Search results for "tommi+musturi/2010/05/song-without-words/2009/09/what-god-said/2011/04/matti-suurpaa-parnasso-1951–2011-parnasso-1951–2011"

Movies and mores

16 April 2012 | Authors, Interviews

Tuuve Aro. Photo: Liisa Takala

Interview with Tuuve Aro, author of Himokone (‘Desire machine’): in these short stories she borrows titles and ambiance from the silver screen

A dark theatre, the smell of popcorn, expectation quivering in the air. Since childhood, the author and film critic Tuuve Aro (born 1973) has loved that magic moment when a new, exciting story is about to begin once again on the silver screen.

The stories in her fourth short story collection Himokone (‘Desire machine’, WSOY, 2012) have taken their names from films – Vertigo, Alien, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example. The book’s title comes from a certain Dr Samuel L. Brimstone, member of the ‘Royal Film Academy of Suffolk’: according to him, a film projector is a desire machine: it doesn’t give anything, it only shows, and for that very reason it is hard to resist. More…

Madness and method

10 May 2012 | Authors, Reviews

Juha Hurme. Photo: Stefan Bremer

One day during Advent in Helsinki the narrator in the novel Hullu (‘The lunatic’, Teos, 2012), a middle-aged man, goes mad.

Complete confusion fills his mind. He thinks he must be dead, but nevertheless manages to knock on the door of the mental hospital. To his amazement, he is admitted to the yellow building.

Because the boundaries between reality and self are, for him, completely blurred, he believes that the people in the hospital know absolutely everything about his unsuccessful life, and that he must expect humiliations and punishments. The people in white coats are aliens, or perhaps holograms. More…

Creatures in the family

31 December 2002 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Riina Katajavuori (born 1965) writes a poetry of quick shifts, cinematic cut, changes in point of view: in a translator’s note for Five from Finland (Reality Street Editions, London 2001), I said that they ‘incorporate voices, observations and acts of speech from the street, television, radio, lectures and books. These hums and buzzes are then distanced by being framed as laconic and ironic propositions.’

That observation still holds true for her new book. Koko tarina (‘The whole story’, Tammi, 2001). Ironic titles seem to be in vogue in contemporary Finnish poetry (e.g. Kai Nieminen’s Lopullinen totuus. Kaikesta, ‘The ultimate truth. About everything’, Tammi, 2002): while these eighty-some pages of poetry cannot literally tell any ‘whole story’, they show that Katajavuori’s work has become more expansive. It delineates a contemporary sphere of urban life in a more richly detailed way, employing an overall syntax that seems less discontinuous than before. More…

Just business?

24 September 2010 | Letter from the Editors

Money, money, money... Photo: Twid/Wikipedia

Through his work, a writer provides a living for both himself and his publisher. The publisher makes his profit through the work of his writers, and both parties are satisfied. Is this how it goes?

The novel Puhdistus (Purge, 2008) by the Finnish author Sofi Oksanen (born 1977) has been translated into 13 languages, including English, and by now it has sold who knows how many copies.

One would imagine her publisher would like to live happily ever after with his superstar, and perhaps also vice versa – for WSOY (est. 1878) has long been one of the most powerful, as well as the most enlightened, publishing houses in Finland. More…