Search results for "2011/04/2010/05/song-without-words"
Maria Turtschaninoff: Underfors [Underville]
28 January 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Underfors
[Underville]
Helsingfors: Söderströms, 2010. 342 p.
ISBN 978-951-52-2739-3
€16 , hardback
This highly original fantasy novel by the Swedish-speaking author Maria Turtschaninoff (born 1977) is evidence of the innovative thinking that Finnish authors for young people bring to the international fantasy genre, particularly the currently fashionable vampire and werewolf themes associated with the borderline between life and death. The protagonist, Alva, is an adopted teenage girl who has some black holes in her memory of early childhood. A young man called Nide leads Alva to a land situated beneath Helsinki, where Alva learns that she is the heir to the shadow king. This novel is teeming with goblins, sprites, kelpies, pixies and sorceresses. Events come to a head on Midsummer Night, when magic spells can come true. Underfors is a classic story of a person’s search for her identity: Alva constructs her shattered self using fragments she finds from her past. She is liberated from guilt, longing and her inexplicable anguish, but becoming free requires sacrifices and struggles with ethical issues.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Sodan kasvattamat [Brought up by war]
6 May 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Sodan kasvattamat
[Brought up by war]
Toimittaneet [Ed. by]: Sari Näre, Jenni Kirves and Juha Siltala
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 464 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-36733-9
€ 34, hardback
This volume is a collection of personal historical accounts relating to child-rearing and youth during the Finnish Winter and Continuation Wars (1939–1944). In the war years, 60,000 children were orphaned and nearly 80,000 were evacuated abroad, mainly to Sweden; in relative terms, this was a greater proportion of the nation’s children than were similarly affected anywhere else in the world. Some 150,000 children lost their homes in bombing raids or in the Finnish evacuation from the region of Karelia. Finland’s agrarian society taught these children to be obedient and to get by without assistance from adults. The Finnish civil war of 1918 had its effects as well: people did not talk much about their emotions. In circumstances where disciplined sacrifice was emphasised, young people found solace in games, sport and working. Researcher Ville Kivimäki speculates that the widespread experience of an unprotected childhood may have led, at least in part, to Finland’s establishing a social welfare state after the Second World War, as a kind of compensation. The material draws on earlier research, archived personal accounts and memoirs as well as numerous new in-depth interviews.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Inside and out
14 February 2011 | Reviews
Markku Pääskynen. Photo: Ville Palonen
It is typical of Markku Pääskynen’s fiction for horrible things to happen both in people’s internal worlds and what goes by the name of the objective reality around them, and you can’t always be sure which one they’re happening in – or they’re happening in both.
From his debut novel, Etanat (‘Snails’, 2002, Tammi), onwards Markku Pääskynen (born 1973) has created a highly original body of work. His special strengths are his linguistic and narrative virtuosity, which allow him to make surprising events and narrative solutions come off in a controlled manner.
Pääskynen’s third novel, Tämän maailman tärkeimmät asiat (‘The most important things of this world’, 2005, featured in Books from Finland 1/2006), was a description of a single day that focused on the relationship between an adult son and his mother. Pääskynen’s sixth book, Enkelten kirja (‘Book of Angels’, 2010), is constructed out of sensory perceptions, thoughts, feelings and memories. The reader has to stay on his toes in piecing together the course of events, gradually revealed from behind these elements, and to find the story behind the plot. More…
Misery me
Extracts from the collection of short prose, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offense’, WSOY, 2010)
Past pushing up daisies
Well, yeah, so I took offense when the doctor said that considering my age I’m in tip-top shape. His theory was that my 25-kilometre ski circuits would keep an old coot like me in shape, if they didn’t kill me first. He said if I were to start just sitting on the couch and waiting, then the Reaper would be on my back in no time.
I don’t ski for my health. I ski because it’s pretty in the forest, and when a body is sweating he doesn’t think a whole lot. More…
Heikki Hiilamo: Kuoleman listat. Suomalaisten salainen apu Chilen vainotuille [Death lists. Secret assistance of the Finns to Chilean dissidents]
17 September 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Kuoleman listat. Suomalaisten salainen apu Chilen vainotuille
[Death lists. Secret assistance by Finns to Chilean dissidents]
Helsinki: Otava, 2010. 362 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-1-24003-7
€ 32, hardback
The 1973 Chilean coup that ousted President Salvador Allende, and the subsequent persecution of dissidents, forced Allende’s supporters to seek asylum in foreign embassies. A number of refugees climbed over the wall of the Santiago home of Finland’s chargé d’affaires, Tapani Brotherus. As the Finnish official line of neutrality was to avoid interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, Brotherus was taking a great personal risk, by allowing this, and keeping it secret from the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With the help of the embassy’s undersecretary and the East German diplomat Arnold Voigt, he and his wife succeeded in helping some 2, 200 people to leave Chile. Brotherus also helped 182 political refugees to obtain asylum in Finland. Heikki Hiilamo, who is now Research Professor at Kela, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, describes the background of the Chilean dictatorship and the development of the broad-based solidarity movement, which has been characterised as one of the central formative experiences of the generation that grew up in 1970s Finland. The movement’s activists included future Finnish presidents Mauno Koivisto and Tarja Halonen, as well as the future Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila.
Anja Snellman: Parvekejumalat [Balcony gods]
30 September 2010 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Parvekejumalat
[Balcony gods]
Helsinki: Otava, 2010. 316 p.
ISBN 978-951-1-22756-4
€ 31.80, hardback
The theme of this novel is delicate and still largely silenced: the collision between the cultures of Muslim immigrants and the local population. Immigration into historically homogeneous Finland is a comparatively newer phenomenon than in many other European countries. Like other teenage girls, the Somali girl Anis dreams about partying, boys and a future, which completely deviaties from the customs and ideals of her patriarchal Muslim family. Her counterpart, the Finnish girl Alla, wishes to convert to Islam, because she has found herself suffering at home from the consequences of Western ‘freedom’ and is left with a feeling of devastating insecurity. Islamic culture’s halal and haram (strictly ‘good’ and ‘bad’) crushes or is crushed in Finnish life. The provocative contrasts and solutions presented in Snellman’s novel (her 19th) appear occasionally overemphasised. In defending the right of women to determine their own lives, Snellman (born 1954) deals Anis an extraordinarily tragic fate.
The naked truth
18 January 2011 | This 'n' that
Out with the truth: sauna camaraderie in the film Steam of Life. Photo: Oktober
Finnish men don’t usually open up about much, it’s generally thought, as they don’t like to speak about feelings.
But in the sauna, it’s different. Intimacies are revealed in its soft steam, by men who sit there quietly and give voice to the sorrows of their lives.
In Miesten vuoro / Steam of Life, a full-length documentary film by two directors, Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen which premiered in March 2010, Finnish men both talk and weep. They have gained considerable popularity among audiences in Finland and abroad.
A naked guy sits on a wooden bench in the steam or outside the sauna building (which could be an old wooden hut in the countryside, a modern city sauna or some odd construction serving the purpose) with a bottle of beer in his hand, and tells the man sitting next to him in earnest about his dead child, new wife, or the death of his mother: the great sorrows or joys of his life.
Water, fire, bare skin and no ornaments: vulnerability. He can be a war veteran or a younger man, lonely or happily married. But he talks, cleansing himself both physically and mentally.
Steam of Life has so far been seen by approximately 50,000 people in Finland, and the DVD has sold more than 28,000 copies. It is the first Finnish documentary to compete for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Oscar nominees will be published on 25 January, with the award ceremony taking place at the end of February.
Steam of Life has won prizes both in Finland and abroad: in Tel Aviv, Warsaw, Pärnu in Estonia, Germany (DOK Leipzig where it won a Silver Dove) and Portugal. It received a Special Jury Mention at the Silverdocs documentary film festival in the United Sates and the Prize of the Interreligious Jury at the Visions du Réel festival in Switzerland. It will continue its tour of film festivals this year; see the trailer here.
The DOK Leipzig jury commented: ‘The film, deliberately set in an original Finnish situation – a sauna, opens a door into the intimate and hidden world of men’s fragility and vulnerability, turning the sauna into a place where naked truth is told by naked men. The film bends together tragic and comic….’
Mies ei puhu eikä pussaa is a saying; we’d translate this as ‘a Finn neither speaks nor snogs’, Finn referring to a male person. But the times, they are a-changing, it seems.
What Finland read in April…
18 May 2012 | In the news
…was Tuomas Kyrö mostly, it seems: at the top of the April list of best-selling fiction titles in Finland, compiled by the Finnish Booksellers’ Association, was his novel Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike (‘Taking offense: the brown sauce’, WSOY).
In March, Kyrö (born 1974) already featured twice on the list: his first novel about a 80-something man, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offense’, WSOY, 2010) was number two, and the newly-published sequel, Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike had shot up to sixth place. In April they changed places – with the audio book version of the brown sauce book at number five.
This mielensäpahoittaja, ‘he who takes offence’, lives in the countryside and opposes most of what a contemporary lifestyle has to offer. Finns are evidently highly amused by the opinions of this obstinate, grumpy old man. But the popularity of Kyrö’s literary creation may also be boosted by the fact that he currently takes part in a television talk show every week, entertaining the audience and his fellow guests with his often acerbic remarks.
A crime novel by Seppo Jokinen, Hervantalainen (‘The person from Hervanta’, Crime Time), occupied third place, Tarhapäivä (‘Kindergarten day’, Otava) by Eve Hietamies fourth.
On the non-fiction list Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, republished by Silberfeldt in April, was already in third place; we published a news piece about it on 25 April.
The non-fiction list was topped by a new, controversial book by banker – and one of the richest men in Finland – Björn Wahlroos, Markkinat ja demokratia. Loppu enemmistön tyrannialle (‘Market and democracy. The end of the tyranny of the majority’, Otava). He favours the methods of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policy and opposes social benefits for the poor; according to him, the market economy is superior to democracy any time.
Praise and prize for theatre on the edge of Europe
29 April 2011 | In the news
Kristian Smeds is awarded the XII Europe Prize of New Theatrical Realities in St Petersburg on 17 April, presented by a previous prize-winner, Italian theatremaker Pippo Delbono. Photo: rossetti/phocusagency
Theatremaker Kristian Smeds (born 1970) was awarded the XII Europe Theatre Prize for New Theatrical Realities in St Petersburg on 17 April. The prize, worth 30,000 euros, was – this time – divided between six prominent theatremakers or theatre groups. (For more information, see the Premio Europa website.)
The international prize jury consists of representatives of many institutions of the field. Since 1986 the main prize, the Europe Theatre Prize (worth 60,000 euros), has been awarded to 14 European theatremakers considered influential – among them, the directors and/or writers Ariane Mnouchkine, Peter Brook, Heiner Müller, Lev Dodin, Harold Pinter, and now, the German director Peter Stein. More…
Life through the lens
22 December 2010 | Extracts, Non-fiction
Let’s go on a little pictorial journey in time with the photographer Erik Hägglund, whose camera went on clicking for 50 years: gentlefolk, peasants, children, old people and village views, beginning almost a hundred years ago in rural western Finland
Ladies in hats: in the 1920s Vörå hats were only used by gentlewomen (and smoking was perhaps a little risqué). Photo: Erik Häggblom
Blickfång. En tidsresa med Vöråfotografen Erik Hägglund (‘In focus. A journey in time with the photographer Erik Hägglund from Vörå’. Red. [Ed. by] Katja Hellman, Meta Sahlström & Monica West. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2010
Old photographs may prove that what is utterly local can be perfectly universal.
That’s certainly the impression the reader gets by looking at the pictures taken by Eric Hägglund between 1910 and 1960.
The village of Vörå (in Finnish, Vöyri) on the west coast of Finland, near the Ostrobothnian city of Vasa (in Finnish, Vaasa) is traditionally mostly a Swedish-speaking community. Erik Hägglund, born 1884, lived, photographed and died there in 1962. More…
Government prize for translation 2012
14 September 2012 | In the news
Vladimír Piskoř. Photo: Charlotta Boucht
The Finnish Government Prize for the Translation of Finnish Literature of 2012 – worth €15,000 – was awarded to the Czech translator Vladimír Piskoř.
Piskoř (born 1960), graduated from the Charles University of Prague in 1984, majoring in Finnish. Since the early 1990s he has translated almost 30 titles, most by contemporary authors, including Kristina Carlson, Kari Hotakainen, Leena Krohn, Rosa Liksom, Asko Sahlberg, Juha Seppälä, Petri Tamminen and Maria Peura.
‘I personally am fond of the novels by Kari Hotakainen: I sometimes play with the idea of becoming a writer myself, and I find his style and themes particularly interesting. Kristina Carlson’s latest novel Herra Darwinin puutarhuri (‘Mr Darwin’s gardener’, 2010) is a truly inspiring work both as a reader and a translator,’ he says.
Piskoř is currently working on Kari Hotakainen’s novel Jumalan sana (‘The word of God’) and Leena Lander’s historical novel Käsky (‘Command’). In 2006 he was awarded the Czech translators’ special prize for the novel Höyhen (‘Feather’) by Asko Sahlberg.
Vladimír Piskoř received his award in Helsinki on 10 September from State Secretary Jarmo Lindén; he thanked Piskoř for the work he has done for the last twenty years, particularly in the field of contemporary Finnish fiction.
The prize has been awarded – now for the 38th time – by the Ministry of Education and Culture since 1975 on the basis of a recommendation by FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange.
Markku Kuisma: Sodasta syntynyt [Born of war]
8 April 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Sodasta syntynyt. Itsenäisen Suomen synty Sarajevon laukauksista Tarton rauhaan 1914–1920
[Born of war. The birth of independent Finland, from the shots fired in Sarajevo to the Treaty of Tartu, 1914–1920]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2010. 273 p.
ISBN 978-951-0-36340-9
€ 35, hardback
Professor Markku Kuisma investigates the route to Finland’s independence in the years from the outbreak of the First World War to the Treaty of Tartu in 1920. He disproves some commonly held beliefs about that era, which he maintains were adopted for reasons of political expediency – such as the idea that Finnish independence was the result of focused struggles by patriots. Kuisma claims that Finland in 1917–1918 was adrift, and the actions of the industrial barons around the time of the First World War had a greater impact on Finland’s status in the world than did the unfocused policies of the Finnish Senate. That was when the corporate structures that would shape Finland’s long-term future arose and trade agreements were set up. Bankers and business leaders were in the Senate as well, and the Finnish representatives who negotiated the Treaty of Tartu were chosen from the top ranks of Finnish commerce.
Translated by Ruth Urbom
Finland goes German
17 July 2009 | In the news
World of books: hustle and bustle at the Frankfurt Book Fair, 2008 - Photo: Fernando Baptista
Competition is hard in the book world, both nationally and internationally, so it’s big news that five years from now Finland will be the theme country at Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s biggest encounter of those who work in the book publishing business.
Tuomas Kyrö: Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike [Taking offence: brown sauce]
25 April 2012 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Mielensäpahoittaja ja ruskeakastike
[Taking offence: brown sauce]
Helsinki: WSOY, 2012. 130 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-0-39079-5
€23.90, hardback
The most popular book by Tuomas Kyrö (born 1974), so far, has been his sixth novel, Mielensäpahoittaja (‘Taking offence’: literally ‘He who takes offence’, 2010). It has sold nearly 65,000 copies as a book and audiobook. The protagonist is a 80-something man, a sturdy old bear who lives in the countryside, now alone, because his demented wife has been taken into care and the children have long since left home. Kyrö inserts genuine humour into the monologues of his stubborn – but by no means simple – character, defiantly critical, opposing new gadgets, fads and all sorts of silly stuff of the contemporary society. In this sequel Kyrö still manages to entertain the reader with his detailed portrait: now Mr Grumpy has to learn to cook, because the food a paid helper brings in just isn’t good enough. With the potato as the cornerstone of his diet, he finally learns how to make good, fatty and salty meals of meat and veg. ‘One must remember what’s important in life, marriage and prostate problems. Time and patience.’ Illustrations remind the reader of the old times: photographs of television programmes and printed recipes from the 1960s and 1970s.
Matti Klinge: Suomalainen ja eurooppalainen menneisyys [The Finnish and European past]
8 April 2011 | Mini reviews, Reviews
Suomalainen ja eurooppalainen menneisyys. Historiankirjoitus ja historiankulttuuri keisariaikana
[The Finnish and European past. Historiography and history culture in the Imperial era]
Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2010. 360 p., ill.
ISBN 978-952-222-208-4
€ 34, hardback
The term ‘Imperial era’ in Finnish history refers to Finland’s period as a Grand Duchy of Russia, 1809–1917. This work is a study of the shaping of Finland’s national culture of history. ‘History culture’ refers to the ways in which ideas about the past are generated, utilised and modified. The brief essays in this book look at the way the past, the events and people involved in historiography are treated in academic research – including those who did not hold high-level academic posts and were therefore absent from previous works. Matti Klinge, an emeritus professor of history, maintains that Finnish historiography has been characterised by an emphasis on nationalism and national development and has focused chiefly on historical writing about Finland. Historians have often been viewed as following in their predecessors’ footsteps, without demonstrating influences acquired from contemporary foreign research. The author emphasises the multilingual intellectual world of the Imperial era; at that time in Finland, people were able to read more foreign languages than nowadays.
Translated by Ruth Urbom