Author: Eila Pennanen
The solitary walker
Issue 2/1983 | Archives online, Authors
Antti Hyry. Photo: Jouni Harala
Antti Hyry, born in 1931, is a writer from northern Finland. His work is coloured by elements characteristic of the region near the Arctic Circle: rugged nature, wintry frost, the light of long summer nights, the Laestadian fundamentalist Christian sect, and the strict rules of an agrarian community.
Hyry is an engineer by training, and although he has never worked as an engineer, his world view has been built on a physical and technological foundation. This orientation, together with a basic intuition which is close to nature, has created in his works a world of fascinating conflict in which troubled man, weighed down by responsibilities, studies his environment as if to test whether it exists, and to discover what laws govern it. More…
Arska
Issue 3/1982 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
A short story from Kaksin (‘Two together’). Introduction by Pekka Tarkka
A landlady is a landlady, and cannot be expected – particularly if she is a widow and by now a rather battered one – to possess an inexhaustible supply of human kindness. Thus when Irja’s landlady went to the little room behind the kitchen at nine o’clock on a warm September morning, and found her tenant still asleep under a mound of bedclothes, she uttered a groan of exasperation.
“What you do here this hour of day?” she asked, in a despairing tone. “You don’t going to work?”
Irja heaved and clawed at the blankets until at last her head emerged from under them.
“No,” she replied, after the landlady had repeated the question.
“You gone and left your job again?”
“Yep.” More…