Interviews
Last resorts
31 March 1999 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Irmeli Jung
The novelist Pirjo Hassinen’s subjects are men, women and death. Particularly, in her novel Viimeinen syli (‘The last embrance’, Otava, 1998), death. Interview by Leena Härkönen
The blizzard to end all blizzards is tearing Finland apart. The railway system is in a mess, and the heating system in our building has stopped working. There is no way I can leave Helsinki for Jyväskylä, the town in central Finland, 300 kilometres away, where Pirjo Hassinen lives. I am obliged to interview her on the telephone, although she says she loathes talking on the phone, and I too would prefer to meet her face to face.
The day I ring Hassinen, Lapland achieves a record low of -51 Celsius. Even on the south coast the mercury sinks well below -20°C, and a freezing wind makes the frost almost unbearable. The entire country is as white and cold as – death. It is an easy comparison, for it is death that is the theme of Pirjo Hassinen’s latest novel. The main character of Viimeinen syli is an undertaker, transporting bodies. There is a lot of death in the book: two suicides plus an accidental one. According to Hassinen, her subject matter is the conclusion of a logical development.
‘I deal with whatever concerns me most at a given moment and whatever I feel I can say something about.’ More…
Fruits of reading
30 December 1998 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Promedia
This is an edited version of an interview published in Leva skrivande. Finlandssvenska författare samtalar (‘Living by writing. Finland-Swedish writers in conversation’), edited by Monika Fagerholm (Söderströms, 1998)
Bo Carpelan is one of the most translated of Finnish writers; his novel Axel (1986) attracted international attention when it was published in English translation. Here, in our occasional series of interviews with writers, he is in conversation with fellow poet Mårten Westö
Mårten Westö: The American writer Paul Auster has said: ‘A young person who wants to be an artist or a writer is above all influenced by art. But a young writer has nothing to say. One has a love of literature, but one can only imitate other writers to begin with. It takes a long time before one finds one’s own way.’ What do you think of that statement?
Bo Carpelan: Of course there’s a lot in what he says. At the same time I am convinced that one must have at least the shadow of one’s own voice from the very outset, otherwise what one writes turns out to be merely plagiarism. But to start with one does probably tend to work in close association with tradition. That was also true of me, but in my own view I didn’t continue – as has often been asserted – in the wake of Finland-Swedish modernism. It is of course quite possible that later on I returned to it, but the basis of my activity was probably the American New Criticism: the large anthologies on criticism and poetry that I read in the 1950s. Those influences have left their clearest traces in the very comprehensive bibliography of my academic work on the Finland-Swedish poet Gunnar Björling. In the last chapter of the dissertation I also tried to draw my own guidelines as to what I mean by poetry: that it is concrete and synthetic. More…
New worlds
30 September 1998 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Ulla Montan
The heroine of Monika Fagerholm’s novel Diva is a teenage girl. But this is a Lolita with a difference; for this is an intelligent Lolita, with a voice of her own. Silja Hiidenheimo interviews her creator
In Monika Fagerholm’s best-selling book Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (1994, English translation:Wonderful Women by the Water), the sun shines and the women really are wonderful. If there is a certain melancholy about the story, it is born more of longing and the unrealised dream of freedom. And although all those of us who were born in the 1960s thought Monika had stolen precisely our childhood memories of summer, that she had leafed through our photograph albums, the work is, in the melancholy lightness of its narrative, an exception in Finnish realism. While the book forces its readers to empathise so completely that one cannot imagine Monika has invented anything in the whole story, but merely, like a camera, has registered everything just as it happened, an ironic laugh is heard in the book: realism is just as banal as life itself. If one were to summarise the plot of either, one would not be able to repeat it without blushing. More…
Among horses
30 June 1998 | Authors, Interviews
Photo: Cato Lein
‘Now it’s really damned difficult to know whether these poems will be close to the reader, or strange,’ Tua Forsström said a couple of days before the publication last autumn of her collection Efter att ha tillbringat en natt bland hästar (‘After spending a night among horses’).
Her previous collection, Parkerna (‘The parks’), published five years ago, found its readers and swept the board of literary prizes. The new poems, too, come close to the reader; the book’s Finland-Swedish publisher has sold out and the prize-boards have been swept again, including the Nordic Council Prize for Literature.
Writing the new collection took five years, as was the case with Parkerna. Tua Forsström writes slowly: nine collections in a quarter of a century. Her first collection, En dikt om kärlek och annat (‘A poem about love and other things’), appeared in 1972. More…
The forest, everything
31 March 1998 | Authors, Interviews
Lassi Nummi
Lassi Nummi (1928–2012) considered himself a prose-writer who has strayed into poetry. In a career spanning almost half a century and 25 collections of poetry, his preoccupations, and his central metaphors, remained constant: landscape, trees, bushes, blades of grass. Interview (1997) by Tarja Roinila
Now I can see how
distinct
each twig is on the bush, each grassblade
with, all around, the void
(1986)
My first encounter with the poet Lassi Nummi came with Maisema (‘Landscape’), a novella which appeared in the same year as his first collection of poetry. The experience was startling. The text delineates the building timbers of his subsequent poetry: trees, bushes, blades of grass. Maisema is a dazzlingly modern work, a complete realisation of something Virginia Woolf wrote in the same year, 1925: ‘Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.’ More…
The price of a free lunch
Issue 4/1994 | Archives online, Fiction, Interviews
Eeva Joenpelto’s new novel, Tuomari Müller, hieno mies (‘Judge Müller, a fine man’), is the story of a good woman with a bad conscience, and of the small-town, big-business corruption of Finland in the 1980s. (Interview of EJ: 1994)
… the front door of the office building flew open. Men swept out and down the street, as fast-moving, garrulous and laughing as if it had been decided by vote in a council meeting. The entire width of the street was filled with the scent of vigorous, masculine deodorants: thyme, tarragon, gunpowder.
At the end of the 1980s, successful men smelt of gunpowder even in the Finnish boondocks: then, after all, money was on the move, whatever the business – bank management, whirlpool baths or local politics. This last seemed to move significantly closer to business life when the fast-moving and garrulous politicians organised a few benefits for themselves from the flowing stream of money, and no one saw fit to object. Yet. More…
Beyond good and evil?
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Esa Sariola. Kuva Irmeli Jung
Markku Huotari interviews Esa Sariola
A stylish restaurant in the Stock Exchange building in Helsinki. Esa Sariola and I order a businessmen’s lunch. We talk about hard-nosed success stories. About technocracy, casino economics.
About profit.
A steely-eyed businessman enters the room from the stock exchange and sees us two soft-talkers, even if we look like men, wasting time. The ruthless gambler bolts down his lunch and disappears to the upper floor again, where he is making money.
We remain.
We’re just talking.
And there’s no money accruing in our wallets.
All the same we have a grip on that investor. Esa Sariola has already laid siege to people like him in three books: Väärinkäsityksiä (‘Misconceptions’, 1983), a collection of short stories, and two novels: Rakas ystävä (‘Dear friend’, 1985) and Kuolemaani saakka (‘Until my dying day’, 1986). More…
A poet of the fresh air
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Sirkka Turkka. Photo: Pertti Nisonen
Sirkka Turkka is interviewed by Markku Huotari
Snowflakes are already covering the forest, and an angry wind is blowing off Lake Lohjanjärvi. It is autumn, and in the courtyard, at the roots of a stunted rowan, is a lounge chair, its paint already peeling.
‘I’ve left the chair there because my mother used to sit in it and knit.’
I start at Sirkka Turkka’s comment. In my mind is her last-but-one volume of poetry, Vaikka on kesä (‘Although it’s summer’, 1983); its poems sound a contemporary lament, occasioned by her mother’s death.
‘There’s nothing made-up in my poetry,’ says Sirkka Turkka.
Landscape, nature, the circular path of life – all of these have left their wounds in Sirkka Turkka’s poetry. But as she writes in Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’, 1986), winner of the Finlandia Prize 1987, ‘from the wounds life grows’. More…
Portraits of change
Issue 1/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Eeva Joenpelto. Photo: Tyyne Havia / SKS Archives
Erkka Lehtola interviews Eeva Joenpelto
You can see Eeva Joenpelto’s house from a long way off: a substantial red-painted building in the southern Finnish village of Sammatti. It is the kind of house rich Finnish farmers lived in in days gone by.
The farmyard is big; behind the hedge loom the neighbouring fields and the blue mushroom woods of autumn. In the flower beds are roses and ornamental plants; the red farmhouse breathes the old Finnish countryside tradition.
But there has been no farming in the red house’s fields and meadows for a long time now. Eeva Joenpelto moved from the capital to these peaceful country surroundings just a few years ago.
All the same, the red house, the well-kept yard and forest and cornfields nearby have an important significance: for in many of her novels Eeva Joenpelto, the writer who has moved to the country, describes a huge shift in Finnish society. Many of her novels show the disintegration of the old Finnish agrarian society, and the industrial Finland, that creation of supply and demand, taking its place. More…
Joni Skiftesvik: arctic storyteller
Issue 4/1984 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews
Joni Skiftesvik. Photo: Hilkka Skiftesvik
Olavi Jama interviews Joni Skiftesvik
We’re sitting on the fringes of the arctic zone, in the modern centre of Oulu, a town that built its wealth in the last century on tar export and sailing ships.
In front of us is the sea; behind us curves Oulujoki, the river that has for centuries brought Oulu writers stories from the north. The restaurant is filled with the bright light of midday; we want to see each other clearly.
JS: All summer the wind blows in from the sea. Now there’s a land wind. It comes from the east.
OJ: You’ve published only two books, but you’re hardly a typical debutant writer. All day you work for an Oulu publisher of romantic fiction, whose products attract hundreds of thousands of readers every year. What’s your job there?
JS: Publications director.
OJ: You returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair yesterday. Did you see anything there to interest you as an author?
JS: For a novelist or a short story writer, for a writer concerned with literature it was really quite a depressing sight. Long corridors and exhibition shelves by the kilometre. More…