Authors

Contradictory logic

Issue 3/1991 | Archives online, Authors

It is unavoidable, really, that in her new book, Umbra, Leena Krohn should have found herself addressing paradoxes. She has long examined the complexities of humanity: good and evil, life and death, the biological relation of Homo sapiens and other creatures with the world, the contrasts of life and the extremes of phenomena. Humanity is filled with paradoxes, but the most difficult of them all is the paradox of evil: does an evil-doer will evil because he must? Or must he do evil because he wills it?

Umbra is a doctor. He works in a hospital; some of surgery hours are spent at a clinic called Aid for the Overstrained and at a research centre whose name is Negative Influences, which cares for violent criminals: rapists, sadists, paedophiles. Umbra is interested in the compulsion of pleasure that drives his violent patients, in the shadow that swallows conscience, the suffering of knowledge of the truth. ‘Moral sensitivity is one of the human senses,’ Umbra ponders. ‘Most people have it. In the clinics patients it is absent. Perhaps they were born without it…’ More…

How to survive in the fast lane

Issue 2/1991 | Archives online, Authors

Kjell Westö is very young, but he has enough historical sensibility to be able to understand small details and how they vary as epochs change. Reading him, I was reminded of one of the dustiest practitioners of the philosophy of art, the 19th-century Hippolyte Taine.

Taine was a dyed-in-the-wool positivist who sought connections between art and geology: just as the earth is overlaid with a layer of ‘soft mulch’ – last year’s decomposing leaves – so ‘the individual is overlaid with customs, ideals, spiritual or intellectual characteristics which last for three or four years; they are the creations of fashion and the moment’; among them are details of speech and clothing. Taine’s description, written around 1830, of the young literary hero, is unforgettable: the upstart ‘who has great passions and deep dreams, who is inspiring and lyrical, political and rebellious, humanitarian and reformist and enthusiastically consumptive, fateful looking with his tragic waistcoats and his arresting hair style’. More…

Words and silences

Issue 1/1991 | Archives online, Authors

A collection of poems and photographs by the Finnish Lapp artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää is an uncompromising statement of the culture of one of Europe’s last truly local peoples

After its supersonic journey across the skies, Concorde lands at Rovaniemi airport. The steel bird disgorges its cargo: rich Europeans on a day trip to Lapland. Among them are a few even more long-distance travellers, from Japan.

Father Christmas greets them cordially. They visit the Arctic Circle. They eat in the frosty outdoors, in front of a roaring campfire. They ride in a reindeer sled. It is the exotic experience they have hoped for; they laugh for the pleasure of it. More…

Lady into Bird

Issue 1/1991 | Archives online, Authors

One of the ways in which the comparative youth of Finland’s culture makes itself felt is in the fact that there is never any great distance between low and high culture. Finnish literature has always naturally mixed popular and high art elements: in dealing with the themes and traumas that define the national consciousness, it has proved possible to use folk tales, pop songs or jokes as a distancing mechanism.

The work of Aulikki Oksanen is characterised by just this kind of mix. She is not only a writer: since her literary debut in 1966, she has also been well-known for her work as an actress, a singer of radical political songs, and for her illustrations of her own children’s books.

Oksanen’s interest in the world of folk tales and myths, and their modern equivalents, popular song and cinema, can be partly explained by her generation and its political consciousness. Appearing in politically engaged plays and films, writing and singing political songs, Oksanen (born 1944) was one of the most prominent figures in the Finnish cultural life of the Sixties. More…

Family crimes

Issue 4/1990 | Archives online, Authors

Olli Jalonen’s novel Isäksi ja tyttäreksi (‘Becoming father and daughter’), one of the shortlisted books for the 1991 Finlandia Prize, is set across Europe in 1999. Introduction by Erkka Lehtola

Olli Jalonen (born 1954) is one of those authors who have brought Finnish literature out of the forests and into the cities – even into the nuclear shelters. Unien tausta (‘A background of dreams’) won a short story competition run by the publishing house of Otava, and was published in 1978. His first novel, Sulkaturkki (‘Coat of feathers’) appeared in 1979, to be followed by Ilo ja häpeä (Joy and shame’, 1981), Hotelli eläville (‘A hotel for the living’,1983), Johan ja Johan (‘Johan and Johan’, 1989) and the story-novel Tuhkasaari (‘Ash Island’, 1987). Jalonen was awarded the Eino Leino Society Prize this year; Johan ja Johan was on the shortlist for the Finlandia Prize. More…

Out of the woods

Issue 4/1990 | Archives online, Authors

France has its tradition of conteurs; but storytellers such as Arto Paasilinna (born 1942) are uncommon today. This makes the success of the French translation of his Jäniksen vuosi (‘Year of the hare’; French translation Le Lièvre de Vatanen, Denoel, 1989) all the more surprising. A first edition of 11,000 copies has been printed, and a second is under consideration, while his Ulvova mylläri (‘The howling miller’) is scheduled for publication next, in a translation by Anne Colin du Terrail; then in line is Auta armias (‘Help, O Lord’), and then… Negotiations are also in progress with French book clubs.

What is the secret of Paasilinna’s success in this land of fastidious critics? Humour is not enough, for each country finds different things funny. A whole chain of causes and coincidences needed before Paasilinna achieved both critical and popular success in France, where the best that the best Finnish writers can generally hope for is a slim edition confidentiel. More…

On a magic carpet

Issue 3/1990 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

‘Tulavall is not large, but it is old and on the coast, just where the River Tatel runs into the sea.’ That is how the Finland-Swedish writer, Irmelin Sandman Lilius, starts her first book on the town of Tulavall, a place which has become her own universe in which she combines saga and realism with fantasy and history.

Tulavall and its inhabitants have become known and loved in ten languages. Last year, for instance the fourth edition of Bonadea, the book quoted above, was brought out in Spanish. The founder of Tulavall, King Tulle, can be read about in English, German, Danish, Finnish and, of course, Swedish. The three books about the magical Mistress Sola are to be published in Japanese.

Irmelin Sandman Lilius herself lives, just as do the girl Bonadea, King Tulle and Mistress Sola, in a small coastal town called Hangö [Hanko], where Irmelin and her husband Carl-Gustaf paint pictures and write books in a heavenly stone house by the sea. More…

A birthday visit

Issue 2/1990 | Archives online, Authors

Last June the master Nieminen – poet, translator, sinologist – was sixty. So we – a group of his friends, publishers and colleagues – set off on a visit to Myllykylä to congratulate him. This is the village where, with his wife, Nelli, he has been teaching primary school since the early 1950s – right up to his retirement, at the end of the 1989 summer term.

At the approach to the school, the road petered out into a single gravel track, and someone announced his astonishment that roads like this were still around in Finland. It brought to mind a poem of the master’s: More…

Island epic

Issue 1/1990 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Ulla-Lena Lundberg‘s novel Leo was one of last autumn’s best-sellers: written in Swedish, it was published simultaneously in Finnish, and praised unanimously by critics in both languages. The first volume of a trilogy, Leo tells of the lives of Åland shipowners and their families at a time when men sailed the seas and women’s lot was to wait at home. Lundberg’s story is at the same time old-fashioned, with its finely drawn portraits, and a modernist structured novel that rises above everyday realism.

‘In Åland literature is peripheral;’ says Ulla-Lena Lundberg in the Helsinki bookshop where she is signing copies of Leo. Nevertheless, the Åland (in Finnish, Ahvenanmaa) islands, between Finland and Sweden, have bred some important writers. I am thinking, for example, of Sally Salminen, whose Katrina (1936) is one of the most translated Finnish novels. And at present there is the influential writer Johannes Salminen, an essayist and pointed polemicist in many areas (he also happens to be Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s publisher). More…

Real lives

Issue 1/1990 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Finnish literature rests largely on a realist tradition. Literature has been valued most when it gives a faithful description of the world. Realistic descriptions of people and nature gradually gave way to social realism, which in turn developed into psychological realism, currently the major trend; sometimes a tiring one. Contemporary Finnish literature overflows with portraits of relationships, family hells and Bildungsromanen, most of them scarcely indistinguishable from one another.

Psychological realism is at its most interesting when it has a social dimension. When – according to the realist tradition – it also deals with its own time, human conditions and ideals, or their absence. The work of Annika Idström (born 1947) has always included this dimension. It may be the main reason for the passion her books provoke, and for their undisputed importance contemporary Finnish literature. More…

Face to face

Issue 4/1989 | Archives online, Authors, Fiction, Prose

Daniel Katz interviewed by himself

I’m awaiting Daniel Katz surrounded by the wooden walls of his study, in what was formerly an old corn-shed.

‘For me,’ his wife confides, ‘he knocked together a study out of a stall in the cowshed.’ Then she withdraws to her cowpen, where she’s translating Bellman’s songs from Swedish.

Through the study window I can see a bit of eastern-Uusimaa forest, the village lane, and the corner of the family’s reddle-daubed peasant hut. A little distance away, like this, the boarding looks in better shape than it does close-up. The family dog, a Lapphund, is lying on the sofa and keeping a trained eye on me: with no reindeer to herd, he’ll make do with me. More…

Between Eros and Thanatos

Issue 3/1989 | Archives online, Authors

Tua Forsström’s poetry is deeply disturbing. Inside her clairvoyant linguistic structures there appear realities and visions that like icons establish a strong and direct link with visions, perceptions, memories, desires and dreams which I myself recognise but which are concealed. Reading her becomes a crossing of borders: I have been in this room before! This reality filled with ambivalence and antagonistic forces, this magnetic field between Eros and Thanatos touches me to the marrow of my experience! More…

Life and letters

Issue 3/1989 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews

Meeting grey-suited Jarkko Laine on a Helsinki street, few would guess that he is a poet. His black briefcase seems more likely to contain accounts and computer printouts than Chinese poems or short stories by Raymond Carver. Few would imagine, either, that this friendly, smiling, gentle poet chairs the Finnish Writers’ Union, a post he has held since 1987.

And even fewer would guess that this is the most characteristic poet of post-war Finland, an ‘urbanist’, ‘child of Marx and Coca-Cola’, ‘mouthpiece for his generation’, ‘Nordic beatnik’, ‘the Gladstone Gander of Finnish literature, who succeeds in everything he sets his hand to’…

‘Sometimes it seems to me that people still brand me as a young poet,’ says Jarkko Laine, whose work is prolific and diverse: poetry, prose and journalism, in his capacity as editor-in-chief of the literary journal Parnasso. More…

Myth at large – an echo when life is mute

Issue 1/1989 | Archives online, Authors

At the end of Karen Blixen’s The Immortal Story certain characters have used all their contrivance to make a popular sailor’s fantasy – in which a crewman is invited to rich house, dined, wined and offered a woman – take place in reality. The crewman is found, all the events occur, but their actuality is entirely different from what was imagined and planned. The final image is a shell held to the ear – a sound that seems to have been heard long ago. The sound of the cosmos is the unpredictable voice of the Puppet Master who subtly alters the plots of the puppet masters.

Eeva-Liisa Manner writes both poetry and prose but carefully distinguishes the two:

Prose, let it be hard as you like, let it  make you restless.
But poetry's an echo heard when life is mute.

More…

The final scene that Büchner never wrote

Issue 1/1989 | Archives online, Authors, Drama

‘Fierce, stubborn sympathy for a weak, doomed person can be seen everywhere in Georg Büchner’s writing. It was the Leitmotiv of all his literary activity, just as the defense of freedom and justice was the motive for his political action.’ So wrote the poet Eeva-Liisa Manner in her essay, ‘The dramatic and historical Woyzeck’, published in the literary periodical Parnasso in 1962. Her first translation of Büchner’s famous play was published in the same issue. Ever since then, this unfinished last play by Georg Büchner has refused to leave Manner in peace. Altogether she has published three different Finnish translations of the work, most recently in 1987. But she was not content to leave it at that, for she also wrote a conclusion to the incomplete play, providing her own interpretation of Woyzeck’s final scene.

Georg Büchner’s contemporaries felt that his life, too, had been left unfinished. He was only twenty-three years old when he died in 1837 – ‘Ein unvollendet Lied’ (‘an unfinished song’), as Georg Herwegh wrote in a memorial poem dedicated to Büchner in 1841. In the eyes of his contemporaries, Büchner was a dramatist who, with his first play, Danton’s Death, had shown great promise which his early death prevented him from fulfilling. At the time, no one could imagine that the ‘almost finished play’ found among the writer’s posthumous works would provide the stimulus for naturalistic, expressionistic, and epic theatre, or that it would serve as the basis for one of the most important operas of the following century. More…