Search results for "jarkko/2011/04/matti-suurpaa-parnasso-1951–2011-parnasso-1951–2011"
Stars above
30 December 1998 | Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Benjamins bok (‘Benjamin’s book’, Schildts, 1997)
There are people who feel they are in contact with the stars. Among those who carry their secret knowledge around with them are both the healthy and the ‘sick’. Now I remember Olli stretching his arm out towards the evening star and seeming to greet it. For others, for me, the starry heavens are a form of distant vertigo. All those milky ways and galaxies, how could they not be inhabited, have developed a culture far older than our own. Perhaps they have watched the development of our planet with distaste, and are waiting for its ruin, which according to their calculation of time will take place in a few years or days from now. If I listen closely I seem to be faintly approached by a celestial choir, composed of indistinct sounds; if I stand on a lonely road in the country, and look up at the sky, the light and faint murmur from a nearby town emerge, and can be separated from the faint voices of the starry heavens. It is probably just my imagination. Perhaps it is an extension of that voice – anonymous, quiet – that I hear when I read a book. A good book is audio-visual. And no harm is done if it gives the reader a mild sense of vertigo. More…
Daddy’s girl
30 September 2004 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose
Extracts from the novel Maskrosguden (‘The dandelion god’, Söderströms, 2004). Introduction by Maria Antas
The best cinema in town was in the main square. The other was a little way off. It was in the main square too, but you couldn’t compare it to the Royal. At the Grand there was hardly any room between the rows, the floor was flat and there was a dance-hall on the other side of the wall, so that Zorro rode out of time with waltzes, in time with oompahs, out of time with the slow steps of tangos and in time with quick numbers. The Royal was different and had a sloping floor.
Inside, the Royal was several hundred metres long. You could buy sweets on one side and tickets on the other. From Martina Wallin’s mum. She was refined. So was everyone except us: Mum, Dad and me. More…
Thrills and spills
23 October 2009 | This 'n' that
In September the comic strip Viivi & Wagner by Juba, number two in August on the list of best-selling books (Mitä Suomi lukee, ‘What Finland reads’ – in Finnish only), gave way to Jari Tervo’s political satire Koljatti (‘Goliath’) and to a new thriller by Ilkka Remes (Isku ytimeen, ‘Strike to the core’).
Number three was Kjell Westö’s novel Älä käy yöhön yksin (in Finnish; the original, Gå inte ensam ut i natten, was published in Swedish, Westö’s mother tongue; ‘Don’t go out into the night alone’) and number four Kari Hotakainen’s novel Ihmisen osa (‘The human condition’).
Numbers eight and nine were new thrillers / crime novels by Leena Lehtolainen and Matti Rönkä. Historical novels by Kaari Utrio and Laila Hirvisaari took the fifth and sixth places.
Not surprisingly, the international bestsellers Paulo Coelho, Henning Mankell, Donna Leon and Patricia Cornwell led the translated fiction list.
As for non-fiction, the doings of Finnish Security Police interests people greatly: a history of it from 1949 to 2009 (edited by Matti Simola), entitled Ratakatu 12 (‘Ratakatu street 12’, WSOY) made its way to the top. It was followed by a biography of the industrial magnate Pekka Herlin of the Kone elevator company, Koneen ruhtinas (‘The prince of Kone’) – and Hitler by Ian Kershaw.
Animals, thy neighbours
30 March 2005 | Authors, Reviews
Sirkka Turkka. Photo Tomi Kontio
‘Everyone’s always in a hurry. In the grave it stops.’
In her new volume Sirkka Turkka (born 1939) appears as an even greater and more pitiless poet. Niin kovaa se tuuli löi (‘So bitterly the wind struck’, Tammi, 2004) – her twelfth volume, the first having being published in 1973 – is an unadorned and searching portrayal of death and the grief that accompanies it. It takes a thoroughly mature poet to handle major feelings as uninhibitedly as she does, and without letting the empathetic glow fade under the documentation.
Animals have always played an important role in Turkka’s somewhat melancholy but vital verse, with its highly individualised concrete language. In 1987 she received the Finlandia Literature Prize for her Tule takaisin, pikku Sheba (‘Come back, little Sheba’, Tammi, 1986; see Books from Finland 4/1988). Little Sheba was a small dog, one of the poet’s dearest friends. Turkka has worked as a stable manager, and horses are frequently central in her work. Domestic and farm animals are always a presence, and here they appear as tokens of the fragility of life and mortality. A hare, a horse, a dog and a lamb are among the animals whose deaths are dramatised. More…
Writers meet again in Lahti
14 May 2009 | In the news
In other words: LIWRE at Messilä Manor
The Lahti International Writers’ Reunion (LIWRE; www.liwre.fi) will be held this year between 14 and 16 June.
In the politically and culturally active 1960s, marked by the confrontation between East and West, an idea was born to found an international, bi-annual rendezvous where writers from all over the world could freely engage in discussions on various themes.
Crème de la crème
31 January 2013 | Fiction, Prose
Such straining and pasteurising is going on in the city that Arabs and other Muslims, the unemployed, drunkards, poor people and lunatics have been eliminated. By chance I became a cultural figure, and I was invited to a cultural evening whose invitation had been personally written by the Anarchist. At the restaurant table sat the Anarchist, the Psychoanalyst and the Psychologist’s boyfriend, 20 years younger, the Journalist, the Gift-Shop Owner, a Librarian and the Deputy Rector of a community college. Accompanying me to the restaurant, too, were the Wolf and the Deer, who hadn’t been invited. Sparse white fur grew on the Wolf’s narrow muzzle and there were teeth missing from his mouth. The Deer was beautiful, with huge eyes. And of course both of them were drunk. I asked them to come along because I believed that intellectuals are warm-hearted and open-minded. A really dumb idea. More…
When the viewer vanishes
26 May 2015 | Essays, Non-fiction
For the author Leena Krohn, there is no philosophy of art without moral philosophy
I lightheartedly promised to explain the foundations of my aesthetics without thinking at any great length about what is my very own that could be called aesthetics. Now I am forced to think about it. The foundations of my possible aesthetics – like those of all aesthetics – lie of course somewhere quite different from aesthetics itself. They lie in human consciousnesses and language, with all the associated indefiniteness.
It is my belief that we do not live in reality, but in metareality. The first virtual world, the simulated Pretend-land is inherent in us.
It is the human consciousness, spun by our own brains, which is shared by everyone belonging to this species. Thus it can be called a shared dream, as indeed I have done. More…
Images of isolation
31 March 1992 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry
Poems by Helvi Juvonen, commentary by Soila Lehtonen
Little is known of the circumstances of Helvi Juvonen’s life. Her fame rests on five collections of poetry – mixing humility and celebration with an uncompromising rigour – published in the ten years before her death at the age of 40 (a sixth appeared posthumously). Her existence, in the drab surroundings of post-war Helsinki, was modest: after studies at Helsinki University, and posts as a bank clerk and proof-reader, she lived by writing and translation, including some brilliant renderings into Finnish of the poems of the 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson.
Helvi Juvonen’s universe is crowded with ostensibly insignificant phenomena: her eye discerns a mole, lichen, dwarf-trees, a shrew; she studies tones of stone and moss; she ‘doesn’t often dare to look at the clouds’.
Us
Rocks, forgotten within themselves,
have grown dear to me.
The trees’ singing, so useless,
is my friend.
Silver lichen,
brother in beggary,
please don’t hate my shadow
on the streaked rock. More…
In memoriam Kai Laitinen 1924–2013
14 March 2013 | In the news
Kai Laitinen. Photo: Ilkka Välimäki (the literature archive/Finnish Literature Society, 2006)
The journalist, critic, author and professor Kai Laitinen died on 11 March in Helsinki, aged 88.
He began his literary career as a critic in the daily paper Helsingin Sanomat in 1950. As the Editor-in-Chief of the new literary journal Parnasso he was able to promote the new trends in modernist fiction and poetry which began to flourish in post-war Finland.
Laitinen’s academic career at Helsinki University involved serving as Associate Professor and Professor of Finnish literature (1975–1989). From the 1950s onwards he was actively involved in the work of dozens of literary societies, publications and organisations, both in Finland and abroad.
Among his publications are two collections of essays, a book of memoirs and two popular books on history of literature: Suomen kirjallisuus 1917–1967 (‘Finnish literature 1917–1967’) and a more concise work, Suomen kirjallisuuden historia (1981‚ Literature of Finland in Brief), which has been published in eleven languages.
Kai Laitinen was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Books from Finland in 1976 when the little magazine, then in its tenth year, began to take the form of a proper literary journal and to be published by Helsinki University Library. He held the job until 1989.
In issue 4/1977 of Books from Finland, on the theme of the 60th anniversary of Finland’s independence and the changing role of literature, Kai wrote in the editorial: ‘Literature is, and must be, much more than a chronicle of national and social history, or the mere accumulation of changing styles and genres. So often it is an author’s critical insight or his struggle against prevailing literary norms that gives birth to the works of the greatrest artistic importance. One of the main tasks of literature, both on a national and a human level, can be summed up succinctly in two lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding – “To purify the dialect of the tribe / And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight.” This comes close to describing what Finnish literature has achieved over the past sixty years.’
T.S. Eliot was the poet who perhaps had a permanent place in Kai’s personal literary cosmos – he introduced Eliot’s poetry to Finnish readership in the late 1940s. This passage, from Little Gidding, might well serve as his epitaph.
….We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
High above the years
23 September 2011 | Fiction, poetry
In Gösta Ågren’s poetry austere aphorisms alternate with concrete observations of life in a small village that was and again is his home, and with portraits of people he has met on his journey in the world. Introduction by David McDuff
Poems from the collection I det stora hela (’On the whole’, Söderströms, 2011)
Father’s hands
(1945)
Father’s hands were like stiff
gloves; a furious
kettle had bewitched them
in his childhood. We ride
from the church’s tall letter
along the river’s long sentence
to the parenthesis of the bridal house,
and the thunder of three hundred hooves
fills the space beneath the clouds.
I saw father driving through
his life with those numbly
gripped reins, and later,
right now, I think of the
life-long body in which a man
comes, is wounded, and goes. More…
Tchotchkes for the tsar
11 August 2011 | Reviews
Cornflower and ear of oats: one of the several Fabergé gemstone ornaments now owned by Queen Elizabeth of England (gold, rock crystal, diamonds, enamel, ca 18 cm)
Ulla Tillander-Godenhielm
Fabergén suomalaiset mestarit
[Fabergé’s Finnish masters]
Design: Jukka Aalto/Armadillo Graphics
Helsinki: Tammi, 2011. 271 p., ill.
ISBN 978-951-31-5878-1
€57, hardback
In its online shop, the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg sells a copy of a most delicate, enchanting little nephrite-and-opal lily of the valley that perfectly imitates nature, sitting in a vase made of rock crystal that looks like a glass of water.
These small flowers made of gold and gemstones were manufactured by the jeweller Fabergé a hundred years ago. The lily of the valley was the most frequently used floral motif in the Fabergé workshops – it was the favourite flower of Empress Alexandra (1872–1918), and the imperial family was the the foremost client of the world’s foremost jeweller.
The replica (13.5 centimetres high) is available at the Hermitage as a ‘luxury gift’ for the price of mere $3,300. (N.B. Since we published this review, the ‘luxury gift’ items seem to have disappeared from the Hermitage online shop selection, so we have removed the link. Several Fabergé egg replicas are available though, ranging in price from $200 upwards – link below.)
For those who feel the price is excessive, there is also a rather modestly-priced little bay tree (original: gold, Siberian nephrite, diamonds, amethysts, pearls, citrines, agates and rubies as well as natural feathers, about 30 centimetres tall, featuring a little bird that emerges flapping its wings and singing when a small key is turned) at just $ 219,95. Despite its form, it is classified as one of the famous imperial Easter eggs. (However, as I write, this item is unfortunately sold out…) More…
Icy prospects
8 October 2010 | This 'n' that
Jorma Puranen: Juovlajohka, Norway, 1997
Photographer Jorma Puranen (born 1951) has long been concerned with nature and the representation of northern landscapes, particularly Lapland, as well as light and its reflection.
One of his most famous projects is Imaginary Homecoming. In the 1990s, on a visit in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, he found some old archive boxes full of glass negatives. They were ethnographical images of the Sámi, taken by G. Roche, employed by the French Count Bonaparte on an expedition to Lapland in 1884.
Puranen took them back to the wildernesses of Lapland and photographed them once more in their native surroundings, where they became a photographic installation in the tundra. He published them in his book Kuvitteellinen kotiinpaluu / Imaginary Homecoming (Pohjoinen, 1999).
Puranen’s 2006 series Icy Prospects explores landscape: the large pictures are made by painting wood with black gloss paint, reflecting the landscape on the wood and photographing the reflection.
Snow, ice, water, sky and trees are portrayed the way that brings Impressionism to mind, as Liz Wells writes in her introduction in the book entitled Icy Prospects, published by Hatje Cantz (Germany, 2009).
Jorma Puranen: Icy Prospects (series, 2006)
A new exhibition of Jorma Puranen’s work from 1992 to 2010, at EMMA, the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, opened on 29 September; it runs until 9 January 2011. Partly retrospective, it features Puranen’s techniques of chromogenic colour and black and white photography, showcasing his highly original style.
Success after success
9 March 2012 | This 'n' that
The women of Purge: Elena Leeve and Tea Ista in Sofi Oksanen's Puhdistus at the Finnish National Theatre, directed by Mika Myllyaho. Photo: Leena Klemelä, 2007
Sofi Oksanen’s Purge, an unparalleled Finnish literary sensation, is running in a production by Arcola Theatre in London, from 22 February to 24 March.
First premiered at the Finnish National Theatre in Helsinki in 2007, Puhdistus, to give it its Finnish title, was subsequently reworked by Oksanen (born 1977) into a novel – her third.
Puhdistus retells the story of her play about two Estonian women, moving through the past in flashbacks between 1939 and 1992. Aliide has experienced the horrors of the Stalin era and the deportation of Estonians to Siberia, but has to cope with the guilt of opportunism and even manslaughter. One night in 1992 she finds a young woman in the courtyard of her house; Zara has just escaped from the claws of members of the Russian mafia who held her as a sex slave. (Maya Jaggi reviewed the novel in London’s Guardian newspaper.) More…
Graphic success
10 May 2012 | In the news
Finnish Comics Annual: picture by Katja Tukiainen
The 2012 Finnish Comics Annual, edited by Reija Sann, was published in May by HuudaHuuda and the Finnish Comics Association. The book focuses on everyday realism, featuring eleven artists: Terhi Ekebom, Grönroos & Rantio, Matti Hagelberg, Pauli Kallio, Tarmo Koivisto, Mika Lietzen, Petteri Tikkanen, Tiitu Takalo, Katja Tukiainen and Riitta Uusitalo. In their work the limits of the individual and the collective, the local and the universally human are explored by means of fantasy.
The first Finnish Comics Annual, featuring Finnish comics and graphic novels in English, was published last year. The editor was Ville Hänninen.
This year’s Finlandia Comics Prize, worth €5,000, awarded by the association Tampere Kuplii (‘Tampere bubbles’) at a comics festival of the same name in Tampere on 4 May, went to graphic designer and illustrator Ville Tietäväinen for his voluminous graphic novel Näkymättömät kädet (‘Invisible hands’, WSOY, 2011). Ten finalists were chosen by a jury out of 68 candidates, and the final choice was made by actor Armi Toivanen.
Näkymättömät kädet is the story of a Moroccan tailor, Rashid, who loses his job and has to leave his family to look for work in Europe. For an illegal alien life in Spain is unbearably difficult. Introducing the work in the article ‘Funny peculiar’ (there is also a sample from Tietäväinen’s work) Heikki Jokinen comments: ‘Through the story of one person, Tietäväinen speaks of important matters: poverty, human value and what keeps us going, hope.’