Reviews

An antiutopia, updated

30 September 2004 | Authors, Reviews

Leena Krohn

Photo: Ida Pimenoff

How many goodly creatures are the here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!

The quotation is the motto of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World dystopia; in Shakespeare’s The Tempest the innocent Miranda sees strangers for the first time when a ship is wrecked on the shore of Prospero’s enchanted island. In Huxley’s world, created in 1932, children in the year ‘600 After Ford’ are bred in test tubes, and the opium for the people, ‘soma’, is taken to fight off anxiety. More…

Cosmic and comic

Issue 3/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Sabine Forsblom’s first novel Maskrosguden (‘The dandelion god’; Söderströms, 2004) is compulsive reading, an intelligent, action-packed family chronicle, whose secretive but vulnerable female narrator has a strong sense of both the tragic and the comic in daily life and, no less important, a clear analytical understanding of historical events.

Maskrosguden is unusual among recent novels in being firmly rooted in the history of the Swedish-speaking working class in Finland. Finland is a bilingual country that contains a small but influential Swedish-speaking community mainly concentrated in Helsinki and on and around the western and southern coasts. The Swedish-speaking working class was mainly concerned with farming and fishing but, like much of the rest of the country, it was overtaken in the 20th century by rapid industrialisation. This development is one of the themes in Sabine Forsblom’s novel, which is set in the small picturesque coastal town of Borgå, fifty kilometres east of Helsinki. Today Borgå is a tourist attraction, but it was once the home of ordinary folk whose humble lives involved a constant battle for survival and integrity amid harsh working conditions. More…

Right between the eyes

Issue 3/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Something that most Finnish men have in common is the one year’s service in the army they experience at the age of around twenty. Military service affects all males, but nowadays many opt to discharge their obligation in the form of community service working in daycare centres or hospitals.

The army also brings together a considerable number of Finnish writers. Compulsorily united, men from different backgrounds who are doing their national service form a kind of laboratory, and by studying them the writers have managed to tackle many different themes, from the exercise of power, violence and oppression on the one hand, to comradeship and solidarity on the other.

The army is in itself an extreme situation: the limits of the young men’s freedom are closely regulated, and the purpose of training is to learn how to wage war. In books that depict the army, conditions are often presented in an even more exacerbated form. In his novel Lahti (WSOY, 2004) Arto Salminen (born 1959) makes an unusual emphasis: the officers in the novel treat war as though they were consultants to the management of a business concern; they talk of dead soldiers as ‘products’, of the war as ‘the market area’, of civilian casualties as ‘waste material’. The most important things are economic efficiency and functional logistics – these officers do not recognise any other values. More…

Briefly put

Issue 3/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Petri Tamminen (born 1966) is literally a man of short stories. He made his debut in 1994 with a volume of fictional biographies called Elämiä (‘Lives’), containing the stories of peoples’s lives presented in about 200 words each.

In them, entire decades flash by in a sentence, or lives are summed up in a single event, often apparently insignificance. In most cases, the comic, the tragic and the melancholy are not captured in language, but in what the author chooses not to say.

His novel Väärä asenne (‘Wrong attitude’, 2000) describes the nightmares of a new father plagued with a bacteriophobia. Tamminen’s collection of short prose, Piiloutujan maa (‘The land of the hider’, 2002), is a kind of manual for those oppressed by the anxiety of existence. The author suggests that anxious people should look for good hiding places to escape the madding crowds for a while. Attics, libraries or airports can be suitable refuges, but havens are also provided by states of mind and modes of behaviour. By hiding, ‘the anxious person rests, takes a holiday from the world and its rules’, he explains. More…

Romantic and political

30 June 2004 | Authors, Reviews

Tomi Kontio

Photo: Heini Lehväslaiho

If I had to describe Tomi Kontio’s new book of poems, Vaaksan päässä taivaasta (‘A span away from heaven’, Teos, 2004, page 93) in ten words or less, I would say that it is a succession of deep breaths taken between catastrophes great or small.

Since I have a few more words at my disposal here, I’ll also say that it meets every expectation set up by his previous three volumes of poetry: sonorous language, an essentially Romantic but not egocentric worldview, and extraordinary skill in combining straightforward narrative with spectacularly effortless runs of metaphors, as in these lines from the poem ‘Pietà’: More…

Between good and evil

Issue 2/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

There are some wounds which take far longer than three generations to heal. In 1918 the great grandfathers of today’s Finns fought a bloody war, and touching the scars that conflict left behind still hurts.

The Finnish Civil War erupted in the aftermath of the Russian revolution. The reasons for the war were nonetheless deeply embedded in Finland’s internal problems, issues of land ownership and the weak position of the working classes. The workers formed the Red Guard and their opponents the White Guard, resulting ultimately in 30,000 deaths, mostly on the side of the Reds, who lost the war.

Amongst the Whites there served a group of officers called Jägers, who had been trained in Germany. They had been smuggled out of the country in order that they would one day return to lead Finnish troops in the struggle for independence against the tsar’s army. When they returned, however, the tsar had been overthrown and Finland had gained independence. Thus the Jägers ended up fighting their own compatriots, the insurgents of the workers’ uprising. The heroic Jägers have become one of the many myths surrounding the Civil War, but so have the Red Guard women who fought like beasts, Leena Lander (born 1955) explores these myths in her novel Käsky (‘Command’). More…

Our fellow creatures

30 June 2004 | Authors, Reviews

Hannele Huovi

Photo: Tiina Itkonen

Hannele Huovi is a compelling story-teller (see page 98) but, again and again, she makes us realise what a strange place our world is – how easily we can slip out of it into dream or psychosis, or cross some concealed frontier into a parallel universe.

Hers is a readable form of surrealism – the art of defamiliarising familiar things by putting them in anomalous environments. The results are absorbing for children but fascinating and entertaining for adults too, an essential of good children’s literature. Because it can be serious without being solemn and can expand consciousness, the genre has engaged very great wits from Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll. Eeva-Liisa Manner’s stories (see Books from Finland 1/2004) are another obvious point of contact, but Huovi is brilliantly inventive and completely original. More…

From Haifa to Helsinki

Issue 1/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Interviews, Reviews

Born into a Palestinian Christian family in Israel, the journalist Umayya Abu-Hanna has just published a prize-winning autobiographical novel – in Finnish. Here, she tells Anna-Leena Nissilä about life on the outside

In Haifa, Israel, in the 1960s and 1970s, a little girl whose wild, curly hair will not obey a comb is growing up. She is the oldest of three children in a Christian Palestinian family; her father is a rector and poet, her mother a pharmacist and a convinced feminist. Both are solidly leftwing. At home Arabic and English are spoken interchangeably; the children pick up Hebrew on the street. When their education at a Catholic convent begins, Italian and French are added to their languages. More…

A tubby muse

Issue 1/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995) is one of the great lyric poets of the second half of the 20th century and a pathfinder for Finnish modernism. Less well-known are her sporadically produced prose works of the 1950s: three novels, a collection of short stories, and stories published in magazines.

Prose was a concomitant of her poetry, where she could try out diverse subjects and stylistic experiments. For the reader, the poet’s prose provides a framework for understanding the poems: it contextualises their background, experience and thinking. In spite of the difference of genre, the style is recognisably from the same hand: sensitive and violent, abruptly montaged, full of intelligent humour and tragedy.

The short-story collection Kävelymusiikkia pienille virtahevoille (‘Passacaglia for small hippopotami’, 1958) created alongside the poetry volume Tämä matka (‘This journey’, 1956) and to some extent performing variations on the same themes and motifs – is subtitled ‘an exercise’. The ‘exercises’ are small, elegant, verbally crafted works of art, mysterious and surprising. One of the aims is ‘the joy of insight’, the workings of the mind; though, as the narrator says, ‘intuition sometimes grant a more unalloyed joy than semi-comprehension’. Looking at the constellations or Sanskrit texts or reading poetry, even without comprehension, the ‘I’ of the stories feels a profound aesthetic pleasure. More…

Sounds familiar

Issue 1/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Finland’s national poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, wrote in Swedish, but modelled his work on the Finnish-language folk tradition. The poet Risto Ahti describes the oddly easy experience of rendering Runeberg’s work back into Finnish

In the Swedish literary canon, Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877) is one of the most important writers, in fact the most important after August Strindberg.

In the Finnish literary world, Runeberg is a stranger. He is known as a writer of hymns, and of the words of a few songs, but his importance is recognised essentially as a patriotic figure, not a writer. At one stage, Finnishness and Runebergness were spoken of almost in the same breath. Until the 1930s, his collection of poetry Fänrik Ståls sägner (Tales of Ensign Stål, I-II, 1848, 1860) was learned by heart like the Ten Commandments – not for its literary merits, but for its patriotic spirit. More…

What makes a classic?

Issue 1/2004 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

In the bicentenary year of Finland’s national poet, Johan Ludvig Runeberg, Pertti Lassila sets his work against the background of the country’s turbulent history

The fifth of February, birthday of Johan Runeberg (1804–1877), a Finnish poet who wrote in his native Swedish, was already a patriotic festival in the 19th century; lighted candles were set in the windows of the Grand Duchy of Finland. Late in the century, the custom became a silent protest against the measures which, in the opinion of Finns, represented Russian oppression and threatened the country’s autonomy. The candle tradition later moved to Finland’s independence day, 6 December.

When, in 1904, the centenary of Runeberg’s birth was celebrated, Russian pressure meant that this was a politically uncertain and dramatic period. A crisis developed when a Finnish student named Eugen Schauman, in the June of the same year, murdered the Russian governor general, Nikolai Ivanovitch Bobrikov, in Helsinki for political reasons. Runeberg’s centenary year gathered the nation around the poet who, more than any other in Finland, was the symbol of love of the country. The first systematic translation project for the rendering of Runeberg’s work into Finnish was also in progress. More…

A taste of life

30 March 2004 | Authors, Reviews

Merja VirolainenThe origins of the world, personal histories and Finnish history intertwine in a language bringing new meanings to familiar words and placing newer words in their older contexts. In her new collection of poetry, her fourth, Olen tyttö, ihanaa! (‘I’m a girl, wonderful!’, Tammi, 2003), Merja Virolainen (born 1962) combines reality and make-believe, life lived and that yet to come, in an outstanding fusion of themes and images.

Virolainen is a master of words. Last year she published and edited a substantial body of long-awaited translations of poetry from two continents. The Finnish-German poetry anthology Toisen sanoin / Mit den Worten des Anderen (‘In someone else’s words’, Like, 2003) demonstrates how meanings and reading between the lines can open up across two languages. The volume Hän jota ei ole (‘The one who doesn’t exist’, Nihil Interit, 2003), focusing on contemporary English-language poetry from India, is a fine testament to the immense undertaking of its two editors, Virolainen and Markus Jääskeläinen. The anthology is the most extensive collection of post-colonial poetry ever published in Finland. More…

The Turku Decameron

30 March 2004 | Authors, Reviews

Riku Korhonen

Photo: Ari Kasanen

It was in the 1960s that Finns began to move en masse from the countryside to the town, but literature has not urbanised itself at quite the same pace. The majority of new literature is set in the countryside, amid nature, and even urban stories tend to shy away from city centres. After the countryside, the suburb has become one of the most fundamental backdrops in new Finnish literature.

Kahden ja yhden yön tarinoita (‘Tales from two and one nights’, Sammakko, 2003) by Riku Korhonen (born 1972) is typical of suburban novels in that it demonstrates how the sense of community found in small villages continues in the lives of children living in the suburbs. Children play together, form tribes and know everybody else’s business. However, Korhonen is not content simply to describe what goes on inside the Turku suburbs, but through the various stories in the novel he takes us from flat to flat, introducing us to the many adult tenants, whose lonely, oppressive existence is a far cry from village life. People in the suburbs live physically very close together, but the spiritual distance between neighbours can be enormous. More…

Totalitarian tendencies

Issue 4/2003 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Olli Jalonen is a master at creating a sense of dystopia, alienation and what it feels like to end up in the wrong place. He skilfully homes in on aspects of our everyday reality which resemble totalitarian tendencies, underlining them and their deadly implications through understatement, and by setting them in environments which are either utopian or skilfully alienated, seemingly realistic and neutral.

Jalonen is not a true satirist, but he has a flair for depicting people’s motives and changes in their identities in situations exploring the boundaries of ‘the normal’. Circumstances which unwittingly uphold repulsive social control, modifying human values, circumstances in which people die, into which they are forced, or against which they lamely revolt, are at the heart of Jalonen’s work. Equally important is the documentary-style reportage of the lives of people who are in danger of being forgotten about by history. More…

Outside the goldfish bowl

Issue 4/2003 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews

Agneta von Koskull was born in 1947 into an aristocratic family in Helsinki – which, in post-war Finland, did not involve any great economic luxury. Her father, Baron Erik von Koskull, worked at the Hufvudstadsbladet newspaper as a correspondent in the advertising department, while her mother Elsa, née Behm, ‘minded the till’ at a shipping company. Agneta and her two older sisters were looked after first by their beloved nanny, Dodo, and later by a series of more or less unsuitable home helps and an eccentric uncle. More…