way round – is so much alive in me, I have to find ever new tropes for it, or I’ll crack under the music.

So I was right! You create long and wearisome stories merely to imitate some pop-jingle’s key-change! Good grief! And to think I’ve always defended you when Bokassa’s reviewers have written you off as a cliché-monger with the brains of an Australopithecus.

Well, that’s not the whole of it. I do admit I’m not one of the brainiest of writers. And I realise this interview will give Bokassa’s reviewers more grist to their mill. But over the years I have been engraved with other kinds of music. And there have been literary fruits. In other words, I don’t regard myself as a two-key man. But I think a person gets a certain basic tone to his soul very early on, and that it remains. In the last couple of years I’ve become very keen on Schubert’s late piano pieces, and they’re characterized by poignantly beautiful melodies and extremely skilful transitions from major to minor cadences, and vice versa….

Music seems to be some kind of ur-artform for you. At the beginning of the interview you said you couldn’t write while the language of the story was lacking…. What if that lack is in fact the story’s music, which hasn’t yet started sounding within you?

That’s not a bad notion. John Cage once said that architecture was frozen music. I admit I’ve sometimes wanted to think of words, writing and composition in similar terms: writing as the notation of silent melody, the creation of frozen music. This exuberant love of music and this very anti-intellectual attitude to language marked my first two fat poetry collections. They’d have been better books if I’d absorbed that writing always has a reflective, self-critical side to it. I have certainly learned that since. But I’m still not interested in the theory of writing, or literary theory either. My justification for my level of existence as a writer must be enough readers wanting to read the stories I invent. In fact I’d be happy to serialize my stories in newspapers, as they did in the nineteenth century. But nowadays the cultures have pulled apart: it won’t work any more. But anyway I’ve accepted that I don’t belong to the literary innovators. I don’t expect my junk to be read in fifty years’ time….

You’ve divulged to me that your stories always take off from some sort of initial image, or vignette, and that without such you can’t catch hold of the story. Could you throw a little more light on this?

I absolutely do require an initial image, and, moreover, one that comes from deep down, that’s alive in me with vivid colours and contrasts. Without such an image my machine won’t start. In my short-story collection Fallet Bruus for example, there’s a story called ‘Iiro and the Boy’. It originated from my playing in various amateur bands for several years. I was accustomed to arriving at unfamiliar restaurants or community centres and carrying my things into the still empty auditorium, along with the other musicians. During those years an image grew within me. A musician arrives at a little town and is carrying instruments and amplifiers into the shabby Town Hotel’s restaurant, still empty and smelling of the previous night’s fag-ends. The day’s grey, it’s dim in the room, and suddenly the musician sees a boy of about ten in the restaurant’s entranceway; the boy looks at him silently and seriously.

But ‘Iiro and the Boy’ doesn’t start with that image.

It’s not mandatory for these personal initial images of mine to form the first image of the story. What they do is give birth to the story within me… or rather they get it going. For often I have to wait years before finding the story linked to a given image. And when the story is ready to be written, the image may come at any point, even right at the end. The image for ‘Bruno’ was three men standing round the body of a dead dog in a veterinary clinic. Recently I finished a novel-chapter called ‘Notes related to pharmacist Pemberton’s holy nectar’: the initial image for that was a lorry that hit a tree in Mäkelänkatu street in the summer of 1952.

Are those initial images inventions, or memories of actual experiences?

Both and. Or rather, either or. There are no amateur musician’s illegitimate children of mine in some strange town. I’ve not been the type of musician who tries to seduce women by playing; and, this being so, no serious-looking boy has stared at me across a restaurant floor. The ‘Bruno’ image is directly connected to my parents’ divorce and the splitting up of our family, though the actual story isn’t particularly faithful. But this I don’t know – did a lorry hit a tree in Mäkelänkatu street in the summer of 1952?

Am I wrong in thinking your almost hundred-page-long story, ‘Melba, Mallinen and I’, was a sort of preliminary run-through for your novel Drakarna över Helsingfors (‘Kites over Helsinki’, 1998)?

You’re not completely wide of the mark. Only after finishing the novel did I realise there were certain motifs in ‘Melba’ that later turned out to be important in the novel: a sketch of the Sixties and Seventies, evocating the atmosphere of that time from a child’s point of view with a gently ironic tone, the portrayal of an upwardly-mobile family, and so forth. But there are also great divergences. ‘Melba, Mallinen and I’ is a story about childhood and adolescence. It’s about the closed and cruel world of these unripe individuals, where the adults have a supernumerary role. In Drakarna, on the other hand, all the generations are important. In ‘Melba’ it’s only the young. And there’s a primary theme, or rather crucial issue, hanging over it – very important for me personally and tormenting – and that is: What happens to a person who’s always getting bullied and beaten up in childhood because of his mother tongue?

Why is this issue so important for you?

This subject – childhood shame and fear through being a Swedish-speaker in Helsinki – has long been taboo in Finland-Swedish writing: even though young boys, certainly including many later writers, have in their time been beaten up like Kenu Backman in my story. Many may well have been able to fend for themselves better than Kenu, but still…. That you can be beaten up because of some external fact, a fact you can do nothing about, is bewildering. The feeling of total helplessness… the feeling that you could try to become a better, friendlier, more loveable person, but it would be no use, because that one external fact is decisive, and you’ll get beaten up time after time. The catalyst of hatred in my story is having the ‘wrong’ mother-tongue; but it could equally well be skin-colour, social position, the wrong clothes, or even one’s literary taste: you name it. That childhood experience marked me deeply. Because I was labelled ‘different’ in the playground, I was moved to understand and accept the differences between others and their ways. That battery also made me a convinced anti-racist. In my view the whole conception of race is mankind’s self-inflicted tragedy – particularly lamentable when you consider how ridiculously little variation there is in the genotypes of the different ‘races’. And in fact… even the nationalistic fervour of sports commentators produces nervous symptoms in me nowadays, though I do love Finland in my own way, and I was formerly an athletics freak.

So, to wind up at last…. When we met today, just before I set the tape going, you said that now you’d consented to this kind of interview you wanted to say a few straight words about how you became a writer as well.

Yes. As I said earlier, I specialise in being the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. This has been a leitmotif in my existence. I’ve tried to learn my lesson, but I still misread the prescriptive codes of human intercourse. And when a situation starts sorting people into like-minded groups, I generally fall between the stools. Throughout the 1980s I was busily involved in the Finland-Swedish literary scene; I was part of this and that endeavour, and I wrote and wrote. At some point I realised I was thirty years old and had got myself the reputation among the left of being a staunch bourgeois, while the bourgeoisie considered me self-evidently a communist…. All right, I admit I tended to be provocative, and I was partly to blame myself. But there are domains where my identity is complicated or conflicting in spite of myself. My social background, for example, what used to be called class background, is incoherent and complex. A few years ago a journalist from the Finnish-language Helsingin Sanomat newspaper hit on the idea that the writer Carola Sandbacka – whom I’ve never met – and I were from the same family. He was making a story about the Tampere of long ago. He wrote mostly about Carola Sandbacka – who had written a novel about a wealthy Finland-Swedish family in Tampere – but planted the suggestion that I too had recalled the past grandeur of my family in a novel. The chief interviewee was a rich old Finland-Swedish man who sat in the library of his patrician home and ordered the maid to bring fancy cakes to the table. Thus, once more, I’d been dexterously slipped into the upper class. The only problem was that I’d never been a relative of the old gentleman who offered the journalist fancy cakes. I do admit that I have thriving relatives in Tampere, and I’m in no way ashamed of them. But at the same time I wondered if it would be of any interest at all to the Finnish-speaking journalist to know that one of my grandmothers was a war-widow who brought up her son by toiling as a seamstress and cook, among other trades….

I’ll mention still another example of my fragmented identity. As a Finland Swede, I have – at least so I imagine – a rather close relation to Finnish, and thereby to the ancient popular Finnish culture, the Finnish Film Industry, Olavi Virta, and so forth. But, but. If a Finnish-speaking artist admits his love for the tangos of Virta or the pop-songs of Rauli Badding Somerjoki, he’s blessed with a great Finnish heart. I, though, encounter astonished looks. And the most distrustful look at me as if they’d like to say ‘Why don’t you piss off to your Swedish Club, raise your schnapps-glass and howl your bloody Bellman songs….’

No, Anders. This isn’t self-pity. I’m inured to this incongruousness in my life, and nowadays I’m well able to see the black humour in it. But I know that without writing, without revealing myself, without this output, without this outlet, my inner conflicts would have landed me in a mess. And that’s why I wanted to finish off the interview like this – pointing out that I’ve been compelled to write, and I still am. I write to keep myself together. I try to write myself into wholeness. I look for stories where there’s a world that has a place for me in it.

Thanks.

Thanks to you.

Translated by Herbert Lomas