Archive for 1999
Underage
Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Leiri (‘Camp’, Otava 1972). Interview by Maija Alftan
In the dark and wet the tram seemed like a stale-smelling and badly-lit waiting room at a country station, its Post Office Savings Bank advertisement set out of reach of vandalising underage hands. The conductress was two-thirds out of sight behind her desk: a small person. I glanced at the time stamped on my ticket. My only timepiece.
It was the time of day when you can see your own face in the window and through to the outside as well. I stood in the doorway, hanging onto the bar. As the tram turned into the narrow canyon of Aleksanterinkatu, the street seemed like some kind of cellar. Fantastic, how the world darkens at the end of the year. And then, when it’s at its darkest, everything goes totally white. The low-slung cars seemed to be slinking round the tram’s feet. More…
Afterthought
Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Essays, Non-fiction
From Novellit (‘The Short stories’, Otava 1985). Interview by Maija Alftan
The short story is a matter of expectancy and reception. So it has to offer surprises. It has to reward the waiting.
The surprises are caused by the known and the familiar. Often some mishap is needed; the most crucial can be some social fix. The story’s limited space provides three states, brought about by a change in the environment: the past, the future and the passing moment. They create a special, unique phase of life for one of the characters. A return to the past leads to the new – not to the previous, situation – and this isn’t in anyone’s control. Short stories often contain arbitrariness. More…
No one can tell
31 March 1999 | Fiction, poetry
Poems from Ahava (WSOY, 1998)
And life went on, went on as a kind of weird fugue, a forked path that drops across your eyes, rejecting simple questions. Which summer was that, I ask in December, in a high room, with a tiled stove, a bricked up nostalgic sentence about the warmth of other times, a crossing where all the world's words discover the the comparative degree of silence, the one with meaning. Should I peep across a couple of cloudy stanzas to get a better view, but again my eye conjures up a medieval constricted soul. All that's left is a thirst of all the senses, a frigid study of sentences, of bones.
Close encounters
31 March 1999 | Fiction, Prose
Viimeinen syli (‘The last embrace’, Otava, 1998)
The hospital looked as if a child had been given a big pile of building blocks and told to make a house, a big house. And then, when the building was ready, more bricks had been brought, and the child had been forced to pile them up over a wider and wider area, to spread rows of blocks across the adults’ routes and over the edge of the carpet until at last it had grown bored and left the last blocks higgledy-piggledy next to its creation.
Around the hospital ran a road from which the whole mess was revealed. Wing after wing, corridors and windows from which no one really ever looked out. The hospital was full of window views that did not belong to anyone, which did not open up from anyone’s office or day-room, but varied meaninglessly like a motorway landscape from the window of an accelerating car. Viivi had been born there, on the sixth floor of the old part of the hospital. As Mikael waited in the tiled fathers’ room next to the room where the Caeserean section was being carried out for his child to be brought to him, the view out had been breathtaking. More…
Like father, like daughter
Issue 1/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Extracts from Tom Tom Tom (Gummerus, 1998). Introduction by Soila Lehtonen
A father and daughter in a hospital back garden
Bits of nail flick to the ground as Kokko cuts Tom’s nails, leaving rather brittle nail-ends among the lichen. In the middle of the hospital afternoon they’ve made their way down to the little park, to care for the hands of both of them, all four.
In the days before Africa Tom used to nurse Kokko on the living-room sofa and cut the nails on her most difficult hand, pushed the cuticles back and taught her the care that ought to be taken of nails, or she’d have smarting and pain round the cuticles. Kokko used to plead to be taken into his nail cutting lap oftener than she should, even when she’d really have preferred to grow longer nails. More…