Books from Finland - A literary journal of writing from and about Finland.

As the setting of her first novel, Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (‘Wonderful women beside the water’), Monika Fagerholm has chosen the Finland-Swedish summer paradise, a group of summer cottages by the sea just outside Helsingfors. The portrayal of summer cottages is, as Fagerholm herself has pointed out, almost a genre within Finland-Swedish literature; writings on the subject include those of Tove Jansson and Johan Bargum. Summer-cottage life involves a return to the safe lucidity of childhood, while those who live all the rest of the year in a cramped
 city apartment understandably enough 
dream of the freedom that the sea and the sun represent. Above all, the life that is lived in summer is more whole, more full than anything that is experienced during the dark winter. More…

The idea of the primacy of matter has taken on increasingly sombre resonances in
 Tiina Kaila’s work: in her third novel, Koe (‘The experiment’),
 an eccentric doctor seeks to reduce his human guinea-pigs to their primary,
 material, factors – and himself becomes the subject of his cruel experiment.

Tiina Kaila (born 1951) first came to the attention of the wider reading public in 1990 
with Bruno, a novel about the scientist and philosopher Giordano Bruno, whom the
 Inquisition burned at the stake in 1600; Bruno reached the final list for the Finlandia
 Prize. In creating her fictive Bruno, Kaila wished to
 portray how ‘terrifying, absurd and crazy a struggle the perception of the world is’.

Both Bruno and Koe combine acts of extreme violence with esoteric thought. But Kaila
 began as a children’s writer and a poet: her first book, a collection of poems entitled 
Keskustelu hämärässä (‘Conversation at dusk’), appeared in 1975, and was followed by
 children’s books and more poetry. More…

It is never easy to be a writer, but it can be particularly difficult if you are forever thrusting weapons into your critics’ hands. A writer who mixes and interleaves her literary texts with her own life is very vulnerable to both literary and other criticism.

Anja Kauranen (born 1954) is precisely this kind of writer. The characters and events of ali her seven prose works have clear connections with Kauranen’s own life, her Helsinki childhood, her Karelian family background, her sporting youth, her personal losses. She is not ashamed to allow herself to be interviewed by women’s magazines on subjects including, for example, boxing. She writes magazine columns on feminism and television programmes and took part enthusiastically in the debates over this winter’s presidential elections.

She is a talkative, lively and good-looking woman. This merely increases the burden she has to bear: if Kauranen writes about sex, it must be based on her own experiences. That is what was thought when her first novel, Sonja O. kävi täällä (‘Sonja O. was here’) was published in 1981. The newspaper reviews of the time consistently confused the novel’s writer with its narrator, a literature student who collected experiences and men. It was a young women’s odyssey and Entwicklungsroman which also attempted to analyse the arrival of feminism in Finland, in the midst of the extreme left-wing student movement of the 1970s. More…

In Urwind (Schildts; Finnish translation Otava, 1993), Bo Carpelan has written a poetic novel of strange depth and self-revelatory intensity. In this – on the surface – extremely simple story of a Helsinki secondhand bookseller whose wife leaves him for a year in order to do research at Harvard, there is a complex layering and criss-crossing of experience, past and present, that makes the narrative a matter more of inner than of outer experience: the fabric of the narrators life, his childhood, youth and earlier years is the subject of most of the 240 pages.

In his name, Daniel Urwind, a host of associations is contained, and this is also the generating point for a great deal of the novel’s thematic material. In the ‘ur-vind’, or ‘primordial attic’, are stored not only inanimate relics of the narrator’s past, but also memories of the people, the neighbours, friends and relatives who inhabited the apartment house in which he was brought up. Some of this material is already familiar from Carpelan’s Gården (‘The courtyard’) and his collection of prose poems Jag minns att jag drömde (‘I remember I dreamt’), but here it is linked to an intense and at times Ingmar Bergman-like meditation on the entire span of a man’s life, brought on by a crisis of loneliness and ultimate desertion. More…

Tytti Parras’ novel Vieras (‘The stranger’, 1993) is a chronicle of fear and loathing among boating classes of the Baltic. Introduction by Pekka Tarkka

Of all modern writers, the best delineator of life at sea is probably William Golding. His skill is apparent, among other things, in the way in which, as his ships do battle with the ocean, he arranges encounters between old styles of literature and, both on and below decks, lays bare the divisions of class. The most developed character in Rite’s of Passage, Mr Summers, has done something unusual, risen from deck-hand to first lieutenant; but despite his social ascent, he is forced to acknowledge: ‘In our country for all her greatness there is one thing she cannot do and that is to translate a person wholly out of one class into another. Perfect translation from one language into another is impossible. Class is the British language.’ More…

The characteristic genres of Daniel Katz (born 1938) are the picaresque novel, the tall story, and the burlesque. He is unusual in Finnish literature in being a humorist and a cosmopolitan. Ever since his first novel Kun isoisä Suomeen hiihti (‘When Grandfather skied to Finland’, 1969) he has drawn on his Jewish family’s rich supply of stories from eastern and central Europe. Katz transforms a dark and tragic background of cruelty, pogroms and alienation into piquant, warm-hearted narratives about survival.

Daniel Katz is one of the few male Finnish authors who does not write from a wounded, introverted ego. He is cheerful, open, alert and full of healthy scepticism towards both Jewishness and Finnishness. One of his tours de force is to portray the encounter between Nordic introversion and central European extroversion. This was one of the triumphantly successful achievements of his first novel, the story of his grandfather, a cavalry officer in the tsar’s army who came to Finland in order to get married.

Katz has novels and collections of short stories. He has settled in Finland-Swedish Liljendal in eastern Nyland (Uusimaa), and at the same time broadened the thematic scope of his writing to include the Middle East, both in his prose and as scriptwriter for a film about the Finnish orientalist Georg August Wallin. It has been said of Daniel Katz’s writing that his exuberant imagination is both a strength and a weakness. The episodes and the ideas sometimes have a way of devouring one another. But Katz can also produce taut and profound psychological compositions, particularly in his short stories. More…