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

Finns like to categorise everything, including writers and books. One author writes ‘realist prose’; another, ‘historical women’s fiction’; Finnish also has a special term, viihderomaani, meaning, literally, ‘entertainment’ or ‘pastime’ novel, a genre that includes, for example, the work of Barbara Cartland, Jeffrey Archer or Sidney Sheldon (and is recognised as an Anglo-Saxon speciality).

A writer who has been categorised in the ‘entertainment’ section of literature may find it surprisingly difficult to fight his or her way out.

It looks as if Leena Lander (born 1955) has succeeded. Tummien perhosten koti (‘Home of the dark butterflies’, Kirjayhtymä, 1991), her seventh novel – her first appeared ten years ago – was a finalist for this year’s Finlandia prize, and is now in its fifth printing. The book has also received the Kalevi Jäntti prize for young writers. More…

Sometimes with fury, sometimes with delight, the Finnish reading public has followed Hannu Salama’s career with unflagging interest for almost 30 years. For the past ten years, the author has let it be known that he has been working on a novel about the Finnish traitor Otto Wille Kuusinen, a henchman of Stalin entrusted with high office in the Kremlin, who managed to survive the worst years of his mentor’s terror.

Ottopoika (‘Otto the adopted’, 1991) is a disappointment in that it is not, in fact, a political novel about the chameleon-like Kuusinen, but rather a story about a Finnish writer, Risto Mikkola, Hannu Salama’s alter ego, whose intention it is to write a book about Kuusinen. Neither is this Mikkola a Kremlinologist of any description, but, patently, a prisoner of his upbringing: he spent his childhood among the proletariat of Tampere, an industrial city in central Finland sometimes known as the Manchester of Finland, whose suburb, Pispala, was a hotbed of Finnish communism. More…

The task of a story is to find words to express that which is too extraordinary to be told. ‘Stones should interpret silence and make it understandable.’

Colorado Avenue, Lars Sund’s third novel, is undoubtedly his most spectacular and dramatic so far. A substantial and weighty epic (a rare genre in Finland-Swedish literature), the book is at the same time formally inventive and playful. A particularly dramatic, action-packed episode may be written in the form of a script for a silent film, while a broader portrait of the times is sketched in a chapter which invites the reader to examine a set of old glass negatives, found among the effects of a parish primary schoolteacher, which an enthusiastic indoor gardener has later incorporated into a greenhouse to protect his tomato seedlings. More…

It is unavoidable, really, that in her new book, Umbra, Leena Krohn should have found herself addressing paradoxes. She has long examined the complexities of humanity: good and evil, life and death, the biological relation of Homo sapiens and other creatures with the world, the contrasts of life and the extremes of phenomena. Humanity is filled with paradoxes, but the most difficult of them all is the paradox of evil: does an evil-doer will evil because he must? Or must he do evil because he wills it?

Umbra is a doctor. He works in a hospital; some of surgery hours are spent at a clinic called Aid for the Overstrained and at a research centre whose name is Negative Influences, which cares for violent criminals: rapists, sadists, paedophiles. Umbra is interested in the compulsion of pleasure that drives his violent patients, in the shadow that swallows conscience, the suffering of knowledge of the truth. ‘Moral sensitivity is one of the human senses,’ Umbra ponders. ‘Most people have it. In the clinics patients it is absent. Perhaps they were born without it…’ More…

One of the ways in which the comparative youth of Finland’s culture makes itself felt is in the fact that there is never any great distance between low and high culture. Finnish literature has always naturally mixed popular and high art elements: in dealing with the themes and traumas that define the national consciousness, it has proved possible to use folk tales, pop songs or jokes as a distancing mechanism.

The work of Aulikki Oksanen is characterised by just this kind of mix. She is not only a writer: since her literary debut in 1966, she has also been well-known for her work as an actress, a singer of radical political songs, and for her illustrations of her own children’s books.

Oksanen’s interest in the world of folk tales and myths, and their modern equivalents, popular song and cinema, can be partly explained by her generation and its political consciousness. Appearing in politically engaged plays and films, writing and singing political songs, Oksanen (born 1944) was one of the most prominent figures in the Finnish cultural life of the Sixties. More…

Olli Jalonen’s novel Isäksi ja tyttäreksi (‘Becoming father and daughter’), one of the shortlisted books for the 1991 Finlandia Prize, is set across Europe in 1999. Introduction by Erkka Lehtola

Olli Jalonen (born 1954) is one of those authors who have brought Finnish literature out of the forests and into the cities – even into the nuclear shelters. Unien tausta (‘A background of dreams’) won a short story competition run by the publishing house of Otava, and was published in 1978. His first novel, Sulkaturkki (‘Coat of feathers’) appeared in 1979, to be followed by Ilo ja häpeä (Joy and shame’, 1981), Hotelli eläville (‘A hotel for the living’,1983), Johan ja Johan (‘Johan and Johan’, 1989) and the story-novel Tuhkasaari (‘Ash Island’, 1987). Jalonen was awarded the Eino Leino Society Prize this year; Johan ja Johan was on the shortlist for the Finlandia Prize. More…