Search results for "2010/02/2011/04/matti-suurpaa-parnasso-1951–2011-parnasso-1951–2011"
Peter von Bagh: Sodankylä ikuisesti [Sodankylä forever]
11 June 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Sodankylä ikuisesti
[Sodankylä forever]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 308 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-36290-7
€ 52, hardback
The Midnight Sun Film Festival is the world’s northernmost film festival. Held in Sodankylä, Lapland, it is now 25 years old. This scrapbook includes the text of speeches given by filmmakers as well as a wealth of material about the films shown over the years. Much of this material is based on the morning discussion panels which the festival’s director, film historian and author Peter von Bagh, has chaired with his guests. More than one hundred film directors, from Samuel Fuller to Wim Wenders, talk about the background and influences in their work. Von Bagh has constructed dialogues between directors who did not actually attend the same sessions; he calls these conversations – sometimes between the living and the dead – ‘heavenly dialogues’. The Festival was founded by Finnish film directors Aki and Mika Kaurismäki and Anssi Mänttäri in collaboration with the municipality of Sodankylä. The light summer nights and laid-back atmosphere at the festival delight the speakers and audience members every year. In the words of the American filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, ‘Woodstock is fuckin’ nothing if you’ve been at the Midnight Sun Film Festival.’
What was Finland reading this summer?
2 September 2010 | In the news
Novels, thrillers and comics were on the June–July list of best-selling books according to the Booksellers’ Association of Finland.
And, as the popular poet, MP, novelist and television celebrity Tommy Tabermann (born 1947) died in June, his collected poems, Runot 1970–2010 became number one of the list.
Sofi Oksanen’s highly popular novel Puhdistus (Purge) has kept itself on the list for a long time, was now at number three. Tuomas Kyrö’s humorous novel about a man in his 80s, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offense’) was at number seven, Pertti Jarla’s Fingerpori 3 at number eight and Leena Lander’s new novel Liekin lapset (‘Children of the flames’) at number ten.
The top ten list of translated fiction included works by Jo Nesbø, Charlaine Harris, John Irving, Donna Leon and Dagsson Hugleikur.
During the summer there’s clearly enough time for nature observations: The Cloudspotter’s Guide by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a work presenting birds’ sounds and a book on bugs and creepy crawlies were among the ten best-selling non-fiction books.
Kirjoituksia sankaruudesta [Writings on heroism]
25 March 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Kirjoituksia sankaruudesta
[Writings on heroism]
Toim. [Ed. by] Ulla-Maija Peltonen & Ilona Kemppainen
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2010. 330 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-207-7
€ 29, paperback
This book examines Finnish heroism and anti-heroism by using approaches from folklore studies, history and literary theory. Political ‘heroism’ manufactured by the media is explored through a study of in-depth personal portraits of Finnish politicians published in the country’s biggest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, between 1981 and 2005. According to the research material, a positive impression is made by a narrative about a politician who is an independent thinker even in the context of his own party, from an ordinary home, engaged in manual work in his youth and risen to success overcoming setbacks through his own merits and without intrigue. The story of the European Union’s Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn, is a heroic story about a politician who dares believe in a European Finland even when it was disadvantageous to his career. Since the 1990s, writers have begun to take a renewed interest in war heroism; the climate in the 1960s and 1970s was pacifist, but now the ‘Winter War spirit’, which is deemed heroic, has been surfacing in an ever-increasing variety of situations, including economic crises.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Our favourite things
29 January 2010 | Letter from the Editors
Every reader has his or her favourite book. It is possible to define, with acceptable criteria, when a work of fiction is ‘a good novel’: do the plot, characterisation and language work, does it have anything to say? But when is a ‘good’ novel better than another ‘good’ novel? More…
Panu Rajala: Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea [Glass-clear, daredevil]
20 May 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Lasinkirkas, hullunrohkea. Aila Meriluodon elämästä ja runoudesta
[Glass-clear, daredevil]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 417 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-35488-9
€39, hardback
Aila Meriluoto (born 1924) is a poet, author and translator whose first collection of poems, entitled Lasimaalaus (‘Stained glass’), sold more than 25,000 copies in 1946. She became a celebrity of her time, as her young, fresh voice expressed post-symbolist visions and, after the long, cruel years of the war, spoke defiantly about the death of God. Hailed as a youthful prodigy, she was favoured by the dominant poet and professor of literature, V.A. Koskenniemi. Meriluoto has published ten collections of poems, as well as novels, children’s books, diaries, memoirs, and a book about her first husband, the poet and author Lauri Viita (1916–1965). She has translated works by Rainer Maria Rilke, Harry Martinson and Astrid Lindgren. This biography tends to concentrate on the writer’s personal history rather than on her works. The author and scholar Panu Rajala and Meriluoto became acquainted in the 1970s, and he calls his biography ‘a subjective testimonial’. Rajala has written plays, novels and film scripts as well as biographies, among them one of the classic author Mika Waltari (1908–1979).
Garden graft
2 September 2010 | Essays, Non-fiction
A chapter from Vapaasti versoo. Rönsyjä puutarhasta (‘Freely sprouting. Runners from the garden’, Kirjapaja, 2010)
If you sit in your garden and feel a bit like you’re tucked uncomfortably at the end of the dock in a guest berth, the reason is this: the garden hasn’t yet found a place in your muscle memory. Because it is only at the point when the garden has settled into your muscle memory, into your senses in as many ways as possible, that it will feel like your own. And that, of course, takes working in the garden, not just sitting in it.
So you should know your rose – not just its lovely smell but also the memory that you get from the shovel handle of when you planted it, or even the memory of the prick of its thorn on your finger. You can anchor every little detail in your senses, and it doesn’t even take much imagination. The scent of thyme on your fingertips, the downy fluff of a pasque flower against your palm, the silken glow of a peony opening in the morning sunlight – or the sumptuous mist of the wee hours of a summer morning twining over everything, and the rare experience of wading through it. More…
What Finland read in March
13 April 2012 | In the news
Tuomas Kyrö: ‘Taking offense’, part two
The top of the March list of best-selling fiction titles in Finland, compiled by the Finnish Booksellers’ Association, was Katja Kettu’s love story set in 1940s Finland at war, Kätilö (‘The midwife’, WSOY; see our feature).
Tuomas Kyrö (born 1974) featured twice on the list: Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offense’, WSOY, 2010) was number two and the newly-published sequel, Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike (‘Taking offense: the brown sauce’, 2012) had shot up to sixth place.
The title is actually a noun: ‘He who takes offence’: this person is an 80-something man who lives in the countryside and opposes most of what a contemporary lifestyle has to offer.
In the sequel, as his wife has to stay in a nursing home, ‘He who takes offence’ decides to learn how to cook for himself. He dismisses the ‘no-good’ girl who bring him food dailysent by a local agency. A firm believer in the potato, this no-nonsense character continues to fascinate lots of readers.
Rosa Liksom’s Finlandia Prize -winning novel set in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, Hytti nro 6 (‘Compartment number 6’, WSOY) occupied fourth place, a new novel about family life by Eve Hietamies, Tarhapäivä (‘Kindergarten day’, Otava) was number three.
The non-fiction list was topped by a new cookbook by Sikke Sumari, Sikke – ruokaa rakkaudella Toskanassa (‘Sikke – food with love in Tuscany’, Paasilinna). As books about birds featured on the list, one might assume spring is on the way, at last.
Profession: author
10 December 2010 | In the news
Alexandra Salmela
Alexandra Salmela, 30, won the Helsinki newspaper Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize 2010 for best first work, worth €15,000.
Her novel 27 eli kuolema tekee taiteilijan (’27 or death makes one an artist’, Teos) depicts a young woman’s search for her own place and calling in the world. Angie leaves her city of study, Prague, for a small Finnish village, wishing to become an author. Among the narrators are also a soft piggy toy, a cat and a car.
With degrees from both the Theatre Academy of Bratislava and Charles University of Prague, the Slovak-born Salmela majored in Finnish and Finnish literature. She has lived in Tampere, Finland for the past four years. In her opinion Finns should scrap the myth about their difficult language.
The jury chose the winner from 80 debut works, finding Salmela’s novel highly original in its imaginative narrative techniques and language.
Vieraita työssä. Työelämän etnistyvä eriarvoisuus [Foreign workforce. Increasingly ethnic inequality in working life]
21 January 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Vieraita työssä. Työelämän etnistyvä eriarvoisuus
[Foreign workforce. Increasingly ethnic inequality in working life]
Toim. [Editors]: Sirpa Wrede & Camilla Nordberg
Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 2010. 285 p.
ISBN 978-951-570-776-5
€20, paperback
There has been a great deal of discussion in Finland about whether educated people should be recruited from abroad for high-level positions, and whether immigrants with lower levels of education could redress the labour shortage in low-paid fields. In this collection of twelve scholarly articles, sociologists have situated immigrants into the field of research into the workplace. This book seeks answers to questions about the factors that hamper immigrants’ acceptance into Finnish society and how ethnic otherness is determined in public discourse by those in positions of power within society. The fields of work investigated include health care, food service, building trades and highly skilled immigrants. Immigrants’ perception of discrimination in hiring is addressed in an article by Pakistani-born Akhlaq Ahmad, based on his PhD thesis. Ahmad himself replied to 400 job advertisements and compared his progress in the recruitment process to the experiences of a Finnish test subject with similar educational qualifications. He received a favourable response rate of 1.5 percent, compared to 25% for the Finnish control. This book also considers media images of immigrants and traditional ethnic hierarchies in the workplace.
Mutts and mongrels of architecture
28 November 2013 | This 'n' that
Uudenmaankatu Street 42: a mixture of architecture from 1865–66 and 1905–07
Low-rise wooden buildings in the late 19th-century small town of Helsinki began to disappear as they were beginning to be replaced by houses built of stone. Last century wars and economic interests further changed the façades of Helsinki.
The oldest buildings may contain several generations of constructions, clearly visible or more discreet. In the past houses have been treated in a way which is no longer acceptable.
They were altered in various ways – made taller, smaller or stripped of original ornaments, often after damage in various wars, when restoration would have proved too expensive. In the end, they have become mutts and mongrels of architecture.
Upwards: an extra floor was added to the middle section of this apartment house (1910–11) in 1926.
Architect Juha Ilonen has wandered around Helsinki with his camera, capturing views that often take a Helsinki citizen by surprise.
In his new, capacious book Kolmas Helsinki – kerroksia arjen arkkitehtuurissa (‘The third Helsinki – layers in the architecture of the everyday’) Ilonen features ca. 300 buildings, from the mid-18th century to 2010. Most of them are apartment buildings situated in downtown Helsinki.
Why is it that I’ve never paid any attention to this or that extraordinary building, even though I hurry past it almost every day? Simply because I often don’t lift my gaze up from street level. The buildings speak volumes about history, aesthetics and demands of practicality.
Mariankatu Street 19: original architecture by Gustaf Estlander, 1904–05
But take a look at this house in Kruununhaka in the heart of the city – Books from Finland resided in the back yard building for years, and we had absolutely no idea that the façade had been thoroughly altered and stripped of its beautiful Jugend ornaments…
Mariankatu Street 19: new version, by Ole Gripenberg, 1936
Ilonen’s book is a treasure trove for anybody interested in architecture, housing or city life – or photography: hundreds of black-and-white photographs feature delightful samples of the variety and quality of Helsinki architecture.
Juha Ilonen
Kolmas Helsinki – kerroksia arjen arkkitehtuurissa
The third Helsinki – layers in the architecture of the everyday]
Helsinki: AtlasArt, 2013. 304 pp., ill.
ISBN 978-952-5671-51-3
€55, hardback
Is it a play, is it a book?
25 February 2011 | This 'n' that
On the way to fame: Walt the Wonder Boy in Kristian Smeds's stage adaptation of Paul Auster's novel Mr. Vertigo at the Finnish National Theatre (2010). Photo: Antti Ahonen
Dramatisations of novels are tricky. Finnish theatremakers like adapting novels for the stage, which often results in a lot of talking instead of action – and action here doesn’t refer to just physical movement but to the subtext, to what happens under and behind the words.
Currently an adaptation of an American novel is running on the main stage of the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki. Mr Vertigo (1994), Paul Auster’s seventh book, tells the story of an orphan boy in the 1930s St Louis. After harsh years as the long-suffering apprentice of the mysterious Master Yehudi, Walt becomes the sensational Wonder Boy by learning how to levitate.
In theatremaker Kristian Smeds’s adaptation, Auster’s whimsical, rambling novel becomes a capricious, illusory journey about illusions, freedom, and the unattainability of love. Walt (the highly expressive, athletic Tero Jartti) interprets, with hilarious comedy as well as with touching desperation, both the dizzyingly powerful experience of creativity and the ridiculous hubris of the artist. More…
John Lagerbohm & al.: Me puolustimme elämää. Naiskohtaloita sotakuvien takaa [We were defending life. The fates of women behind pictures of war]
21 April 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
John Lagerbohm & Jenni Kirves & Olli Kleemola
Me puolustimme elämää. Naiskohtaloita sotakuvien takaa
[We were defending life. The fates of women behind pictures of war]
Esipuhe [Foreword]: Elisabeth Rehn
Helsinki: Otava, 2010. 176 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-24660-2
€ 41, hardback
The women’s narratives of the Winter War (1939–40) and the Continuation War (1941–44) in this book are complemented by memoirs and academic writing, as well as journalistic extracts, personal recollections and interviews. It focuses on the status of women in wartime, showing that, in addition to the members of the Lotta Svärd auxiliary organisation, women carried a great deal of responsibility in a variety of roles, taking up traditionally male-dominated work in ports and mines. During the war years, the duty to work applied to all citizens aged 15 and up for whom various tasks could be assigned. One of the difficult jobs for ‘Lottas’ on the front line was placing the bodies of fallen soldiers into coffins and sending them home for burial. To maintain morale, it was important to the women to derive joy even from little things, and that humour comes through in this book as well. There is a wide range of photographic material, some of which comes from private collections.
Do you remember the yellow house?
14 February 2011 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Enkelten kirja (‘The book of angels’, Tammi, 2010)
[Tallinn, summer] The past will not go away
and the present is insurmountable. Summer vacation has begun, the newspaper hasn’t come; it doesn’t get delivered here anyway. Can you remember the Isabelline yellow house? Remember the alley with the name that means hurry? Surely you remember the home with all the maps on the shelves, the important papers and the brass objects bought from nearby antique dealers? Also the rugs from North Africa and the obligatory cedar camel figurines on the windowsill. And so many glasses and plates and empty lighters in a cardboard box on the shelf on the left hand side of the kitchen.
Tallinn, June 7th. The floors creak. One step has split in half; some of the lights have burned out. This is a lovely home. A small window upstairs is ajar to the courtyard. Tuomas had latched it behind the Virginia creepers. The fountain in the courtyard is dry. On cold nights the smoke from the fireplace grows like a statue for the crows until it wraps around over the layered rooftops like a snake eating its tail. Russian men are repairing the attic of the house across the street for wealthy people to live in; they laugh in front of the window and smoke. Tuomas waves at them, and they wave back. The courtyard is creepy when it’s empty. Soon the neighbours would go about their day and quietly close their doors behind them, and two nearby churches would divide the hours into quarters, Russians and their gossip would make their way to the Alexander Nevski Cathedral, and the Estonians and their gossip would go to their own churches where a wise and peculiar, almost human scent would rise from between the headstones. Tuomas wouldn’t smell it, Aino would and would move to stand beneath the the center tower. More…
Street-corner man
11 March 2010 | Extracts, Non-fiction
Check-up by a district nurse: from the exhibition ‘Everyday life in Finland’ (Muonio, 1970)
Photographs from Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf (Musta Taide, 2010; graphic design by Jorma Hinkka)
The period after the Second World War and before the age of television was the golden age of photojournals such as Life, Look and Paris Match. The big Finnish illustrated periodical was Viikkosanomat (‘The weekly news’); its early star, Caj Bremer, was one of the first Finnish press photographers to wander among people and record life as it was
‘Every photograph is the sum of aesthetic choices, and each one has a relationship with reality both when it is taken and in the time frame in which the viewer encounters it’, writes news editor and curator Riitta Raatikainen in her introduction to Caj Bremer. Valokuvaaja / Photographer / Fotograf.
Caj Bremer (born 1929) worked for years as a press photographer, most intensively between 1950 and 1970. A retrospective exhibition of his work over six decades opened at Helsinki’s Ateneum Art Museum in February (until 16 May). More…
Högtärade Maestro! Högtärade Herr Baron! [Correspondence between Axel Carpelan and Jean Sibelius,1900–1919]
17 December 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Högtärade Maestro! Högtärade Herr Baron! Korrespondensen mellan Axel Carpelan och Jean Sibelius 1900–1919
[My dear Maestro! My dear Herr Baron! Correspondence between Axel Carpelan and Jean Sibelius, 1900–1919]
Red. [Ed. by] Fabian Dahlström
Helsinki: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2010. 549 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-583-200-9
€40, hardback
‘For whom shall I compose now?’ wrote Finnish composer Jean Sibelius in his diary upon hearing of the death of his good friend Axel Carpelan (1858 –1919). Carpelan was a penniless baron, who considered music and his friendship with Sibelius to be the most vital aspects of his life. Using his natural-born talent and instinct, he gained acceptance as Sibelius’ trusted musical confidant, to whom the composer dedicated his second symphony. Axel came to be known by the wider public in 1986, when his great-nephew, the author Bo Carpelan, made him the protagonist of his award-winning novel entitled simply Axel. This volume, edited by Fabian Dahlström, contains the surviving Swedish-language correspondence between Sibelius and Carpelan, as well as letters to Sibelius’ wife, Aino. Carpelan wrote to her when the composer was too busy. These letters contain interesting details such as Aino Sibelius’ account of the origins of her husband’s violin concerto. The comprehensive foreword to this book sheds additional light on Carpelan’s life.