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Punishment and delight

Issue 4/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from Pimeästä maasta (‘Out of the Land of Darkness’, Kirjayhtymä, 1995). Interview by Jukka Petäjä

‘A being far more powerful and wiser than ourselves made the mould at the beginning of time and set it up for us as a model in order that we might shape ourselves correctly,’ the teachers said. ‘The Prime Mover’s form, actions and thoughts we are unable to understand. The Prime Mover gave us the mould in order that we should not remain formless. To this extent it has made itself known to us, although we do not deserve anything from it. It did not make the mould of bog-iron, which would soon have rusted in the cellar, but of a much better material of which we know nothing, and need to know nothing. Our duty is to aspire to fill the perfect mould given to us perfectly. Most of us will never be able to do so, for we are worthless, formless, unclean messes who deserve, many times over, all the pain of fitting the mould.’

Ulthyraja Tharabereghist did not dare ask anything, but there was something she would have liked to know. How the Prime Mover had made the mould, at least, and where it had found the materials, and what the Mover had gone on to do and where it had gone when the mould was ready and in the possession of the villagers. Even illicit thoughts were said to damage one’s shape: to be visible in it, if one knew how to look, and, of course, to be felt in the pains of fitting the mould… More…

Writing Sinuhe

Issue 4/1995 | Archives online, Authors, Fiction

Extracts from the novel Neljä päivänlaskua (‘Four sunsets’, 1949): in this novel about a novel, Mika Waltari gives a fictionalised, humorous and melancholy account of the birth of his most famous novel, the international bestseller, Sinuhe, egyptiläinen (The Egyptian, 1945). His ‘Egyptians’ do not leave him in peace, so he retreats to his summer cabin with his typewriter and faithful dog to write

Critical notes

In offering this work to the public, furnished with the requisite comments, we do so with considerable hesitation, for even the superficial reader will very soon realise that this disguised and sentimental love-story has no educational or morally uplifting intent whatsoever. On the contrary, the thoughts contained within it are often so amoral and perplexing that they are repellent to the enlightened reader. For this reason, the spontaneity of the narrative does not of itself legitimise publication of the work.

Since, however, with the aforementioned reservations, we are offering the work to the public, we do it for entirely other reasons. For this work is, by type, a terrible apotheosis of human selfishness. One must remember that it was written only a couple of months after the first use of the atom bomb for practical purposes, when the world had hardly achieved the so-called ‘cold peace’ after the so-called Second World War. If we remember this background, the author grows, in his unremitting selfishness, into a cautionary example in the reader’s eyes. For he does not, in his book, spare a thought for the sufferings of humanity, but speaks incessantly about his own heart. More…

Who’s looking

Issue 4/1995 | Archives online, Authors

During the 1990s, young Finnish poetry has been in search of a new grip on language: what is being written now is poetry of the ardent intellect.

lntellectually and consciously, Riina Katajavuori (born 1968) retreats from simple expression of emotion but, through the inner intensity of the poems, forces the reader to join her in the process of creating meaning.

In her first collection of poetry, Varkaan kirja (‘The book of the thief,1992), Katajavuori plays a sort of intertextual game. Through literary and other cultural references she seeks a polyphonic effect, but the integration of private mental images with a rough and associative textual fibre does not yet succeed completely. More…

This journey

Issue 3/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Tämä matka (‘This journey’, 1956). Introduction by Jukka Petäjä

You took a planet

For Erik Lindegren

The stars arranged themselves
round a red magnet
by request,
and shaped fugitive systems and mirror reflections,
space’s sonorous grammar.

Oh, those hatched-out faces of the apathetic! –
and the grudge of those who can no longer read
(apart from cruel bibles, containing pressed roses and corpses).

Oh, ourselves! – here in the lonely sublunar place, 
hair and eyes in the wind, in our hands
	                                                ignorance and boomerang-echoes.

Oh, these vaultings of the word! – changing skies
where the glyphs rise like distress flags.

I looked for a question
	                    whose answer is this mutabor.

I kneel
	   to gather up the shattered fragments of a glyph
scored with the brilliant wounded secret 
where I lost my wings
	               before my choosing fingers were formed.

More…

A life of letters

Issue 3/1995 | Archives online, Authors

Death is a central theme in the poetry 
of Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995). In many poems she
 described the proximity of death and 
the last frontier in order to conquer
 death and laugh at it – often grimly,
 sometimes cheerlessly.

But actually I died ages ago,
 and when death comes, when it strikes
 the body that wears my clothes,
 it's all a predestined rendezvous:
 movement stops, words scatter like snow,
         the eyes' apparitions
 are off like a flight of pigeons....

Manner wrote in a collection entitled
 Niin vaihtuvat vuoden ajat (‘So change the
 seasons’), which appeared as early 
as 1964. More…

The last melody

Issue 3/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Kadotettu puutarha (‘The lost garden’, WSOY, 1995). Introduction by Riina Katajavuori

Their sojourn at the villa extended into the autumn of 1944; the schools did not go back as usual on the first of September. Repair of the university buildings progressed rapidly; the work had begun immediately after the bombing. The Doctor went to town from time to time, but nothing bound the family to it, and he returned to his desk in the attic room and to his solitary walks by the lake. His heart troubled him from time to time. It did not like these walks, did not like exertion; but he had succeeded in concealing the matter from Elisabet. After one particular attack, he had secretly seen a doctor in town, and now, instead of camphor tablets, he always had those little buttons in his pocket, the breast pocket of his waistcoat. He swallowed one from time to time on these expeditions, a pain in his wrists and his eyes staring dimly at a clump of ferns that seemed to have become hazy, or a tree-top that seemed to be falling toward him. He did not wish Elisabet to know. Not this, in Elisabet’s world, not this, in air that was suffused with grief for their dead son Leo, with well controlled and beautifully expressed emotion, with concern for the remaining boy, who was there, on the frontier, with the burdensome and universal tragedy that filled the air as light filled it in daytime. More…

While there was still time

Issue 3/1995 | Archives online, Authors

The publication of Kadotettu puutarha (‘The lost garden’, 1995), a novel by Helvi
 Hämäläinen, more than forty years after it was written, has been a literary sensation. The poet Riina Katajavuori describes
 her first encounter with the anguished 1940s intelligentsia whose lives it charts

I am in the midst of a strange, unfamiliar, 
lost World. These 1940s gentlefolk are a
 mixture of backbone and nerve: externally they look as if a breath of wind could 
blow them away but internally they are
 tenacious and unyielding in their capac
ity to look war and death straight in the 
eye, continuing their own undisturbed 
life, whose affected and aesthetic calm it is 
impossible to dislocate.

Or is it? Does not Helvi Hämäläinen’s
 Kadotettu puutarha describe precisely the
 internal collapse that war inevitably causes 
in everyone – even those who attempt to
 deny ugliness with lime-blossom tea and 
honey, cherry jam and the Moonlight 
Sonata? Into the lives of the main characters of Hämäläinen’s earlier novel, Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable 
tragedy’, 1941), to which this is a sequel,
 moral decay, materialism and wicked 
manners have penetrated in the form of a
 wicked woman, the din of a radio or a 
noisy lodger. Impurities make their appearance in their lives, which cannot be 
aestheticised and around which no softening web of forgiveness and propriety
 can be spun. More…

Solitude growing

Issue 2/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extract from Häiriö maisemassa (‘A disturbance in the landscape’, Otava, 1994). In this, her first novel, Raija Siekkinen – well-known for the fragile prose fof her short stories – continues her dissection of the soul with an account of the experience of a womanwho finds that many lives are being lived through her own

She was pregnant. After all these years, the woman finally found she was pregnant: it was as if the man had made a last attack to retain his hold on a country he had once conquered.

She let the days go by, the days of autumn, which night by night edged more shadow across the damp lawn. She looked at the man from a distance, not seeing him; her mind rehearsed what she knew about him. The man had two children from a previous marriage. The woman had not wanted the children to come here, and neither did their mother; that was, indeed, the only subject on which they agreed. The man went to visit his children; they never spoke about what happened on those occasions. More…

Going on a summer holiday

Issue 2/1995 | Archives online, Authors

As the setting of her first novel, Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (‘Wonderful women beside the water’), Monika Fagerholm has chosen the Finland-Swedish summer paradise, a group of summer cottages by the sea just outside Helsingfors. The portrayal of summer cottages is, as Fagerholm herself has pointed out, almost a genre within Finland-Swedish literature; writings on the subject include those of Tove Jansson and Johan Bargum. Summer-cottage life involves a return to the safe lucidity of childhood, while those who live all the rest of the year in a cramped
 city apartment understandably enough 
dream of the freedom that the sea and the sun represent. Above all, the life that is lived in summer is more whole, more full than anything that is experienced during the dark winter. More…

The summer of 1965

Issue 2/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

From Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (‘Wonderful Women by the Sea’, Söderströms, 1994; Finnish translation lhanat naiset rannalla, Otava, 1995). Introduction by Michel Ekman

The summer of 1965; this summer people go waterskiing. They go waterskiing behind the Lindberghs’ shining mahogany sportsboat, and from midsummer onwards they go water-skiing behind Gabbe’s outboard motorboat, an Evinrude bought second-hand from Robin Lindbergh. Now Bella and Rosa are skiing: Tupsu Lindbergh’s face is covered in freckles if you look at her close to, and it’s not particularly becoming, her fair hair is super-peroxided and she is as thin as a skeleton and everyone knows that it’s because she is so thin and ugly and not because she has a cold that she says she can’t take part in any watersports. There is something nervous about Tupsu Lindbergh. At Bella’s party at the beginning of the summer Tupsu Lindbergh sits on the white villa’s veranda, on the white villa’s lawn on a camping chair, on the white villa’s beach while Bella and Rosa go waterskiing and talk about Tupperware. Not Tupperware all the time, but Tupperware is the collective description. More…

The living
 and the dead

Issue 1/1995 | Archives online, Authors

The idea of the primacy of matter has taken on increasingly sombre resonances in
 Tiina Kaila’s work: in her third novel, Koe (‘The experiment’),
 an eccentric doctor seeks to reduce his human guinea-pigs to their primary,
 material, factors – and himself becomes the subject of his cruel experiment.

Tiina Kaila (born 1951) first came to the attention of the wider reading public in 1990 
with Bruno, a novel about the scientist and philosopher Giordano Bruno, whom the
 Inquisition burned at the stake in 1600; Bruno reached the final list for the Finlandia
 Prize. In creating her fictive Bruno, Kaila wished to
 portray how ‘terrifying, absurd and crazy a struggle the perception of the world is’.

Both Bruno and Koe combine acts of extreme violence with esoteric thought. But Kaila
 began as a children’s writer and a poet: her first book, a collection of poems entitled 
Keskustelu hämärässä (‘Conversation at dusk’), appeared in 1975, and was followed by
 children’s books and more poetry. More…

The train

Issue 1/1995 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from the novel Koe (‘The experiment’; WSOY, 1994). Interview by Tuva Korrström

In the morning a wild rose tapped beseechingly at the window, the wind sighed in the shaft of the chimney, the entire house creaked, pregnant with so great a longing that they had to awaken.

And as soon as they began to speak to each other, the house settled.

‘I should like to see the train,’ Sari said.

‘Why?’

‘Because that is the reason why I am here.’

‘I didn’t plan it like that,’ Kari said. More…

Hard to swallow

Issue 1/1995 | Archives online, Authors

An unusually powerful but economically achieved – one might almost say 
minimalist – stylisation of the tension 
between inner and outer is typical of 
the short stories of Kjell Lindblad (born 
1951).

Catastrophe is close
 – or has already taken place. The 
disasters take many forms, but they 
always have a dramatic effect, stopping 
the individual dead in his or her ordinary life. ‘Det finns inga hundar längre’
 (‘There are no more dogs’), a short story 
from his first collection, Före sömnen
 (‘Before sleep’), describes some post-
catastrophic state in which keeping 
dogs is forbidden. The reader is left to
 decide the logic and nature of the 
situation. More…

The Earth is a snowball

Issue 1/1995 | Archives online, Prose

A short story from Resa runt solen (‘Journey round the sun’, Schildts, 1994). Introduction by Ann-Christine Snickars

It is a day in August and even though I can sense that the end of the summer is nearer than the beginning, my hours are still as long as days. I am a child and live in the midst of summer’s eternity.

This morning I wake up earlier than anyone else. It isn’t usually that way. Usually Mårten is the first of us two to get up, but now he is asleep with his face turned to the wall. I stay in bed for a while, listening. It is also quiet in the other room, where Mama is asleep. Now I remember that it’s today Papa is coming out to see us after working in the town all week.

I open the curtain a little and see that the sky is blue and not grey with heavy rainclouds as it has been these past few days. I quickly put on my few clothes, a thin striped cotton sweater, my shorts and my brown plimsolls. I push the door open, stand on the steps and breathe a morning air that still smells more of summer than of autumn. I listen to the familiar sounds: twittering birds, the wind in the treetops and crying gulls over the bay. More…

Nothing but air

Issue 4/1994 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Ankkuripaikka (‘Anchorage’; WSOY, 1994) and Sormenjälkiä tyhjässä (‘Fingerprints in the void’, WSOY, 1992)

Images from nature

A sick fox recoils to the deepest corner of his hideout.
His coat’s moulting in tufts, rain’s drenching him, death’s on the way.
A pine stands sentry on the pile of stones, its bright green needles
adorned with dew for this last day. Somehow it’s a celebration.
A crow drops in, and sings a note. ‘Goodbye,’ the forest sighs, and
so does the whole world. A soul’s ecloding from its cellular pupa.
It yelps as it exits: ‘Why? Why are there still stars? Why must I fall so deep?’ More…