Reviews
Soulscapes
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Raija Siekkinen. Photo: Irmeli Jung
When the first collection of short stories by Raija Siekkinen (born 1953), entitled Talven tulo (‘The coming of winter’, 1978) appeared, the critics were unanimous on one point: here was a mature writer with an original, individual voice. For her second collection, Tuomitut (‘The condemned’, 1982), Raija Siekkinen received the coveted Kalevi Jäntti Prize. Since then she has remained faithful to the short story. And since the publication of her fourth collection, Pieni valhe (‘A small lie’), the reader has been able to trace a development in which she has polished and tightened her narrative and brought to it more and more poetic and symbolic elements.
The main character in Raija Siekkinen’s short stories is generally a woman, not old but not very young either, often alone, sometimes broken by illness. Death is a recurring theme with Siekkinen; illness withers her women, her men die sometimes by their own hand. Siekkinen writes seldom about children; when she does so, it is from a child’s point of view. This perspective results in a critique of the narrow and restricted world view of adults. But always sensitively, never pointing the finger. More…
A sense of order
Issue 2/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Solveig von Schoultz. Photo: Charlotta Boucht
That Solveig von Schoultz occupies the position of ‘grand old lady’ of Finland-Swedish poetry is beyond question; yet it is an epithet that fits her badly. It all too easily suggests the image of a stern and queenly poetess, an Edith Sitwell, Marianne Moore or Gabriela Mistral. The poetesses of Scandinavia are, by and large, less solemn – more gentle and down-to-earth, even when they grow older and wiser and ascend some of Parnassus’s more elevated thrones.
Solveig von Schoultz has, of course, had a long journey to the top. She has behind her twelve collections of poetry, at least fifteen volumes of prose, and an even greater number of plays for radio, television and theatre, spanning a good fifty years’ acitivity as a writer.
In this long artistic career there is both continuity and development. It might be said that the continuity is represented by the fact that from the very beginning she has preferred to describe women – their daily lives, their loves, thoughts, impulses, relationships. But since so much in the world of women and in women’s thinking has changed during the decades since her literary debut in the 1930s, both her themes and her outlook have necessarily altered, too. Among other things, she has had many of her early, then only half-developed ideas taken up by a later generation, and has thereby had them given back to her renewed. As a feminist she has always been one of the least militant, and for a short time some of her younger co-sisters were uncertain about the strength of her commitment to the Cause. More…
Too much or too little love
Issue 1/1987 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Rosa Liksom. Photo: Pekka Mustonen.
On the October day last year on which Rosa Liksom‘s second collection of short stories, Unohdettu vartti (‘The forgotten quarter’), was published, she also opened an art exhibition of her own work. The occasion took the form of a kind of cross between performance art and a practical joke. Young women dressed in Finnish military uniforms carried out body searches on every newcomer, changed the guard and drilled, while crackers exploded in the gallery. Many people were of the opinion that it was all no more than a silly joke. Even the art critics were not enthusiastic: they felt that Rosa Liksom’s felt pen work was derivative of a certain Danish artist who himself had copied the cartoon-like stick-men of the so-called Chicago school. But all the same, there emerged from the pictures a funny story about the artist’s adventures among the underground youth of Russia from Leningrad to Vladivostock.
Only her closest friends knew which of the soldiers in the gallery was Rosa Liksom, which her clones. Rosa Liksom is a pseudonym, and her little game of hide and seek has already lasted a couple of years. We know of her that she was born in Lapland, studied anthropology, has travelled in both East and West and lived for a long time in Copenhagen. Her writing was published for the first time in an anthology of the work of young authors, Kalenteri 84 (‘Calendar 84’, 1984). Her first work, the short story collection Yhden yön pysäkki (‘One-night stand’) was published in 1985 and achieved considerable success. More…
A poet’s perspective
Issue 4/1986 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Aila Meriluoto. Photo: Pertti Nisonen
When Aila Meriluoto burst on to the world of Finnish poetry 40 years ago in the autumn of 1946 she was at once hailed as a youthful prodigy. Praised lavishly by the leading critics, the 22-year-old poet’s first collection, Lasimaalaus, sold in phenomenal numbers: in a couple of years it went through eight editions, or 25,000 copies, which in Finland is still a record figure. Today total sales are well over 30,000.
Two poems attracted particular attention. One was Kivinen Jumala (‘God of stone’), a poem of defiance unleashed by the experience of wartime bombing, in which God is portrayed as having changed into a stone statue, and people as having hardened correspondingly. It was the first reaction of the younger generation to the war – abusive, strong and inevitable, the proclamation of the death of the kind, just God.
The other central poem of the collection was Lasimaalaus (‘Stained glass’) from which the collection took its name: a taut post-symbolist vision and a dazzling synthesis of the oneness of the world. Baudelaire, master of correspondances, might well have been satisfied with it. More…
Concrete dreams
Issue 3/1986 | Archives online, Authors, Reviews
Marja-Liisa Vartio. Photo: SKS archives
Pirkko Alhoniemi on Marja-Liisa Vartio’s works
Although it is now 20 years since the death of Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924-1966), her writing remains as vivid as ever. Her books are regarded as classics of modern Finnish prose, and they constantly attract new readers, as the demands for reprints testify. Vartio’s style has not lost its freshness, nor her social vision its edge, even in the teeth of the aggressive feminism of the 1980s.
It is a little difficult to gauge the secret of her continued popularity. Although the main character of her novels is always a woman, Vartio cannot really be seen as a champion of the feminine point of view. Most essential and at the same time paradoxical in her work is perhaps the fact that, from a purely Finnish starting point, she is able to give valuable insights into the general change in world view that followed the Second World War. More…