Juha Hurme. Photo: Stefan Bremer

One day during Advent in Helsinki the narrator in the novel Hullu (‘The lunatic’, Teos, 2012), a middle-aged man, goes mad.

Complete confusion fills his mind. He thinks he must be dead, but nevertheless manages to knock on the door of the mental hospital. To his amazement, he is admitted to the yellow building.

Because the boundaries between reality and self are, for him, completely blurred, he believes that the people in the hospital know absolutely everything about his unsuccessful life, and that he must expect humiliations and punishments. The people in white coats are aliens, or perhaps holograms.

In one of the rooms of the next venue, the white building, he sees his mother as she was 30 years ago. His room-mate is some kind of observer, the toilet door is a gateway to oblivion, the Gateway of Final Departure.

Our man tries to find consolation and sense in reading and in his books. But how a poem by Bertolt Brecht describes, in exact detail, his life-story! The pain of knowing! The paralysis of fear! ‘It was one hundred per cent pure, genuine terror – odourless, colourless and tasteless, free of causes and consequences.’

Time works very strangely, but a slow return to a shared reality begins. A notice board gives details of how life in the third, grey building works. Breakfast: 8.00. Lunch: 11.45. That is understandable, but what does this mean: ‘Clothing care individual’?

Becoming acquainted with other patients gradually brings social turning points. In the mornings, the sounds of the building have a soothing effect: ‘It was new that I began to perceive that there were other people pottering about, with their sorrows, their joys, their loves and their confusions’. ‘… I was once more a part of life, although I had only a very small stake in it. You can feel and communicate by listening, too, even if nothing more were ever to happen.’ Terror subsides.

‘I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,’ said Hamlet: the return of a thespian begins gradually. He recognises the difference between illusion and delusion.

Around New Year the patients act, as a read-through, a play written and directed by the narrator. It tells the story of Josef Julius Wecksell, a Finnish poet who wrote verse and plays in Turku in mid-19th century until he went mad and spent 42 years in the silence of a mental hospital. The play, however, moves freely between the late16th century and the year 2015.

‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.’ The entire script of the play is included in the novel: its 65 pages include comments by both the director and the actors as well as events external to the drama. The performance ends with one of the patients playing air guitar. ‘We drank our evening tea. Mikko [a nurse] stayed on to supervise and we other actors swallowed our medicines and passed out into our beds. The rockets exploded and the year changed, I presume, but of that we no longer knew anything.’

‘What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!’ The narrator gradually picks up the pieces, rediscovering his reason, his nearest and dearest and his place in the world.

In this, his third novel, the theatre director and dramatist Juha Hurme (born 1959) describes a psychosis and recovery from it. In his story, he weaves a complete play text together with the stories of his main character and his fellow patients; a vivid imagination may play its part in the descent into madness, but it can also play a strong part in surviving it.

The reader of Hullu empathises with the patients, whom Hurme describes with artless but profound humour and deep sympathy: both human tragedy and comedy live behind the closed doors of the mental hospital.

Hurme’s main character takes up the role of a dramaturge in the closed community, simultaneously rebuilding his own self-understanding. ‘All relations in the world are interactive relations.’

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

House of words: the Finnish Literature Society building in Helsinki. Architect Sebastian Gripenberg, 1890. Watercolour by an unknown Russian artist, 1890s

Kai Häggman
Sanojen talossa. Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1890-luvulta talvisotaan
[In the house of words. The Finnish Literature Society from the 1890s to the Winter War]
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2012. 582 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-328-9
€54, hardback

The Finnish Literature Society has, throughout its history, played a multiplicity of roles: fiction publisher, research institute specialising in folklore studies, organiser of mass campaigns in support of national projects, literary gatekeeper, learned society, controller of language development.

The priorities of these areas of interest have changed from decade to decade, so Kai Häggman has taken on an exceptionally difficult subject to describe. He has, however, succeeded brilliantly in gathering the different threads together, using as as lowest common denominator the ideas of nationalism and nation whose role in global modernisation and European history have been studied, among others, by the British historians Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm.

They drew attention to the nationalism born in the backwaters of the 19th-century superpowers of Eastern Europe, which was a springboard to the birth of nation states such as the Czech republic and Slovakia. Similar historical developents were evident in Hungary and Estonia, which were, as Finnic peoples, close to the heart of the Finnish Literature Society. In these countries, the local folklore provided the foundation for national identity.

The nationalist phenomenon offers Häggman an opportunity for international comparison. He draws parallels with, for example, Ireland; Séamus Ó Duilearga, an eminent folklorist active in the Irish nationalist movement, visited and learned from the Finnish Literature Society. In Ireland, of course, the original native language did not achieve the desired position of power, unlike in Finland, where Finnish supplanted Swedish as the language of government, commerce and education in the early 20th century.

Two rune-singers: the brothers Paavila and Triihvo Jamanen reciting in Uhtua, 1894. Their father had been recorded by Elias Lönnrot, compiler of the Kalevala

The Finnish Literature Society entered the service of the nationalist movement in Finland, for it needed words as well as deeds. The promotion of the young written language became one of the Society’s most important priorities. It was activity led the cultural elite, but the Society was able to mobilise, if not the entire nation, then at least the Finnish-speaking middle strata. It organised campaigns in which enlightened members of the nation participated enthusiastically by sending in rapidly disappearing memoirs and vocabulary. By 1908 the Society’s ‘word bank’ already contained as many as half a million word-slips. One enthusiastic Fennomane calculated that if they were piled up the result would be a tower higher than Helsinki’s cathedral. Häggman is unable to restrain himself from poking a little gentle fun at this passion for collecting, with which the Society’s other activities could not always keep up.

Häggman draws attention to the conflict between traditional and modern values that characterised the nationalist movement. Although nationalism in theory favoured and in practice constructed a modern nation state and looked to the future, the recording of vanishing native dialects and traditions focused attention on the past. The traditionalist folklore-gatherers often took a dubious view of modernisation because it rode rough-shod over the old culture and standardised language. The Society debated whether its direction should be sought in the past or the present. The answer was ‘both’; the Society was like an ‘aged mother’ who lavished some care on everything and was the supporter of many different nationalist projects.

Kalevala in English: W.F. Kirby, butterfly-scholar and linguistic genius, translated the Kalevala into English in 1907; J.R.R. Tolkien, among others, was greatly impressed

As a promoter and defender of the developing literary and administrative language, the Finnish Literature Society has, over the years, played an important role. In this respect Häggman dubs it the state publisher, for the government support it has received for its various literary projects have been nothing if not substantial. During the period of Russian rule, in particular, it had close ties to the Senate, and its leaders were among the members of the compliant conservative grouping who remained loyal to St Petersburg even during what is known as the period of Russification. The constitutionalist liberals were, indeed, most disapproving when, in 1902 and in the midst of an anti-Russian rebellion, the Society published a Finnish-Russian dictionary of a thousand pages.

The links between state and Society remained close after Finland gained its independence. The Finnish government supported the most important of the dictionaries published by the Society, Nykysuomen sanakirja (‘A dictionary of contemporary Finnish’), work on which began in 1929; it was eventually published in the 1950s. It ranks with the great dictionaries of other countries in offering accurate knowledge about the Finnish words that are used in the living language. In its concern for the rules and discipline of standard Finnish, the Society took the academies of France and Sweden as its examples. The elite that oversaw correct use of language became quite popular among the masses, as ordinary people concerned about points of grammar were happy to turn to the Language Office for help.

Everywhere, folklore has been a source of power for nationalism, a pillar of national identity. In charting the role of the Society in 1893, it was noted that Finnish folk poetry was superior in both quantity and quality to that of other countries. The Society understood that the study of folk poetry could not be based entirely on the Kalevala, as collected and put together by Elias Lönnrot (the first version appeared in 1836); the starting point had to be the original folk poems that were held in the Folk Poetry Archive, the Society’s treasure chest. Over the years, a 33-volume work entitled Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot (‘The ancient poetry of the Finnish people’) was published, containing around 100,000 different poem texts.

The comparative folk-poetry scholarship championed by one of the Society’s important figures, Kaarle Krohn, emphasised the international nature of the discipline. In his doctoral thesis, Krohn labelled the ‘patriotic perspective’ that had been handed down from the time of the brothers Grimm, in which peoples sought their history and soul from their old poems, as old-fashioned. Krohn’s folkoristics played by super-national rules: in 1907 Krohn and the Dane Axel Olrik founded an international network of scholars whose series of publications, Folklore Fellows, belonged to the elite of humanist disciplines. A typology of folk tales published in the series by Krohn’s student Antti Aarne became an international classic.

Finland’s independence, gained in 1917, was followed by a change in the nation’s mood; Häggman follows this in dividing his book chronologically in two. At first, Finnish nationalism was a belief in the power of the word and the spirit, but in the 1920s and 1930s folk poetry was interpreted ‘historically and militarily’. Already in the 19th century national romantics had travelled beyond the eastern border of the Grand Duchy studying the lives of the fragmented Finnic tribes that lived there and dreaming of reuniting them.

Always vigilant: the Society’s civil defence group on the roof of the building in 1939. In the background, Helsinki's Orthodox Cathedral

It was not a big step from this cultivation of kinship and cultural links to the political idea of a Greater Finland. Even as cool-headed a scholar as Kaarle Krohn had ventured to suggest that while the Kalevala had earlier been read as an epic of peaceful times and a story about the power of the word, now it ‘echoed with the din of warlike sea-voyagers, glittered with golden swords’. He advised the young people of the newly independent country to view themselves as folklore heroes.

The Second World War cured Finland of its nationalist megalomania; the young men of the 1930s were forced to show their military capabilities in war against the attacks of the Soviet Union. Häggman will address the post-war history of the Finnish Literature Society in the third volume of his work, to be published in 2014.

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Published earlier:
Irma Sulkunen: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 1831–1892 (‘The Finnish Literature Society 1831–1892’, Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2004. Reviewed by Outi Lehtipuro in Books from Finland 3/ 2004.

Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike

The most popular book by Tuomas Kyrö (born 1979), so far, has been his sixth novel, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offence’: literally ‘He who takes offence’, 2010). It has sold nearly 65,000 copies as a book and audiobook. The protagonist is a 80-something man, a sturdy old bear who lives in the countryside, now alone, because his demented wife has been taken into care and the children have long since left home. Kyrö inserts genuine humour into the monologues of his stubborn – but by no means simple – character, defiantly critical, opposing new gadgets, fads and all sorts of silly stuff of the contemporary society. In this sequel Kyrö still manages to entertain the reader with his detailed portrait: now Mr Grumpy has to learn to cook, because the food a paid helper brings in just isn’t good enough. With the potato as the cornerstone of his diet, he finally learns how to make good, fatty and salty meals of meat and veg. ‘One must remember what’s important in life, marriage and prostate problems. Time and patience.’ Illustrations remind the reader of the old times: photographs of television programmes and printed recipes from the 1960s and 1970s.

In celebration of Helsinki’s status as World Design Capital 2012 comes this volume of vignettes of the city’s designers. Twenty Helsinki designers and artists – from textile designers and animators to illustrators and industrial designers – are interviewed by Eva Lamppu about their work and the inspiration they find in their city. The result, handsomely illustrated with atmospheric photographs by Katja Hagelstam, is a fascinating composite portrait, a colourful patchwork of creative lives lived out against the compact and interconnected fabric of this small northerly capital, which – not unexpectedly – is revealed as both sympathetic and conducive to good design. The book is rounded off by suggestions from 12 people active in creative fields on the city’s future. A fascinating and heartwarming study.

The largest department store in the Nordic countries, whose current building was completed in 1930 to a design by the architect Sigurd Frosterus, is celebrating its 150th birthday. The Akateeminen Kirjakauppa (Academic Bookstore), owned by Stockmann, is the biggest bookshop in the Nordic countries. The shop founded by the German-born H.F.G. Stockmann has grown into an international business, trading in 14 countries (including Russia, where it has stores in St Petersburg and Moscow). Now quoted on the Finnish stock exchange, Stockmann, owned by a conglomerate of families and foundations, has survived recessions, financial crises and wars. In the 19th century Stockmann was considered an expensive shop for gentlefolk, but as a result of growing competition it has been forced to focus strongly on a diverse concept of service. For decades one of the capital’s best-known meeting places has been ‘under the clock’, outside the main entrance of the department store. The book’s writers are historians from various fields. The generously illustrated work offers new information about the history of trade and the city.

Pirkko Saisio. Photo: Laura Malmivaara

Why does the private become political? Who makes it happen? Why should religious doctrines define private matters such as sexuality? Why should those who wield power in the political system define personal sexuality?

Pirkko Saisio (born 1949), a theatremaker as well as a prolific and versatile author of plays, novels, film and television scripts, has written a play for the Finnish National Theatre entitled HOMO! and subtitled, ‘An anarchist musical farce’.

Answers to the above questions – and they are complicated – are to be found in, for example, historical, psychological and sociological research.

In the last century, Stalin and Hitler condemned gays. Thirty years ago homosexuality was considered an sickness in Finland; forty years ago it was a crime. Today, it is still illegal in more than 75 countries: punishments vary from flogging to life imprisonment or death. In democratic societies, the ‘gay problem’ is a question of human rights, and hence a subject for public debate – for example, in a musical play, for of course the issue also involves that eternally fascinating and entertaining feature of human life, love.

At the Finnish National Theatre HOMO! is a musical, composed by Jussi Tuurna; there’s a live band of four musicians on stage. The dozen-strong cast, including two students from the Finnish Theatre Academy, surprise the audience with their considerable musical talents – the National hasn’t exactly been famed for its musical profile in the past. Since its premiere last September, HOMO! has been playing to full houses.

In the central roles are a middle-aged married couple, Veijo and Hellevi Teräs, their student daughter Rebekka and the family’s au pair, the handsome young Moritz – and Hellevi’s conscience.

Hellevi is a hard-line Christian member of parliament who does not approve of gays. The biddable house-husband Veijo has sought the services of a psychiatrist because he is tormented by dreams about Snow White who looks like Hellevi. Rebekka is infatuated with the handsome Moritz, but he is seeking his sexual identity and falls in love with a Muslim boy. Hellevi’s conscience can no longer tolerate Hellevi’s fundamentalist views, and runs away – to become a Muslim.

From the metatheatrical opening onwards, the story treats its audience to a switchback ride of events and imagination. Unafraid of megalomanic exaggeration, the text wants to say absolutely everything about its subject; the operatic music pumps into it a hugely entertaining musical spirit.

One of the things that makes HOMO! topical in Finland now is the current debate: civil relationships between two people of the same sex are permitted, but there is no law on equal, gender-neutral marriage. Both the Lutheran and the (much smaller) Orthodox churches in Finland are state churches which receive government support, and the majority of Finns are members of one or other of these religious communities. The churches’ doctrines have thus traditionally been influential. Homosexuality is no longer considered socially reprehensible (neither is divorce!), but because some of the leaders of the Christian Democrats – which opposes, for example, the gender-neutral marriage bill – have expressed strongly homophobic views, thousands of tax-paying people have left the Lutheran church. This, of course, is a matter of concern to the church, if not to the party.

Saisio skillfully satirises the arguments of politicians and bishops in the dialogue. She also allows Hellevi a biting intellect as well as a sharp tongue – ideologies and world views are set on collision paths, but her characters and her themes are not trivialised, despite the comic turns and speed of the plot.

Into the visually impressive bubbling witch’s cauldron of the stage Saisio throws, along with Snow White, seven dwarves: they are young ice-hockey players, with comical macho clichés. Moritz desperately tries to be one of them. Other characters include bishops, Stalin (‘Homosexuality is a relic of capitalism!’), Hitler and Goering, Shakespeare and Hans Christian Andersen, Churchill, the apostle Paul and the British mathematician Alan Turing (he was sentenced to treatment with female hormones as punishment for a homosexual crime, and died in 1954, having eaten a poisoned apple).

Jussi Tuurna’s compositions are versatile, vigorously melodic and rhythmically varied (including tango, waltz, bolero, march, rock‘n’roll, a ballad). His music is emotional but not sentimental – not at all unlike Kurt Weill’s dramatic narrative scores for Bertolt Brecht’s plays. It inspires the cast, resulting in enjoyable part-singing and solo performances.

HOMO! brings to mind Tony Kushner’s famous play and television film, Angels in America (1991–1992), ‘A Gay Fantasia on National Themes’. Set in the years of the outburst of AIDS, it embraces a huge scale of issues and themes – religion, history and politics, Jews, Mormons, angels, gays, McCarthyism, marriage, race, illness, friendship, loyalty and betrayal. Its world-wide success results from the fact that its contemporary characters are very sympathetic in their suffering and in their love.

Saisio writes: ‘Gays and lesbians continue to form an important minority, larger than the Finland-Swedish or fundamentalist Christian minorities, which bear full civil responsibilities but which do not enjoy full civil rights.’ In the end, HOMO! claims: politicians must not define people’s identities; gay people should not be subjected to any political or religious ideology.

HOMO! ends with a gentle song sung by the ensemble: ‘… if there were a land / where everyone could / love, love, love / whoever they want… There the twin towers / would still rake the sky, / in Baghdad instead of bombs / we’d hear a new story / about a thousand and one nights / where you can / love, love, love whoever you want!… Could it be here, that land, / where even strangers / are able to be loved?’ The audience and the cast share the last minutes of the play in mutual wishful thinking.

Pirkko Saisio: HOMO! Musiikkinäytelmä (‘HOMO! A musical play’, Helsinki: Lasipalatsi, 2011. ISBN 978-952-480-245-1).
Production: The Finnish National Theatre. Music: Jussi Tuurna. A recording is available on a CD (later in digitised form) from the National Theatre

Harri Nordell. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

The poems of Harri Nordell are a mystery to me. Each time I open one of his books, my reading begins afresh. I have analysed and translated his poems, but the texts have still not become familiar. I have not begun to comprehend them. They always speak to me as if for the first time.

I could not wish for a greater gift from a poem. These poems create a special state of being; I could call it not-knowing or marvelling. I feel I am involved in an unfolding event.

Nordell’s poems open me up, but I am unable to prise them open. I do not want to interpret cryptic expressions, or seek out more explicit meanings for them. I would not wish to write on top of these poems, to mute silence with superfluous words.

The imagery of the poems is diverse: traditional at times, highly radical at others. Despite their use of imagery, the texts resist a metaphorical reading, whereby interpretation uncovers the ‘real’ meaning behind an image. The poems do denote something, but not anything that can be named in simpler terms. There is secrecy in the saying.

Nordell’s poems cut across different times, yet their moment is now. A Nordell poem arrives softly yet forcefully. Mere shreds come to the surface, yet the work brings aeons with it. The poem is placeless, in a vacuum. Yet each poem engages with the world.

The modern poem has often been compared to a sculpture. The comparison emphasises the object-like quality of a poem: density of meaning, inward-directed power, sharply delineated contours. The characterisation befits Nordell in that, when scrutinising a sparse poem from different angles, one keeps discovering new meanings, and the relationships between these meanings create tension. For example, the way Nordell blurs the distinction between parts of speech makes micro-reading so rewarding that the poem’s references to the exterior world may not be the main focus of interpretation.

Even so, I think that the effect of Nordell’s work is based on how it extends beyond itself, into ‘reality’. There is something visionary in this, maybe even dramatic; the emergence of the world appears as a kind of birth in which words play an active role. The words do not merely weave into each other, they evoke the world.

In terms of modernist self-sufficiency, a Nordell poem is not complete. It does not close itself off. In the world of sculpture, the works of Alberto Giacometti, which shimmer endlessly, seeking their own contours, provides a point of comparison. This kind of movement intensifies with the progress of Nordell’s work: the innovative narrativity of Valkoinen kirja (‘The white book’, 2006)) departs even further from rock-like solidity. The weight of the single word reduces, the poem’s edge dissolves. The poem breathes in and out.

The ‘I’ of the poem often says ‘you’. The ‘I’ addresses another person, a beloved, but there are much broader implications to this act. The ‘I’ is a function of the ‘you’, and vice versa; and in that sense always incomplete. One’s fundamental relationship with the world entails addressing ‘you’ and being addressed. Addressing ‘you’ signifies participation in the unfolding and emergence of things here and now; just as light creates the world by making it visible.

There are no finished words. The dialogic ‘I – you’ relationship introduces something tentative or sketchy into the poems. Although the texts have been honed to the point of minimalism, the gesture of crystallisation, of finalisation, is missing. They call out to you.

I once stood in front of a Mark Rothko painting. All of a sudden, the painting became a window. I felt I was looking through it, into another world.

Experiencing Nordell’s poems is similar. The most daring leap they make is to reach the outer limit, the edge of ineffability.

The edge of the sacred, the transcendental? The old labels are not good enough. The language has to be constructed anew. It is constructed here, in the actual event of naming, and not in the familiar, established manner. This despite the fact that the whole train of tradition is trailing behind. (And how lightly it trails!) Nordell’s poems are not riddles I could try to solve. They point at something outside themselves, but at what? If you could say it in other words, there would be no poems. The works make me listen to another way of saying things, one that differs from the one I regard as my language.

The potential ‘obscurity’ of the poems does not constitute glued-on aesthetics, but is an inevitable consequence of what they are striving at. The attempt to say, the tough battle the poems wage over naming, is born from an encounter with something outside the known and familiar.

In this respect, Nordell is a Hermetist, a scion of the mythical Hermes Trimegistos and of Paul Celan. But ‘hermetic’ not in the sense of air-tight or impenetrable. In some incomprehensible manner, the Nordell poem becomes a window; we look through it.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah

This is an edited version of Tarja Roinila’s ‘Afterword’ to Harri Nordell’s selected poems, Sanaliekki äänettömyydessä. Valitut runot 1980–2006 (‘A word-flame in silence. Selected poems 1980–2006’, WSOY, 2011). See also Sound and meaning, an essay by Tarja Roinila on translating poetry, including Nordell’s

C.L. Engel. Koti Helsingissä, sydän Berliinissä. C.L. Engel. Hemmet i Helsingfors, hjärtat i Berlin

The life and works of the German architect Carl Ludvig Engel (1778–1840) are portrayed in four articles by specialists in Finnish history, the history of Helsinki and the history of gardens. Engel spent almost 24 years in Helsinki, transforming it with his architectural designs. For eleven of those years, he and his family lived in a house surrounded by a large garden, both of them his own creations. Looking for work, the young Engel finally found it in the tiny northern town that was pronounced the new capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1812 – both Tsar Alexander I and his successor, Nikolai I, favoured him. From 1816 onwards he designed more than twenty neo-classical buildings, among them nationally important landmarks: the Cathedral, the City Hall, the National Library and the University. Despite his mostly rewarding job as a highly regarded city planner, Engel found Helsinki cold, small and quiet, and he constantly longed for his native Berlin, which he never saw again. However, his flourishing garden gave him great pleasure. Richly illustrated with photographs, the book gives the reader an thorough and interesting picture of this city-changing man and his era.

Sinisten maisemien mies. J.G. Granön tutkijantie 1882–1956

The man of blue landscapes describes the life and work of the Finnish geographer Johannes Gabriel Granö (1882–1956), whose career also reflected Finland’s development as a modern state. Granö was a scientific explorer, writer, a pioneer of Finnish photographic art and a professor of geography at the universities of Tartu (Estonia), Helsinki and Turku. In Estonia he applied scientific method to the study of local history and from Tartu brought the tradition of urban research. Granö spent much of his youth in Omsk in western Siberia, where his father worked as a priest among displaced and deported Finns and Estonians. From 1906 to 1916 Granö made an expedition to Mongolia and the Altai mountains, but his fieldwork remained unfinished when the 1917 revolution broke out; the area was then closed to Western scholars for 70 years. Among Granö’s most important works are the classic travel book Altai, vaellusvuosina nähtyä ja elettyä (‘The Altai, seen and experienced during my years of travel’, 1921) and his methodological masterpiece Puhdas maantiede (‘Pure geography’, 1930). In it Granö outlined a theory of landscapes, and the book was a pioneering work ahead of its time: landscape was examined in terms of the relation between human beings and their environment, as the sum of all the senses.
Translated by David McDuff

Enkelten verta

The literary career of Johanna Sinisalo (born 1958) has embraced fiction, drama, sci-fi and children’s books. Her 2000 Finlandia Fiction Prize-winning fantasy novel Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi and the novel Linnunaivot (2008) have been published in English as Not before Sundown and Birdbrain respectively. In this new novel, set in the near future, the central role is played by bees: widespread beehive failures in the United States and the resulting drop in pollination have resulted in an enormous food shortage that threatens the world economy. Orvo is a loner, the father of Eero, his grown-up son. Sinisalo cleverly works in animal rights activist Eero’s controversial blog comments on animal rights and modern man’s flawed relation to nature. However, this is also the novel’s biggest problem, as the blogging starts to weaken the story, of three generations of men in a family. Both the mythic, parallel reality of the bees and the tough-and-tender relationship between father and son are strong indications of Sinisalo’s narrative skill.
Translated by David McDuff

Häväistyt

The tenth novel by Asko Sahlberg (born 1964) is reminiscent of the earlier works of this distinctive author: its principal characters are hardened by experience and lead their lives somewhere in the Finnish countryside during a recent period of the country’s history. The sentences are beautifully constructed, and the pace of the narrative is very slow – sometimes even too slow. The main role is played by a middle-aged man who is running away with a woman and a small boy. What they are running away from for a long time remains a puzzle, as does the question of who they are looking for, a man called The Master. In the flashbacks of the last part of the book all is explained, and the rhythm of the story quickens. Considering the book’s desolate, even fatalistic view of the world, it is  slightly surprising that everything eventually turns out as happily as in a fairytale. But perhaps this is Sahlberg’s tribute to his characters, and to all of us human beings, for whom he seems to care a great deal? His novel He (2010) will be published in February in England under the title The Brothers (Peirene Press).
Translated by David McDuff

Katmandun unet. Kirjoituksia idästä ja lännestä

Tero Tähtinen’s second collection of essays is focused physically in the wilds of a Finnish national park and Nepal – where the author (born 1978), a literary scholar and critic, has frequently travelled – and mentally in the divergences of Western and Eastern thought, which Tähtinen, who is familiar with Zen and Buddhist philosophy, studies, occasionally by means of literary examples. The ‘Socratic ego’ of the Western egocentric, individual ‘I’, which strives in vain to understand the whole of reality by rationalising it, is his favourite bête noire. Tähtinen quickens the pace of his verbal virtuosity as he discusses both dogmatic, materialistic faith in science – as well as some of its representatives – and Christian faith: he considers that both, in their pursuit of an absolute and total explanation, end up in a metaphysical vacuum. Unlike them, Eastern philosophy, in which the individual ‘I’ is not the centre and measure of all things, does not give rise to the anxiety of compulsive cognition. The virtual narcissism of Facebook, a platform tailor-made for the Socratic ego, receives Tähtinen’s outright condemnation: ‘Facebook trivialises humanity,’ he declares. At the end of these passionate essays on the author praises silence.
Translated by David McDuff

Naisten mies ja aatteiden. Juhani Ahon elämäntaide

Of Juhani Aho (1861–1921) it is said that he created what have proved to be the most enduring descriptions of how traditional Finland began to be modernised; his most famous book is the novella Rautatie (‘The railway’, 1884) which portrays the arrival of the railway in the Finnish countryside. This new biography also shows once again how many international influences can be found in the work of Aho, who is often called a national author. Aho was active in student politics, and as a newspaper journalist. He was nominated for the Nobel Literature Prize twelve times, but for various reasons, some of them connected with language politics, lobbying on his behalf was not successful. Aho developed Finnish prose, bringing to it realism and impressionistic style. His experiences during a visit to Paris in 1889 form the basis of his novel Yksin (‘Alone’), which caused a stir in part because of its erotic flavour. This book by the author and literary scholar Panu Rajala provides a versatile insight into Aho’s personal story, the world of his ideas, his opinions on art, and his complex relationships.
Translated by David McDuff

Kuningattaren viitta ja muita kiperiä kysymyksiä

The style of Maria Vuorio’s books demands quiet concentration – but you could get quite hooked on their slow, thoughtful, gentle story-telling. Vuorio carries on the tradition of classic animal fables, following in the footsteps of Hans Christian Andersen, but with a personal twist. She is masterful in describing different emotional states – whether evoking the inner lives of humans or of anthropomorphised animals. Her stories and fairy tales hand the reader a magnifying glass that brings into view even the smallest, most insignificant creature or thing. The entire universe is present in the stories, for example when an earthworm ponders the meaning of life, a bear breaks into the National Museum, or a noxious insect imperils cultural exchange between Finland and Denmark. Talvitie has drawn an allegorical picture for each tale.
Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah

Kahden maailman tyttö

Marja-Leena Tiainen (born 1951) has dealt with unemployment, immigration, and racism in her works, in ways that are accessible to her young readership. She researches her topics with care. The idea for this book dates back to 2004, when the author made the acquaintance of a Muslim girl who lived in a reception centre in eastern Finland; her experiences fed into Tara’s story. Tiainen’s central theme, ‘honour’ violence in the Muslim community, is surprisingly similar to Jari Tervo’s  Layla (WSOY, 2011). Tiainen’s is a traditional story about a girl growing up and surviving, but the novel’s strong points are the authentic description of everyday multiculturalism, and the intensity of the narration. The reader identifies with Tara’s balancing act, which she must carry out in the crossfire of her father’s authority, family tradition, and her own dreams. In spite of everything, the community also becomes a source of security and support for Tara. The narrative arc is coherent and, despite the numerous overlapping time-frames, the tension is sustained right up to the final, conciliatory solution.
Translated by Fleur Jeremiah and Emily Jeremiah