Authors

Home alone?

30 June 2003 | Authors

Kari Hotakainen

Photo: Veikko Somerpuro

Kari Hotakainen’s novel Juoksuhaudantie (‘The Trench Road’, WSOY, 2002), has sold more than 100,000 copies, an enormous number in Finland, and more than any other Finlandia Prize-winning work since 1986. Why?

Matti Virtanen is close to being the most common man’s name in Finland. In Kari Hotakainen’s sixth novel, this on the one hand ordinary but on the other extraordinarily obsessive Virtanen chances, in a state of agitation, to hit his wife, as a result of which the wife and their daughter leave. Virtanen gets it into his head that the only way to win forgiveness and get his family back again is to get them a home of their own. Virtanen believes himself to be a blameless ‘home-front man’, the opposite of the wargoing generation of his father and grandfather:

‘A home veteran looks after all the housework and understands women. Throughout our marriage I have done everything that our fathers did not. I did the laundry, cooked the food, cleaned the flat, I gave her time to herself and protected the family from society…. I listened, I understood,I caressed, I foreplayed and kept the mood going after intercourse. I had had no education in any of this, nor was there any kind of example for me tofollow.’ More…

Conserving memory

Issue 1/2003 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

One could almost call Birgitta Boucht’s narrative style Chekhovian, even though the tales she tells in Konservatorns blick (‘The conservator’s gaze’) are not fictitious. The ‘gazes’ in these seemingly peripheral, marginal, trivial stories are all essentially rather similar; perhaps this is one aspect of what Boucht calls ‘the conservator’s gaze’: ‘When culture, society and our hopes for the future begin to crack, we automatically turn to our memories and examine them with a conservator’s gaze: at once tender and severe.’ Memories often contain a great deal which is both trivial and of little importance, yet it is precisely these banalities which can lead us to worlds filled with essential matters. More…

Abrupt bewitchment

Issue 1/2003 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Jouni Inkala (born 1966) published his first collection of poetry in 1992. For some time it seemed that he had already developed his style to the limit, creating an intimate, concentrated tone with a characteristically calm rhythm and a pensive narrative voice. Words and images form a chain, which winds itself round a mystery: something which we can approach and redefine again and again, but which we can never fully apprehend.

In Inkala’s first collection, there are some poems which are so carefully polished, so skilful and considered, that even the dust seems to fall meticulously into place. He has gradually introduced points into his poems at which such control disappears and the writing suddenly ruptures. More…

In no-woman’s-land

Issue 1/2003 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Ten years ago, when Kaarina Valoaalto moved to the country, to the village of Toivakka in central Finland, I received a note from her:

‘350g of me has just moved, the other 99kg is still in the thick of things. The final truckload – the chickens, the ducks, the goats, the geese, the cat – is leaving tomorrow at six (a.m.) in special boxes carried by volunteers. The current has taken my heart and the rapids my brain….’

Kaarina Valoaalto embodies the myth of the poet’s ‘creative madness’ by writing the way she lives and by living the way she writes. In the fragment ‘Hometalo’ (‘The mouldy house’) from a collection of poems, Räppiä saarnaspöntöstä (‘Rap from the pulpit’, 1997) two sisters, Eine and Tyyne, move into the house of their dreams in the countryside only to be met by a sharp smell: mould. The reality in the heart of the country reveals itself to the newcomers in a tragicomic way. More…

Woman and myth

Issue 4/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Anu Kaipainen (1933-200) was a prolific writers; she published more than twenty novels, numerous stage, television and radio plays.

Kaipainen’s work has not been translated very widely. ‘The language of my books has often proved too difficult,’ the writer herself has said. Kaipainen’s language rings with the rhythms of the Karelian dialect, even the songs of the Kalevala, although in earlier novels it is linked with social reportage.

Typical of the writer’s work is diversity of material and style. Before post-modernism, this was called a collage technique. In her novels, Kaipainen has interleaved myths, folk stories and contemporary themes, as she also does in  Granaattiomena (‘Pomegranate’, WSOY) which is entwined around the Oedipus story from the point of view of Oedipus’s mother. More…

Creatures in the family

Issue 4/2002 | 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…

Humankind in disguise

30 September 2002 | Authors, Reviews

Thomas Warburton

Thomas Warburton

Thomas Warburton (born 1918) has for sixty years tossed off words, poems, narratives, translations, literary histories and articles. He transforms Finnish and English literature into Swedish (he has also has translated several of Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories into English) and writes about ancient Japanese culture.

It comes as no surprise that Thomas Warburton’s latest book is called Förklädnader (‘Disguises’). Having such a long experience he knows how to get under the skin of so many literary characters in order to draw forth their stories. More…

Hiding the soul

30 September 2002 | Authors

Petri Tamminen

Photo Irmeli Jung

The world makes people anxious, is the thesis of the writer Petri Tamminen in his new book, Piiloutujan maa (‘The land of the hider’). Well, if this is true, what do you do then? Rage and fight – or go into hiding?

The people in Tamminen’s world choose a hiding place. Fortunately, the world is full of them, and they are not only places, but also states of mind and modes of behaviour.

The writer and freelance reporter Petri Tamminen (born 1966) made his debut with a volume of short prose entitled Elämiä (‘Lives’, see Books from Finland 3/1994), in which people’s life stories are presented in about 200 words; entire decadesflash by in a sentence, or lives are summed up in a single event, often an apparently insignificant one. The comic and the tragic lie side by side, and are often not reached by language, but what the author does not choose to say. Next came the short story book Miehen ikävä (‘Male blues’, 1997) and the novel Väärä asenne (‘The wrong attitude’, 2000), which described the nightmares of a new father, plagued with a horror of bacteria. More…

On the uselessness of poetry

Issue 3/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Essays

Poetry has become a habit, or a dependency, a bit like a long marriage, or the habit of doing the football pools, or of getting involved in jazz.

I began my career as a writer in the autumn of 1962 with a slim volume of poetry, Ventil (‘Valve’). Ever since then I have written and read poetry continuously. Over a period of forty years I have published about twenty collections.

Since for most of that time I have also had other jobs, either as a psychiatrist or as a politician (from 1987 to 1999 I was a member of Parliament, from 1990 to 1998 leader of the newly founded Vasemmistoliitto [Left Alliance] and from 1995 to 1999 Minister of Culture in Paavo Lipponen’s five-party government), my writing of poems has often been concentrated on summer holidays and weekends. So it’s often summer in my poems. More…

Endurance tests

Issue 3/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Jari Järvelä (born 1966) puts his characters in extreme situations, making them victims of crime, wanderers in the desert, victims of car crashes as in the novel 66 luuta (‘66 bones’, 1998), or of torture and extortion as in the novel Lentäjän poika (‘The pilot’s son’, short-listed for the Finlandia Prize in 1999) and of war in the novel Veden paino (‘The weight of water’, 2001).

There are also plenty of problems to be found in difficult relations between men and women or at work. Järvelä’s themes also include power games originating in expert power and the shame that follows humiliation. These are also linked with a criticism of the Finnish culture of silence. This stops people not only from speaking, but also from analysing their traumatic experiences. More…

Quiet strength

Issue 3/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Eeva Tikka (born 1939) is an explorer of what lies under the surface, the secret strata of the human mind, who reveals the whirlpools that are generally hidden between the ordinary and the conventional. The themes of her collection of short stories, Haapaperhonen (‘The butterfly’, 2002) are death and relinquishment.

Tikka originally trained as a biology teacher and worked in teaching for a couple of decades before becoming a full-time writer in 1982. She has published more than 20 volumes, comprising novels, collections of short stories, poems and children’s stories. The children’s stories are illustrated by her sister, Saara Tikka. More…

Displaced persons

Issue 2/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews

The novels of Asko Sahlberg (born 1964) have introduced a new kind of existential narrative cum thriller to Finnish literature. Interview (2002) by Markus Määttänen

Asko Sahlberg survived a real test of his skills as a writer in the year 2000 in the shape of his novel Eksyneet (‘The lost’). It almost killed him.

‘When I finally finished it, I went on a binge for about a month. A terrible depression, almost as if a child had died. Such a deep low that my private life, too, went to hell, and I split up with the Swedish woman I’d been living with. It was perhaps the most difficult process I’ve been through in my entire life. But it made a damn good book.’

Asko Sahlberg was the literary phenomenon of autumn 2000. A Finn who had lived the life of an outsider in Gothenburg, Sweden, for four years and had deliberately set out to be a writer gave voice to the Scandinavian darkness. More…

From Bosnia with love

31 March 2002 | Authors, Reviews

Daniel Katz

Photo: Pertti Nisonen

Daniel Katz’s new novel Laituri matkalla mereen (‘A jetty to the sea’, WSOY, 2001), tells the story of the impossible romance between the Bosnian wife of a blind Finnish colonel and a history teacher. Introduction by Tuva Korsström

At some point 250 years ago, a Swedish monarch decided to grant town status to some villages in the estuary of Kuhnusjoki (‘Sluggish river’) on the south-west coast of Finland.

There the little town lies today and is, with its environs, the setting for Daniel Katz’s novel Laituri matkalla mereen (‘A jetty to the sea’). It’s the late 1990s, early autumn, and this year the autumn gales come early. The history teacher Henry Loimu goes down to the bank of the river to repair his jetty in the gusts of wind. More…

Head first into literary stardom

Issue 1/2002 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Reidar Palmgren has described his first novel as ‘a story about father and son, swimming, cycling, hi-fi electronics and ghosts’.

Palmgren has had frequent opportunities to talk about his definition, as Jalat edellä (‘Feet first’). He has become a popular guest in libraries, book shops and on television programmes, the novel was awarded the Helsingin Sanomat Literary Prize for the best first work in 2001, it has been selling well and the rights have already been sold for a translation into Swedish. More…

Poetry for a new age?

Issue 4/2001 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

The brilliant colours and new free verse of the poetry of Katri Vala (1901-1944) inspired her contemporaries in the 1920s, but also divided them – into those for whom Vala’s romantic exoticism brought to mind the movies of Rudolph Valentino and those who were enchanted by the freedom of her imagination. ‘Wild and full-blooded and primitively lovely’, Katri Vala was to die of consumption at the tragically early age of 42. Vesa Mauriala introduces her work

Like many Finnish beginner poets, Katri Vala published her first works in the children’s magazine Pääskynen (‘The swallow’), and later in Nuori Voima (‘Young power’), a publication intended for schoolchildren. Around this latter, originally didactic, magazine, there subsequently grew up the Young Power League, and in the mid-1920s this in turn gave birth to a group called the Torch-Bearers, which first published intensely personal nature poetry but later began to import European influences into Finnish literature. More…