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.