Instead of television or Facebook, there were impoverished post-war homes and often long, lonely journeys to school in -20°C on unlit roads in the middle of nowhere.

Between 1945 and 1949 more than 100,000 babies were born annually in Finland (in 2005 the figure was less than 58,000.) The sheer size of this demographic phenomenon is exceptional even by global standards.

In a new book edited by Anja Salokannel and Kaija Valkonen (baby boomers themselves), entitled Kauaksi kotoa. Muutoksen sukupolvi kertoo (‘Far from home. The generation of change tells its stories‘, Kirjapaja, 2011), 21 people born in the 1940s – mostly pensioners now – take a look at their lives, during which Finland has changed enormously. Review by Pia Ingström.

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

I found myself standing in front of the noticeboard. The rules were on a sheet of paper:

Ward 15 5-C
MEAL TIMES:
Breakfast 8:00 AM
Lunch 11:45 AM
Dinner 4:30 PM
Evening Snack 7:30 PM
COFFEE:
After lunch
We recommend leaving money, valuables, and bankbooks for storage in the ward valuables locker. We take no responsibility for items not left in the locker! Money may be retrieved 1–3 times per day. Use of mobile phones on the ward by arrangement.
VISITING HOURS:
M–F 2–7 PM
Sa–Su 12–7 PM
PERSONAL CLOTHING:
Use of one’s own clothing by individual arrangement. Clothing care individual. Washer and dryer available for use in the evenings after 6 PM.
OUTDOOR RECREATION:
Arranged individually according to health condition. Outdoor pass does not include the right to leave the area.
VACATIONS:
Vacations arranged during morning report, according to health condition.
NOTA BENE!
Smoking is only allowed on the smoking balcony! Smoking prohibited from 11 PM to 6 AM.
Pastor Karvonen available by appointment.

These were impossibly difficult rules. I read them through three times and simply did not understand. ‘Clothing care individual.’ ‘Outdoor pass does not include the right to leave the area.’

What did these sentences mean? With whom did you schedule the pastor and how? And why?

A young woman had popped up next to me in front of the noticeboard. She was a slightly smudged creature with a pale face and black circles under her eyes. The overall impression was murky but not frightening. She wore a combination of a pyjamas and her own stuff.

– I am 163 and 1/2 centimetres tall.

– Ah. I was 190, but now I’ve probably shrunk a bit; I’d wager I’m 189 at most.

We were both delighted at this matter-of-fact and, at least on the surface, honest discussion and went our separate ways. 163 and 1/2 centimetres started walking towards the recreation and dining area that widened out at the end of the hall, where it appeared there were others loitering as well, but I did not have the nerve to go there yet. I returned to the smoking balcony, breathing in the frigid air and inspecting the view.

The Pasila radio tower loomed behind the bars through the crowns of the pine trees. On the ground was a little snow. Some traffic was also visible, and human figures. A squirrel jumped easily from branch to branch. It was a good sign. My brain was ticking through these sights and, crunching furiously, working them into a new theory when the door opened and a man with bad teeth joined me. He had a ‘Karelia Back’ cap on his head. He gave me a friendly smile.

I knew speedheads well enough to connect the toothless smile to an eager, diligent, liberal and sincere pursuit of amphetamines. These people here are junkies! 163 and ½ centimetres was also clearly a gear user. And my roommate, the black-haired Indian, Jysky, is here taking a break from his hashish psychosis!

This was an utterly shocking, cataclysmic discovery. These are people, fellow travellers, human wrecks, just like me. What’s our problem then? We’re alive. Which made me think of death and Mother. Is she still alive? I should get in touch quick and make sure, but first I need to test out these new ideas by getting acquainted with baseball cap guy.

– Are you a person?

– I am garbage.

– Do you want the Russians to give Karelia back to Finland?

– Under no circumstances.

– Why do you have a cap like that then?

– I bear the sins and stupidity of the human race. Someone has to bear them. Otherwise they accumulate into too large a pile and the world slides into the Vantaa River.

– Are you Jesus?

– Amos. The prophet Amos.

– Prophet? Can you predict the future?

– Yes.

– How will things go for us?

– Things will go well.

– This was pleasant news for once. You are a capable prophet. Cigarette?

– No thank you. I do not come to this balcony to smoke but to breathe away the evil smell of the ash tray. In that way I cleanse the world.

– So from your perspective is it evil that I smoke my fags and create these reeking stubs in this cup?

– Of course not. Quite the contrary. Go right on smoking. Surely I shall breathe the evil vapours away.

I stubbed the cigarette out and the prophet Amos stayed there on the balcony to sniff the ashes.

Someone rang the dinner bell in the hall. Called by it, I walked to the noticeboard, where 163 and 1/2 centimetres was inspecting the writing on the wall. I placed myself beside her and reviewed the rules.

– What time is it? Is it lunch or dinner now?

163 and 1/2 centimetres thought for a second before answering.

– I don’t know. And I don’t remember. I think what we last ate was evening snack, but in that case now should be breakfast and in between should have been night. But what difference does it make?

That was well said. None! It only takes on any meaning from the coffee perspective: we receive that after lunch, and, as I understand things, it is included in breakfast, despite not being mentioned specifically in the rules.

– How tall are you? I am 163 and 1/2 centimetres.

– We’ve already dealt with that issue. I am the former 190 and current 189.

We moved in reverse height order to the tail of the food queue. I was happy that there was a space of a couple of pyjamas between us and Sharp Eyes.

The meal did not go anything like well. 163 and 1/2 centimetres received her plate before me and then ran right to the second-to-last free spot, at that nice table where I would have liked to go. The only remaining place was between the Sharp Eye’s and the prophet Amos, and that was precisely the place, the most frightening and dangerous point in the world, which I would have liked to avoid.

That place was designed just for me. That was where I would crucified and then the scourging would begin. The change of buildings and the squirrel in the yard were just a tactical feint – nothing had changed. The only thing I could trust was that I couldn’t trust anything at all.

This is staged theatre, and all of these people have been brought in here for me, to do me in, to squeeze what’s most important out of me. They won’t let up until I’ve admitted everything. What everything? Presumably that since I was one and a half years old I’ve been false to the core and a coward. As far as I remember, I learned to talk so I could lie to my parents more effectively. I have never had the nerve to tell anyone what I actually think. I have flattered and embellished and turned the best face forward. I haven’t believed in people. I haven’t believed in friends. I have lied the very worst to those who have loved me. Lunatics!

For fifty years I have pretended to build my life on nothing, supposedly doing, supposedly feeling, supposedly breaking down, supposedly reasoning, supposedly rejoicing, supposedly sobbing and supposedly living. And apparently I supposedly died as well, since I can’t seem to get a handle on whether I am alive anymore or where. I am standing here with a plate of potatoes in my hands, and everyone is staring, already amused, and I have to go there, even though I don’t want to go there, and the whole ballet has been orchestrated and blocked in advance, but I am the only one of the ballerinas not given a tutu and toe shoes, and who has never been to any rehearsals.

If this is an illusion, then in that case illusions are the most real thing so far in my life. They burn, and cut and kill. They take you by the neck and submerse your head in a tub of water. They shake off useless assumptions. I will be threshed in this looney bin until I admit that I am nothing, and then my existence will be deleted from the universe, from all possible universes.

Suddenly it was clear, a precise definition of myself: I am a criminal who has never dared commit a crime. Can there be anything less!

– Now go to your place and eat. Your food is getting cold, says a representative of the kitchen staff.

Yeah, yeah.

– Well, now, hello. How are you settling in?

– Um, settling in? I don’t know. I doubt I really want to settle in here.

Big and White asked me to talk in the office. Why not? So we went. She opened the door with a key. The spaces for these control-side characters were all outfitted with locks, while we main characters bunked in unlocked, two-person residences. This was probably a perfectly sensible arrangement.

– It appears you were studying the Bible.

Damned Bible. That always made you a mote in everyone’s eye. I decided to lead this spy astray a bit.

– I would rather have read the Tao Te Ching, but you didn’t have it. It’s the only religious book with something interesting in it, because it isn’t religious at all. It has aphorisms that have been worn so smooth by the centuries and by so many millions of people that you can get hold of them. And that is precisely the quality I can get hold of.

– What do you mean?

– Well, exactly what I said; I don’t know how to explain it any better.

That conversation dried up there, as it should have. Big and White flicked her computer on, scrolled down to me and started explaining my situation. I was all a big absent-minded ear. It was making me yawn and my thoughts were swarming somewhere else entirely.

The tale was harsh enough.

I had walked into the yellow building ten days before and said I was dead. From there, after some small confusion, I had been committed to the white building, where on the third night I had attacked the innocent night individual. This had been followed by an automatic transfer, as per policy, to a private suite, where I had relaxed for a couple of days. And from there by unanimous decision of the jury, had come the move here to the grey building.

The grey building was the final destination, said the white person.

From here there was nowhere else to go; this is the furthest corner of society. Beyond these borders there is nothing, unless you count the graveyard. As the phrase goes, you are here ‘for the time being’. Your departure is not in your own hands, but rather decided upon the authoritative directorate of these games.

And that’s that, said the white woman, making the screen go black with her sinfully red fingernail.

I thanked White for the pertinence of the information in her briefing and suggested that we part.

I hurried to the dining room. A few were grouped around the TV, but I found a secluded corner table. I feverishly compared my own memories with the white woman’s otherwise logical and believable report.

Nothing really lined up; about a week had disappeared somewhere.

Time has run away with me, and I have lost a large part of my life somewhere. For safety’s sake I did small memory tests in my mind. I remembered the presidents of Finland. I remembered the 26 plays of Shakespeare. I remembered the quadratic formula. I remembered that the speed of light is 300,000 kilometres per second.

That was enough to continue with. I didn’t have the energy to moan or complain. I decided that I was partially alive and partially dead. And because I had to go on somehow, it was best to invest in the living side, in what sense was left, not to waste limited energy sighing over forgotten things and lost time. Perhaps I’ve developed into some sort of time traveller, bouncing in my own style from one hummock of time to another.

The nights always fell quickly. Here in the grey building the chemists also appeared with their carts in the hall at the end of the evening to distribute the Eucharist, to each her own numbing agents as deemed appropriate, to be swallowed down with water. They snuffed our candles effectively, because the system lay dormant at night in the silence and immobility dictated by the regulations.

Or else I was so deep below the surface of unconsciousness that I did not hear the others’ raging. However, in the mornings there were never any detectable marks or rumours of nocturnal bacchanals, so the knockouts apparently worked for everyone.

I slipped into unconsciousness smoothly, but I came out night after night suddenly, violently. I emerged from the depths of sleep like a baby from the womb, defenceless, uncomprehending of anything. My eyes fluttered open, my pulse pounded at one hundred and thirty beats and I was in the grip of complete and utter terror.

There was no logical or even illogical basis for this terror. It was one hundred per cent pure, genuine terror – odourless, colourless and tasteless, free of causes and consequences.

I did not fear death, monsters or violence against myself. Everything had already gone to hell as much as it could – there was nothing left to fear. However, my new acquaintance, pure terror, listened to none of these or any other logical arguments, simply shaking me awake each morning in the grey building at four or five o’clock in the morning with such force that I feared my seams would burst and my head split open.

Now I knew what it means to be paralysed with fear. I lay like this for five minutes after waking up. The sweat ran, my muscles did not work and there was no thought in my mind, since the terror was there. Then gradually I would be able to do something. I moved very quietly, so Jysky wouldn’t wake up. Music helped sometimes. Martta had already brought me a player and a stack or records. But I only dared listen to certain artists, especially in the morning. Mississippi John Hurt comforted me many times. He seemed to know exactly how I was doing and what the best medicine would be. The pianist Ahma Jamal’s bright passages also had a terror-dulling effect.

I had again, after a hiatus of one month, begun to see honest to goodness dreams again. I did always die in them, but puckishly, amusingly, at the end of a good story. I recorded a couple.

I am shipwrecked and swimming with another man to a deserted island. We succeed in saving rations and supplies. On the island there appears to be fruit and water and good facilities otherwise as well. We are not immediately attacked by dinosaurs. And we have weapons and ammunition. But it is deserted. There is no one else and no hope of escape. However, we approach the situation calmly. Around our first evening campfire, I ask my companion what kind of man he is.

‘I want to be completely honest. I’m a psychopath and a murderer.’

I am Doctor Watson investigating a ticklishly tangled murder of a physician. Behind the case we find another incident, and in the end we realise that doctors have been being murdered for years now. Someone has been bumping them off. We also realise that I too am in danger. I leave my wife and move to Baker Street under Holmes’ protection.

Doctors keep dropping. We find a clue. Following this we climb the stairs, kick in the door and surprise the suspect, who is one of my colleagues.

You! Are you the insane doctor murderer?

No, it is not him, I hear a voice behind me say, and Holmes empties his pistol into me and the other doctor.

Thump.

I stood in the stairwell wearing civilian clothes and a rucksack on my back. I had tried to leave unnoticed, but had not succeeded. 163 and 1/2, who was always hanging around in the corridor, was there again.

– You’re leaving now?

– Now.

– Well, bye then.

– Bye. Say hello to Amos and Puupponen.

Then I wondered whether I should hug this little creature, but she decided the matter for me by running away. The guard let me out into the stairwell.

I went down in the elevator to the ground level and smelled the outside air. It was a bright, crisp February morning. I walked past the yellow building and across the street to the stadium park. Just for fun I did a lap around the stadium’s sawdust track. My blood began to circulate. I felt almost alive.

I dropped down to the banks of Töölö Bay and then climbed up to the Birdsong bridge. I leaned on the railing and watched the trains. I considered where one could go on them and where I would like to go myself. Like over the winter holidays.

I walked past the City Theatre and the Kallio Church to Sörnäinen. I stopped in at the corner shop and bought fags. I continued towards home.

Home looks like home. The phone rings. Martta.

Hey, I got out. Let’s meet on the shore, like maybe on Katajanokka. It would be fun to see a little open water after so long. And then we can go for coffee.

We agreed. Martta is happy to skive off school. Daddy’s girl.

I headed out into the city. The Red Planet second-hand book shop at Harjutori Square called to me. The salesman at the Planet, an old acquaintance, asked how I was. I answered that I was probably doing quite well. For five euros I bought the opus The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes from 1892. Hard stuff that.

I stopped off at a kiosk and bought the Helsingin Sanomat, Hufvudstadsbladet, People’s News Weekly, Provincial Future, Green Thread and Ny Tid. I thought I would find out over the course of the day what was going on.

Martta and I walked around the shores of Katajanokka. She went her own way, and I went along the Kruununhaka strand towards Kallio. Some construction waste had collected under the shoreline road bridge, an indeterminate amount of dry lumber. Out of this I built a small fire, shaving a few chips off with a knife and lighting them. There was even a bench. I sat by the fire and dug Sherlock Holmes out of my rucksack. I was perfectly warm with the fire and the woollen long johns I bought way back when at the Kajaani market under my jeans. I chose the ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’. It began irresistibly. Watson peered out the window and said,

Hey Holmes! Here comes some madman. It sure is sad that his relatives let him trot around alone.

The story had draw. When I got to the end, the fire had almost died. I decided to sacrifice one of my newspapers to revive it. I chose from the more useless end of the spectrum, so the Helsingin Sanomat. With that I got some life into the blaze, and something was left over as well, the Help Wanted section. The following advertisement caught my attention.

‘Position for housekeeper and caretaker in a serious but happy family. We would like to tell you now that we are spiritualists, occultists, Buddhists and Christians, and we want that our children are taught the importance of truth. Mother is a medium and the father is a healer. Most of those who read this notice will think we are not entirely well. We want someone to run our house and do our maintenance who feels we have a refreshingly intelligent feeling about us. Send your application hand written – we are also graphologists.’

I put out the fire and made a trip to the Hakaniemi post office to buy an envelope and stamp. I had my own paper and pen in my rucksack. I had to find something to do with myself again anyway.

Translated by Owen Witesman

The Guggenheim Foundation's global network of museums

Helsinki has said no thanks to a new Guggenheim art museum in the city – for the time being, at least.

On 2 May the City Council voted 8-7 against the mayor’s motion to build such a gallery in Helsinki. Politically, the move was supported by the National Coalition Party and the Swedish People’s Party, while the Greens and the left-wing parties opposed it.

What happens after the upcoming national elections – in autumn this year – is another matter. The director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Richard Armstrong, is persistent: he says he wants Helsinki.  Well, if the Foundation offers a better deal in the future, the proposal may be considered again.

Three months ago we wondered – see Panem et circenses – whether ‘the people of Helsinki wish to begin to pay additional taxes for the revival, yet again, of the age-old dream of guaranteeing Finland “a place on the world map”, in a situation where economic difficulties are a matter of everyday life for increasing numbers of them? (We believe, incidentally, that Finland already has an appropriate place on the world map.) Will their opinion be asked, or heard?’

Since then, it has been announced that Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin will close its doors at the end of 2012. The construction of the future Guggenheim Abu Dhabi building (designed by Frank Gehry) is estimated to finish in 2015 instead of 2013. The other three museums are in New York, Venice and Bilbao.

The total cost of the Guggenheim Helsinki for the next 20 years would have been approximately 300 million euros (design and cost of a new building, maintenance – admission fees deducted – and a 20-year Guggenheim licence fee). The Finnish government has not promised to finance the museum –  by the way, the Ministry of Education has had to cut grants to state-aided museums by three million euros this year. No art-minded private sponsors of a future Guggenheim announced themselves in the public either.

The public debate made it clear that the deep ranks of Helsinki taxpayers don’t want a costly new monument that would be expected mainly to attract possible tourists – and for which the brand, the Guggenheim Foundation, would not be taking any financial risks whatsoever. People worried about the fate of the existing art museums (there is a good supply of them in Helsinki and neighbouring Espoo) – as well as about the grim-looking future prospects and cuts in public spending.

The deep ranks were pretty vociferous, and a number of the city council members  clearly reconsidered.

The wide and heated public debate resulted, however, in interesting, spontaneous plans for the future: a new form of co-operation, entitled Checkpoint Helsinki, consisting of more than 150 artists and arts professionals, aims to found a new organisation to encourage the production of new, internationally interesting works of art. The base for this would be the existing collections of the Helsinki Art Museum; as a new building is necessary (as the existing one in Meilahti has to be replaced due to structural problems), this would be an opportunity to join forces in developing the art scene in the city as well as securing an international audience for it.

Finnish Comics Annual: picture by Katja Tukiainen

The 2012 Finnish Comics Annual, edited by Reija Sann, was published in May by HuudaHuuda and the Finnish Comics Association. The book focuses on everyday realism, featuring eleven artists: Terhi Ekebom, Grönroos & Rantio, Matti Hagelberg, Pauli Kallio, Tarmo Koivisto, Mika Lietzen, Petteri Tikkanen, Tiitu Takalo, Katja Tukiainen and Riitta Uusitalo. In their work the limits of the individual and the collective, the local and the universally human are explored by means of fantasy.

The first Finnish Comics Annual, featuring Finnish comics and graphic novels in English, was published last year. The editor was Ville Hänninen.

This year’s Finlandia Comics Prize, worth €5,000, awarded by the association Tampere Kuplii (‘Tampere bubbles’) at a comics festival of the same name in Tampere on 4 May, went to graphic designer and illustrator Ville Tietäväinen for his voluminous graphic novel Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’, WSOY, 2011). Ten finalists were chosen by a jury out of 68 candidates, and the final choice was made by actor Armi Toivanen.

Näkymättömät kädet is the story of a Moroccan tailor, Rashid, who loses his job and has to leave his family to look for work in Europe. For an illegal alien life in Spain is unbearably difficult. Introducing the work in the article ‘Funny peculiar’ (there is also a sample from Tietäväinen’s work) Heikki Jokinen comments: ‘Through the story of one person, Tietäväinen speaks of important matters: poverty, human value and what keeps us going, hope.’

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.

This year Finnish booksellers decided to celebrate the occasion by publishing a new novel which was given for free to all customers who made a purchase worth €10. This was the only way to get hold of a copy; the print run was 3,000 copies.

The chosen work was a new novel by Tuomas Kyrö, entitled Miniä (‘Daughter-in-law’). The narrator is the daughter-in-law of the main character of Kyrö’s two popular novels, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offence’) and Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike (‘Taking offence: the brown sauce’). The grumpy old man from the country comes to stay with his son and his daughter-in-law in the capital –  which inevitably results in practical (and mainly comical) discordance of various sorts.

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.

Nobel Prize 1970: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

After falling out with her original publisher, WSOY, in 2010, author Sofi Oksanen – whose third novel, Puhdistus (Purge, 2008), has become an international best-seller – has founded a new publishing company, Silberfeldt, in 2011, with the aim of publishing paperback editions of her own books. Its first release was a paperback version of Oksanen’s second novel, Baby Jane.

Oksanen’s new novel, Kun kyyhkyset katosivat (‘When the pigeons disappeared’), again set in Estonia, will appear this autumn, published by Like (a company owned by Finnish publishing giant Otava).

However, in April Silberfeldt published a new, one-volume edition of the autobiographical novel The Gulag Archipelago by the Nobel Prize-winning author Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. This massive book was first published in the West in 1973, in the Soviet Union in 1989.

A Finnish translation was published between 1974 and 1978. Back in those days of Cold War self-censorship, Finnish publishers felt unable to take up the controversial book, and the first volume was eventually printed in Sweden. The work, finally published in three volumes, has long since been unavailable.

This time the 3,000 new copies of Solzhenitsyn’s tome sold out in a few days; a second printing is coming up soon. Oksanen regards the work as a classic that should be available to Finnish readers.

Hagia Sofia, Istanbul: from basilica to cathedral to mosque to museum. Postcard, c. 1914. Photo: Wikipedia/Xenophon

Sacred spaces, repositories of free speech, places of healing? Teemu Manninen awaits the day when libraries become virtual, enabling anybody to visit them, without having to travel across land and sea

The Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Vatican Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, New York Public Library, the British Museum Reading Room, the Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura in Rio De Janeiro, the Library of Congress and the National Library of Finland.

What do all of these have in common, except the obvious fact that they are all famous libraries? To put it another way: why are these famous libraries so famous?

It is not because they have books in them, although that has become one of the main tasks of the library system in the modern world. But a library is not simply an archive. If we in the West are a culture of the book – a culture of the freedom of information and expression – then a library is the architectural incarnation of our way of life: a church built for reading.

Famous libraries are like famous cathedrals, and one could say of them that ‘what is more important in a library than anything else – than everything else,’  as the American poet, dramatist and librarian Archibald MacLeish wrote, ‘is the fact that it exists’.

A library is the medicine chest of the soul, open for all, and used by all, rich and poor, wise and stupid; it is ‘a place of safety for the bibliophile’, as the writer and editor Orlando Whitfield recently said in the Paris Review, trying to explain the fascination the London Library (established in 1841 by Thomas Carlyle) has held over his soul from the time when he was a boy and would spend every Saturday there with his father, the two of them flinging themselves ‘like hunters into the warren of the stacks’.

The London Library became ‘an addiction, an obsession’ for him, as libraries tend to do for those of us who care deeply about words and ideas. I myself have spent numerous hours, sometimes whole days in libraries small and large, wandering aimlessly in basements and upper stories, moving my eyes a book title at a time from left to right, down and up the shelves, head craned in an awkward position, slouching forward in that slow gait of the prospector of rarities and serendipities, waiting for the miraculous event when something simply clicks and, by instinct or by foreknowledge we do not know, an arm reaches out and a book is retrieved, a fruit of knowledge sampled there and then in its pristine glory.

It is because of the immense enjoyment I receive from these ventures into the bibliographical unknown that I have become a staunch supporter of digitisation. I believe that we must digitise every book in the world and make them available for everyone in the form of electronic lending libraries.

We must do so quickly, because I fear that we may, as a culture, be losing our grasp not just on the task of libraries – to administer and uphold the rites of universal knowledge and the freedom of information – but also on what makes the best of our libraries, the famous ones, so well-suited to this task: the simple fact that they are well-designed and beautiful.

If the library is akin to a secular church, then we must understand that the architecture of a library is not incidental to its cultural task. And indeed, there is a singular feeling one gets when walking through the stacks of a very old or very beautiful library, described by Charles Lamb, the nineteenth-century essayist and critic, who said that ‘all the souls of all the writers’ seem to repose there ‘as in some dormitory, or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding-sheets. I could as soon dislodge a shade.’

But there is equally a feeling one gets when one delves ever deeper into the electronic archive, leafing through databases like Early English Books Online, WorldCat, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive or Google Books, piecing together information from disparate sources and combining them in the exact right search string. This string produces, for example, a digitised representation of the first edition of Charles Montagu Doughty’s early science fiction epic in verse, The Cliffs (1909) – just that kind of book I could not even have dreamed might have existed, but upon finding become enrapturously engrossed in.

The sorry fact is that this ecstatic experience is often come by only after tedious hours of navigating through incoherent menus, unusable interfaces and paywalls, incomplete scanning jobs, incompatible text encodings, or – what is most annoying – unnecessary copyright protections extending well beyond any reasonable amount of time. Personally I believe all books should be released into the public domain after a writer’s death, and a scan of a 16th-century playbook should be available through my ereading device just like the latest bestseller is; and the experience should be as easy, enjoyable and beautiful as a visit to a well-designed library.

So far, this has seemed like a pipe dream, mostly due to the need to monetise new technology. As much as there is talk about the coming of the ebook, I find it abhorrent that it is most often only thought of as a commercial product, and not a way to make libraries a part of the information ecosystem of today’s interconnected world.

Just think: for almost two decades now the sum of human literary production could already have been immediately available for almost anyone with an internet connection, but due to either the bureaucratic ineptitude of this archive’s administrators or the infinitely abysmal avarice of the money-grubbing mercenaries who own the ‘rights’ to the writings of long dead authors we are denied something that is our inalienable cultural birthright.

As long as these scoundrels get their way, the digital version of a cathedral such as the Bibliotheque Nationale or the British Library awaits its coming. I hope that day is not long off.

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

Karoliina wondered whether her name was suitable for a famous poet.

Her first name was alright – four syllables, and a bit old-fashioned. But Järvi didn’t inspire any passion. Should she change her name before her first collection came out? Was there still time? She had four months until September.

Even if The flower of my secret was the name of some old movie, Karoliina clung to the title she’d chosen. It described the book’s multifaceted, erotically-tinged sensory world and the essential place of nature in the poems. Karoliina loved to take long walks in the woods. Sometimes she talked to the trees.

She had been meeting new people. At the writer’s evening organised by her publisher, she’d been seated next to Märta Fagerlund, in the flesh. Karoliina had read Fagerlund’s poems since her teens, and seen her charisma light up the stage on cultural television shows.

At first Karoliina couldn’t get a word out of her mouth. She just blushed and dripped gravy on her lap. But the longer the evening went on, the more ordinary Märta seemed. She was even calling her Märta, and telling her about a new friend on Facebook who said how ‘awfully funny’ Märta was. In fact, the squeaky-voiced Märta, with her enthusiasm for Greece, was a bit dry, and, after three glasses of white wine, tedious. But Karoliina never mentioned it to anyone, because she wasn’t a spiteful person.

The publisher’s editor Iiris Suvanto wanted to make Karoliina a star. ‘You have a timeless light blazing within you,’ Iiris said at the end of their editorial meeting, at a corner table at Kosmos. Karoliina would always remember that moment. She wanted to remember those very words, the spring evening light that illuminated the silver forks and the sides of their glasses of cognac. What she wanted to forget was that there were four empty cognac glasses in front of Iiris, and a slight slur in her voice.

Her, Karoliina Järvi, from Iisalmi, sitting in Kosmos Restaurant with a publishing editor enjoying a dessert of vanilla mousse in a nest of cloudberries. As she looked at the dish, she wondered if a picture of herself naked in a bed of cloudberries might be a good idea for the book cover. She didn’t suggest such a thing, of course.

Karoliina had a collection of representative photos on her web page. There would, of course, be requests for photos and interviews once her book was published. She had deleted unnecessary friends and the silly, shallow photos taken with them – after all, she didn’t really know if people like that were her real friends. Instead she bestowed some black and white shots of herself in a lovely fitted top she bought in Barcelona. She had an inscrutable, perhaps slightly melancholy look in them.

She wrote diligently on her blog, which was also a countdown to the release date for The flower of my secret. She commented on current events and made clever remarks about them, but not too provocative, so as not to label herself a political person ahead of time.

Besides, politics didn’t interest her terribly. She would much rather comment on artistic questions, and sometimes fashion, and any old wonderful thing that made her poet’s heart beat faster. Sometimes it was just the morning sun, its rays announcing one less day left to wait until September.

September arrived and Karoliina’s web page read THE BIG BANG. It referred to her book’s publication date, which had already been preceded by a few little bangs: first, sending the final manuscript to the publisher – Ta-daa!!! : ) : ) – then, receiving the galleys for review – HELP!!! – and, lastly, mailing it for the printing – Phew!

On the morning of the big day Karoliina turned off her phone and went for a long walk in the woods – she didn’t want to think about all the inevitable inquiries and demands right away. Still, as she walked along the trail she couldn’t help pondering her nature-lover’s image and what kind of magazines she would grant interviews to. The yellowing trees nodded their approval, her step light over the tufts of moss. ‘The silky dimness of the birches,’ she wrote in her black notebook, then continued on, humming as she went.

When she got home and turned on her phone, there was a message from Anne: ‘CONGRATULATIONS on your book, Karo! How exciting! When can I get a copy?’

Karoliina didn’t bother to answer because a) Anne still lived in Iisalmi and wore sneakers, and b) she hated her childhood nickname, Karo.

No other messages. But she didn’t panic, she just hurried to report her most recent feelings on her blog. They were a combination of relief and excitement. For her Facebook update, she just wrote Finally out!

She kept her eye on her Facebook page while she wrote a draft of the poem inspired by her morning walk. No one commented on her Finally out! update right away.

Finally Petri Papunen commented: ‘Who’s out of where?’

Karoliina got up so fast she almost knocked her chair over. She had to pace back and forth on the rug to calm herself down. First off, who could really have a name like that? And second, why did he have to make such a stupid, clueless comment about her happy news?

Karoliina took a deep breath and wrote: ‘The flower of my secret, that’s all! : )’

She couldn’t concentrate on the half-finished poem, she kept glancing instinctively to see if any comments had arrived. Several minutes passed, half an hour. Then from Petri: ‘???’

Karoliina bit her lip and wrote: It’s a collection of poems, my first, entitled The flower of my secret. I already have my head in the clouds contemplating the next one!’

To which Petri, again after several minutes, wrote: ‘Ahh. Wow. Sounds kinda pornographic!’

Karoliina deleted Petri’s comments from her wall. She checked her phone and took it with her when she went to take a shower, just in case. She tried writing, but nothing came of it. As evening fell, she picked up the tea kettle, then put it down again and opened a bottle of white wine. It was a day to celebrate, after all.

November arrived. An arctic wind moved through the streets. Seven copies of her collection had been sold, and of those, three went to Karoliina’s mother, her grandma, and Anne. There were two reviews. One of them, the more positive one, was in the local Pohjois-Savon Sanomat newspaper, and the other one she didn’t like to think about. Risto Heikkuri’s stinging words nevertheless haunted her nights. They bubbled up one by one full of thinly veiled misogyny.

That’s what it was about, Karoliina wrote on her blog, pure misogyny! ‘Heikkuri’s lack of expertise in contemporary poetry is glaringly evident in this piece, which is less a review than a pitiful wannabe writer’s desperate act of vengeance.’

‘Can’t wait to read it!’ Petri Papunen commented. ‘That misogyny crack is so not cool. Maybe he’s just horny!’

Karoliina thought for a moment and then answered: ‘I don’t recommend reading the review, but the book is available from Academic Bookstore for 23 euros!’

Petri: ‘Awfully expensive!?! I guess I’ll have to wait to get it from the library.’

Karoliina hadn’t heard from Iiris Suvanto in weeks. She didn’t answer Karoliina’s emails, and the encouraging comments had dried up with Risto Heikkuri’s review. Karoliina went to visit the publishing house unannounced and didn’t recognise a single face in the clatter of the hallways – it seemed almost everything old had been exchanged for new in just a few months. Iiris Suvanto’s office door was shut. A muffled conversation could be heard within. Karoliina pushed the door open to reveal the young writer Suvi-Kukka Salin (formerly Hytönen) with a glass of champagne in her hand. Iiris also had a glass in her hand, and a sensuous look on her face. Suvi-Kukka’s glow was reflected in Iiris’s horn-rimmed glasses – the two of them were celebrating her book’s fifth printing. Pigbitches was selling like hotcakes, though Karoliina thought the book had a hint of desperation in it.

When she got home, Karoliina looked at the clipping from the Pohjois-Savon Sanomat on the wall. There was a black and white photo of her in her fitted top and the caption: ‘Karoliina Järvi, our local girl in the wide world. We believe in you!’

She had at first thought the review was a tad homespun and clumsily written, but the more she read it, the more she saw in it. She sent a text message to Anne and said her phone had been on the fritz and her messages had arrived late but it was really nice to hear from her and had she got a copy of The flower of my secret yet?

Anne answered immediately. ‘Oh, yes, and it was exactly like you!’

That had to be a positive comment. She decided to confirm Anne’s now-ancient Facebook friend request.

By December, Karoliina had developed a worsening inability to sleep. She forgot to eat, laid in the dark all day looking at Facebook. She sat staring at it at night as well, even though no one communicated on Facebook at that hour except for a couple of old pen pals in Brazil. She wondered if she should unfriend Juan, who mostly just asked her about what she wore to bed.

The shimmering hum of the computer felt safer than the deep silence that descended on her studio apartment when she shut it off, as if the silence disassociated her from the world. So she kept the computer on even as she sank into fitful sleep.

Her new friends wrote updates about the magazine articles written about them, the prizes they had pocketed, and the surprising number of foreign publishers who’d bought translation rights to their work. ‘I guess those goofy Dutch just like me!’ wrote an authoress who had opened up about her career as a stripper in her novel.

Suvi-Kukka Salin’s blog had an eventful video diary of the Frankfurt Book Fair, where she recited her text in Salman Rushdie’s lap, in a particularly voluptuous outfit. The video had 385 likes and a pile of appreciative comments.

Karoliina wrote less and less on her blog. Her post on ‘A poet’s winter provisions’ got zero comments. The ‘November isn’t going to bring me down!’ post – same story. Her ‘Christmas is ruined by over-commercialisation’ post, on the other hand, received long, voluble responses, but with a distinctly harassing tone. Apparently she was a retarded lespian atheist, among other things.

She reminded herself that at least someone had read it.

At the publisher’s Christmas reception she faced a wall of backs in corduroy jackets. It was a tight wall, impossible to penetrate. ‘That’s so hilarious!’ she said, tired, apropos of nothing, attempting to elbow her way into the conversation through a break in the wall.

‘Hilarious how?’ a long-haired male writer with a piece of beet in his beard asked. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

‘No,’ Karoliina muttered.

The man began a meandering monologue about the appalling gaps in the grant-making apparatus, and then burst unexpectedly into tears.

The mood at the reception was tense in other ways because Krista Uuspaavalnimi’s poet husband had stretched the limits of their relationship by also toying with a relationship with Saara Väkiparta, who in turn had long shared her bed with both Arto Mynämö, famous for his crime fiction, and a 76-year-old writer of war novels. ‘That’s where I draw the line!’ Krista said in an indisputably chill voice.

The snow covered the city, and Karoliina’s soul.

One colourless Wednesday night Karoliina was again staring at the messages zipping across her screen, comments and comments and comments to which she had no reply.

Suddenly the computer crashed.

Karoliina cried out. She pounded the keys, to no effect, chewed on her already gnawed fingernails, and felt like she had to get out of the house.

She wandered the streets, looking down at her snowy feet, directionless. All the streets looked the same, each street leading to another, alleyways all the same. There were no trees, but she didn’t feel like talking to them anyway. She continued on, and got lost in an outlying neighbourhood that she wasn’t familiar with. It was a dubious looking place, the abandoned buildings threatening. The windows were dark or broken, a rat the size of a dog ran out of a gate left ajar.

Karoliina stopped. The wind blew into her right ear. She was already turning back when she noticed a familiar name on a muddy wall: Trailer Alley. She’d heard it in the conversation at the writer’s evening, in connection with some club.

At the end of the alley she could make out a glimmer of light. The light seemed to be a reflection off a metal cellar door. Something made her approach the door – maybe it was the muffled shouts and curses she could just barely hear within.

She pressed her ear against the door. ‘Take that! And that!’ a woman’s voice shouted, almost choking. ‘Diletantte! Scribbler!’ another, deeper woman’s voice said. This was followed by a series of high-pitched moans and a clatter.

Karoliina had only slept a few hours over the past few weeks, so she imagined for a moment when she opened the door that she was experiencing hallucinations.

In the middle of a bare cement floor stood Märta Fagerlund, her jiggling breasts bare. She wore dirty leather pants and steel-toed boots. A thin, bruised woman stood facing her, also without a shirt – Karoliina recognised her as a short story writer of a rival publishing company.

‘Who the hell left the door unlocked?’ the thin woman said, and spit out a front tooth.

‘She’s harmless,’ Märta Fagerlund said, wiping the sweat from her blood-streaked brow. ‘Let her watch.’

The women continued their battle. ‘Amateur!’ Märta roared, looking nothing at all like the squeaky classics enthusiast that Karoliina had met last spring. Märta held the skinny woman with one muscular hand and plugged her in the face with the other. ‘Half-baked realist!’ The story writer had two black eyes and bruises on her cheeks, but if Karoliina wasn’t mistaken, she was smiling.

Now Karoliina noticed that a whole crowd of shirtless women were standing around the edges of the the poorly-lit, steamy room. All of them had black, red, and yellow bruises. There was Ilona Suurimo, a star novelist, or rather a shooting star, since her last work, The truth of this, was a flop, and with good reason. Next to her, shaking her fist, was Eila Aarneva, an established essayist of the previous generation, well-known for her uncompromising analyses of matter and being. Her thirty-seventh essay collection, Hate won’t fade, had received deserved praise. What was she doing here?

The women writers panted and let out muffled and irrepressible curses as they watched the bashing. ‘Crush her!’ shouted Lilja, a young, red-haired poet from Turku. Karoliina had thought that Lilja loved large hats, Baudelaire and Rilke, but here she was hopping up and down like a real boxer, her sweaty breasts bouncing, throwing blind punches into the air. ‘Government leech! Grant glutton!’ she screeched, the veins in her neck bulging.

From the ceiling hung a frayed and tattered sack which had, Karoliina spotted a naked picture of Risto Heikkuri painted on its side. It was stabbed full of holes and covered in spreading bloodstains.

Märta had knocked out the novelist, whose swollen face could no longer be clearly seen. But as she loosened her grip, the skinny woman sprang up like a gazelle. ‘You won this round, you hack. You hit harder than you write!’ she said, and let out a strange, heartfelt laugh.

‘My turn!’ Eila Aarneva yelled, and came toward the middle of the floor, her full breasts swinging. ‘Who’s up for the challenge?’

‘I am,’ Karoliina answered.

She tore her shirt open, the buttons flying.

All eyes turned toward her. She didn’t feel sleepy anymore. In fact, she saw everything clearly now.

The first blow to her cheek made the warm blood spurt, and made Karoliina laugh with joy.

Translated by Lola Rogers

Tuomas Kyrö: ‘Taking offense’, part two

The top of the March list of best-selling fiction titles in Finland, compiled by the Finnish Booksellers’ Association, was Katja Kettu’s love story set in 1940s Finland at war, Kätilö (‘The midwife’, WSOY; see our feature).

Tuomas Kyrö (born 1974) featured twice on the list: Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offense’,  WSOY, 2010) was number two and the newly-published sequel, Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike (‘Taking offense: the brown sauce’, 2012) had shot up to sixth place.

The title is actually a noun:  ‘He who takes offence’: this person is an 80-something man who lives in the countryside and opposes most of what a contemporary lifestyle has to offer.

In the sequel, as his wife has to stay in a nursing home, ‘He who takes offence’ decides to learn how to cook for himself. He dismisses the ‘no-good’ girl who bring him food dailysent by a local agency. A firm believer in the potato, this no-nonsense character continues to fascinate lots of readers.

Rosa Liksom’s Finlandia Prize -winning novel set in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Hytti nro 6 (‘Compartment number 6’, WSOY) occupied fourth place, a new novel about family life by Eve Hietamies, Tarhapäivä (‘Kindergarten day’, Otava) was number three.

The non-fiction list was topped by a new cookbook by Sikke Sumari, Sikke – ruokaa rakkaudella Toskanassa (‘Sikke – food with love in Tuscany’, Paasilinna). As books about birds featured on the list, one might assume spring is on the way, at last.

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Life is hard, and then you grow up. Except that you don’t really, at least if you keep watching television. Jyrki Lehtola takes a look at entertainment for the Peter Pan generation – which, he argues, is pretty much all of us

When did we start making television for children? I mean, in theory for adults (believe me, advertises, believe me: for adults!) but in practice for children?

Theoretically television is a wonderful, flexible medium less dependent on big money than the film business. Why did we let it slip out of our hands as a form of expression?

Why did we start making adult programmes for children and children’s programmes for adults? In other words, why do we make exactly the same TV programmes for everyone?

As always, everything was naturally better in the past. Before dinner there were ‘kids programmes’ for children to watch. In Finland they were usually Eastern European cartoons, but in other places they were American ones. In these shows good was good and bad was bad, but only temporarily, because in the end the bad guy always got to sit down with the good guy and eat a carrot too, since he had learned it was better to be good than bad.

Then something changed. Adults no longer grew up to be adults. Apparently life became so hectic that it demanded all the energy they had to give, so after work they had no desire to use their brains or concentrate on anything.

So we started making slightly easier TV programming for them. Dramas consisting entirely of stereotypes; dramas depicting a time when everything was straightforward and life was a little slower; cartoons for adults, with humor children can also understand; competitions where someone sings and the audience can vote whether he or she is singing well; reality TV where a pack of unpleasant people are shoved in a locked cage or dropped off in a jungle and then we watch to see how much more unpleasantness can be extracted from them.

This we watched, wine glasses in hand, and called it relaxation. Soon our teenage children joined us on the sofa, because these series were also their favorite series, and isn’t it nice when the whole family can spend time together?

And when the TV studios woke up to the fact that teenagers were watching the adult shows too, they made them even more simplistic; the teenagers’ younger siblings, the 6-10-year-olds, now also appeared on the sofa to watch excitedly to see who would be dancing with whom and whether someone could really eat a pile of worms like that just for money and, ‘Yuk, what are those two drunk teenagers doing? Oh, they’re kissing – gag me with a spoon.’

So there we were. A family who had become a single target audience. Of course there still were separate programmes for adults (boring talk shows and series produced by the likes of HBO and Showtime) and children’s shows, but most TV content was programmes ‘for the entire family’, from soap operas to the Simpsons.

When the TV channels realised this, they also realised that they couldn’t let the shows be a danger to children. And they were.

They had swearwords, off-colour jokes, obscene gestures. They came on at a time when there could potentially still be some child awake somewhere. So questionable references had to be removed and the language had to be watered down, because the most important thing in protecting our children is that we look like we’re protecting our children.

Television could matter. It is in every home, either in its traditional form or delivered and viewed through computers. But instead of taking advantage of its potential, we make programmes for children.

We could condescendingly deride the state of television by wondering why we make the same programming for adults and children even though we don’t write books as if the two target audiences were the same.

Except that we do. Because we adults don’t have the energy or patience for reading, we read books directed at children and the feebleminded: Harry Potter, pre-underlined diet and self-help books, and books with the words ‘da Vinci’ or ‘code’ in the title to reassure us that we also have what it takes for more challenging reading.

Magazines are mostly made so children can also understand the world view they present, which is generally connected to the ideas that suffering builds character and every dog has its day.

The Finnish press holds a ‘newspaper week’ each year during which the content of the papers is adjusted to appeal more to schoolchildren. Unfortunately the difference compared to normal editions is embarrassingly small, if any exists at all.

Popular music is made for children and all of us who want to feel like we are still young. In films young people go on adventures in imaginary worlds, fart as a sign of humour and ruminate over interpersonal problems that the children sitting in the audience have already solved.

The visual arts have always been an art form that ‘my niece’ could produce, and in the theatre we are taught that if any feeling exists, it can be dressed up in the form of a song either melancholy or cheerful.

Before we had target audiences for which we produced content. Ill-tempered and kindly grandparents, tired and energetic adults, normal and alternative youth, the cultured and the uncultured, those interested in the world and those looking for entertainment.

Now we just have two target groups: children and the ever-shrinking group of adults who would occasionally like something besides culture for kids.

Translated by Owen Witesman

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.