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Breathe out, breathe in

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Nio dagar utan namn (‘Nine days without names’, Söderströms, 1998). Introduction by Bror Rönnholm

Quickly, at a zebra crossing
moments
          not of wonder but of
 something closely related: the tree
          upturned by the gale
 with its roots to the heavens, the lit-up
          church spire against the night sky, a few
simple gravestones viewed at a
          suitable season, a quartet from the Marriage of Figaro
 or just standing at a roaring
          crossing and writing this, invisible
 to all in exhaust fumes and a faint blue
          light from a hidden sun, a few
times mistaken for a
          loved pupil  More...

Bodies and souls

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Åtta kroppar (‘Eight bodies’) contains eight stories: Susanne Ringell would really have liked to include the reader’s body in the title, but then the figure nine in the title would have perhaps been associated with the expression ‘nine lives’ – like the cat’s – and she did not want that.

Ringell is not one to fall for a cheerful, pedagogical optimism, and her consciousness of the physical is at the same time a consciousness of each person’s exposed vulnerability. Exposed in a literal sense is the ‘central character’ in Vara sten (‘Be stone’, 1996) which is a collection of statements by a stone which has lain in a cornfield since time immemorial. The stone has a fixed position, with a point of view that is given once and for all. The stone is also infertile; it has to make do with looking at the productive cornfield or with being a place for loving couples to lie. More…

Cause of death

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

A short story from Åtta kroppar (‘Eight bodies’, Söderströms, 1998). Introduction by Ann-Christine Snickars

It was a bailer, a blue one. There they were, he, she, the bailer and a stormtossed net on the stern board of a hired boat. The boat had come with the cottage and the cottage with ‘Autumn archipelago package. Now nature is aglow.’

And it was aglow.

Masses of foliage and apples, damson and shiny russula spread out around them in all their glory. It happened everywhere, that glowing. Wherever one turned one’s gaze there was something ready to be picked or ready to fall, ready in general. Those first days they had, at least to each other, she to him, feigned enthusiasm about all this ripe richness, but that time was over.

Their time of fire and flames was over. More…

Arms and the man

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews

The work of Veijo Meri (born 1948) has a secure place in the canon of Finnish prose of the second half of the 40th century. One could say Meri is a man’s writer – especially favoured by men who have been at war. The male characters of his short stories, novels and plays find themselves in absurd and surprising situations in a world governed by chance. They are not, however, heroes, but everyday anti-heroes who are depicted by their author with laconic humour. Since the 1980s, Meri has turned to historical essays.

Meri is an unbelievably prolific speaking machine; hardly have I set foot inside his house when he is already, in his speech, strolling along the shore of the Pacific Ocean with Matti Kurjensaari, his late writer friend. The academic and writer Veijo Meri turned 70 on New Year’s Eve in 1998. The event was celebrated in the theatre, and a book was published about the writer and his work. And, of course, his birthday itself was celebrated: he no longer wishes to escape his age. ‘Can’t feel a thing,’ Meri says on the massive leather sofa in his living-room. Mrs Eeva Meri starts making coffee. ‘I’m just trying to understand that I’ve turned 70: when was it that I got to be so old?’ On his 50th birthday, he felt something: ‘It’s a threshold.’ That had, in fact, been preceded by some improvement in life; after the age of 45, apparently, one no longer suffers from hangovers and all the most sensitive nerves have stopped working.’ The world has become extremely familiar. There’s nothing mysterious hidden behind the hedge, on the other side of the horizon. You tend to avoid thinking about death, because it begins to seem a pity that you will have to leave the world, now that you finally feel at home here.’ More…

Underage

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

A short story from Leiri (‘Camp’, Otava 1972). Interview by Maija Alftan

In the dark and wet the tram seemed like a stale-smelling and badly-lit waiting room at a country station, its Post Office Savings Bank advertisement set out of reach of vandalising underage hands. The conductress was two-thirds out of sight behind her desk: a small person. I glanced at the time stamped on my ticket. My only timepiece.

It was the time of day when you can see your own face in the window and through to the outside as well. I stood in the doorway, hanging onto the bar. As the tram turned into the narrow canyon of Aleksanterinkatu, the street seemed like some kind of cellar. Fantastic, how the world darkens at the end of the year. And then, when it’s at its darkest, everything goes totally white. The low-slung cars seemed to be slinking round the tram’s feet. More…

Afterthought

Issue 2/1999 | Archives online, Essays, Non-fiction

From Novellit (‘The Short stories’, Otava 1985). Interview by Maija Alftan

The short story is a matter of expectancy and reception. So it has to offer surprises. It has to reward the waiting.

The surprises are caused by the known and the familiar. Often some mis­hap is needed; the most crucial can be some social fix. The story’s limited space provides three states, brought about by a change in the environment: the past, the future and the passing moment. They create a special, unique phase of life for one of the characters. A return to the past leads to the new – not to the previous, situation – and this isn’t in anyone’s control. Short stories often contain arbitrariness. More…

Text and textuality

Issue 1/1999 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

In winter, the writer Riikka Ala-Harja walks the last 50 metres of her journey home across ice. She lives in a large villa on an island near the centre of Helsinki. When the ice begins to melt she takes a pole with her in case she falls into the water. Ala-Harja does not, however, consider herself particularly brave on this account. She likes her island.

One of the main characters of her first novel, Tom Tom Tom, Elsa Kokko, known simply as Kokko, also lives on an island, but only in summer. Born in 1967, Ala-Harja, who trained as a dramaturge, says she has been ‘wringing out’ her novel for years. In 1990 she won first prize in the J.H. Erkko competition for short stories, and she has, among other things, written five radio plays, four stage plays and scripts for cartoons, directed dramatic texts, held an art exhibition of autobiographical texts and images made on plywood with tacks and thread, and teaches creative writing at the Theatre Academy and at the University of Industrial Art and Design, as well as at a sixth-form college. More…

Like father, like daughter

Issue 1/1999 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

Extracts from Tom Tom Tom (Gummerus, 1998). Introduction by Soila Lehtonen

A father and daughter in a hospital back garden

Bits of nail flick to the ground as Kokko cuts Tom’s nails, leaving rather brittle nail-ends among the lichen. In the middle of the hospital afternoon they’ve made their way down to the little park, to care for the hands of both of them, all four.

In the days before Africa Tom used to nurse Kokko on the living-room sofa and cut the nails on her most difficult hand, pushed the cuticles back and taught her the care that ought to be taken of nails, or she’d have smarting and pain round the cuticles. Kokko used to plead to be taken into his nail cutting lap oftener than she should, even when she’d really have preferred to grow longer nails. More…

A writer like himself

Issue 4/1998 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

I first got to know Jari Tervo in the early 1980s, when we were both studying to be journalists at the same college. He had already, at that time, published a volume of poetry, but he did not seem to me in the least like a poet. No anaemic appearance, dark, floating hair or incipient beard. Instead, resolutely curly flaxen hair, a good deal of body mass, a grey jacket and funny boots.

Tervo became a good general reporter, particularly fond of the early morning shift on evening newspapers, the ones where you have to wake up at three in the morning. On those shifts you ring round the police stations and ask what criminal homicides have been committed during the night. Another common job is to wake a celebrity or politician up with an early morning call and demand a statement on some issue or another. More…

The search for joy

Issue 4/1998 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

‘Thank heaven there are more important things than being right.’

Risto Ahti is a contemporary incarnation of the vates, the poet as a seer or prophet. Prophet of what? Perhaps Jonah’s desire to get out of the whale? Or humanity’s desire to get out of our conditioning.

Let’s say that Theseus has found the Minotaur and, far from killing him, has befriended him. He’d like to lead them both out of the Labyrinth, but Ariadne’s thread has been lost, and the cunning intricacy of the mind-forged walls are baffling. It’ s necessary to get lost – ‘so utterly lost, you don’t know whether you’re coming or going’. ‘The lost wander in their lostness till they come in sight of themselves and finally other people.’ More…

The only time for loving

Issue 4/1998 | Archives online, Fiction, poetry

Poems from Iloiset harhaopit (‘Happy heresies’, WSOY, 1998). Introduction by Herbert Lomas

Thief

Down from the top floor crept
a kind thief

and loaded a bed with silver,
nicked from a house in the harbour.

‘Ah,’, he said, like Weiss: ‘an
impecunious lot – no hope of swag.

The lady’s purse is empty, nothing but
matches, sugar, a teabag.

Too few frocks in the wardrobe too
for a pretty lady.’

Morning, and the bedside chair
is piled with frocks from the neighbour’s line.

A proper thief is smitten
and shows his philosophy of crime,

and I’m a poet!
Neither foxes nor police dogs stir my heart

but I do love the sheer out-and-out howling
dottiness of our time. More…

Home and abroad

Issue 4/1998 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

The short stories in Irti (‘Away’), a first collection by Sari Vuoristo (born 1964), are often set on the beach, at sea or even in the water. The characters include ship passengers, rowers, swimmers, sun-bathers, drowning people and fish.

Vuoristo lives in the Kallio district of Helsinki, high above the city, with a clear view of the flashing lighthouse on the Suomenlinna fortress island and the ships departing for Sweden and Estonia. ‘The sea before me,’ she says, ‘perhaps it’s some classic kind of longing for freedom.’ The short stories describe states of disengagement. ‘If there is some unifying idea, then it is the realisation that it is possible to disengage from unsatisfactory situations, or to let the past go.’ More…

The ring

Issue 4/1998 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

A short story from Irti (‘Away’, Gummerus 1998). Introduction by Milla Autio

When the car turns into the drive I know that this time it has happened. That this time it has not been for nothing that I have felt cold fear creep inside my stomach. And for a moment, as Vangelis gets out of the car and looks at me and Irini sighs deeply and grabs me as if for support, I feel nothing.

The landscape is the same, the trees and the burnt grass and the intoxicating scents of late summer. And the sounds, too, are the same; the merry cries of children farther off and the clatter of dishes from the kitchen. Later, of course, my landscape will shudder and quake from its place, fly on its way like disturbed papers. That was something you shouted at me about; other such incidents I do not remember, but when a gust of air from the door caught your papers you went mad. That moment is inscribed in my memory, caught there like the words on the pages of a book. More…

Local heroes

Issue 3/1998 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Two collections of short stories, two strong displays of a diverse literary talent. Two books: the first received the Helsingin Sanomat Literary Award for the best first book in 1995, the second the Savonia Prize; it was also shortlisted for the Runeberg Prize. Sari Mikkonen received the Suomi Prize for young artists in 1997. Those are the high points of the career of this 31-year-old writer to date. Not bad.

Born in Juankoski, in eastern Fin­land, Mikkonen is a writer who is exciting because she both continues and innovates a great tradition in Finnish literature. She is a latterday F.E. Sillanpää, the chronicler of the slow life of the Finnish countryside who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1939. Mikkonen describes remote districts with the boldness of the contemporary writer Rosa Liksom. In her short stories, she often describes people in traditional surroundings – people who are no longer countryfolk, but are not yet townspeople, either. To her, juxtaposition of things is more interesting that choosing one and rejecting the other. ‘You can’t be either–or; you have to be both–and. There are no absolute truths in the world,’ she has commented. More…

Incident at Experience Farm

Issue 3/1998 | Archives online, Fiction, Prose

A short story from Pakkasyön odottaja (‘Waiting for a frosty night’, WSOY, 1997). Introduction by Jukka Petäjä

I

The round steel teapot is new. Father brought it back from Birmingham, where he went on a visit with the others from the concrete factory. In the shop, the teapot was wrapped in rustling, soft tissue paper. Pirjo was given the honour of opening the package. The pot has been used for brewing tea ever since.

At school, her sister Karoliina is proud of the fact that at home they drink only tea; they are different from other people, different in a good way, one to be proud of. They have a real teapot. Sometimes, during breaktime, a morsel of the excellence of Karoliina Kamppinen falls Pirjo’s way. ‘Yes, let’s include her, she’s Karoliina’s sister, after all.’ More…