Context N°18
by Jarmo Papinniemi
In the northeast corner of Europe lives a people five-million strong, crazy about sports, music, and reading. Finns head the list in terms of newspaper reading and library use, and studies show that Finnish children read better than any other country’s. When you use public transportation in Finland, you notice that almost everyone is reading something—mostly the free papers, but many have a book in their hands. Authors are revered, often appearing in the media, and their words have weight.
A literary utopia, then? Not exactly. The number of Finns is rather small, all things considered, and our language seems bizarre to the rest of the world. Print-runs are small; even a few thousand copies is a good showing. It’s a rare author who can support himself with his books alone—and most of those who do write predictable pop fiction. Thankfully, Finland has created a grant system that helps to ensure that artists have an income.
The landscape of Finnish literature has moved closer to general international trends in recent years. Crime novels and thrillers have been in vogue, and romantic woes still pass muster as a theme even for literature with serious ambitions. Stylistically, Finland is a down-to-earth land of realism, as it has been for a century now. Playful, postmodern narrative has never taken root here, despite increasing experimentation. Fantasy is practiced, and there have even been some notable successes in that field, but the mainstream has always trod the paths of realism.
The Finnish national character includes a penchant for the incessant questioning of one’s own identity. Historically we were first a part of the Kingdom of Sweden, then part of Russia. Our political independence is less than a hundred years old, and today discussions about the nature of our relationship with the East and West are still an integral part of Finnishness. Thus, national history plays a strong role in Finnish literature. The most important events were the bloody Civil War of 1918 and World War II (during which Finland fought a separate war against the Soviet Union, receiving help from Germany).
Two models for telling the stories of those wars were conceived during the 1950s, and both remain strongly influential in Finnish literature today. Väinö Linna’s (1920-1992) Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon sotilas, 1954; unfortunately, the 1957 English translation is not very good) is the ultimate Finnish war novel. It traces the various fates of the members of a machine-gun company in the maelstrom of war. The perspective is at the level of the enlisted men, who spend the majority of their time grousing and cracking jokes. These quick-witted soldiers appealed to the reading public in a way that had never been seen before. One important reason for this is the irony cultivated throughout the novel, which helps the men ride out even the fiercest storms. Though the war ends in defeat for Finland, the following oft-quoted sentence is loosed from a soldier’s lips: “The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics won, but tenacious little Finland came in a close second.” This expresses a typical Finnish attitude towards our nation and our history. We may be at the mercy of the great powers, but we’ve always kept our heads above water with irony and perseverance.
A different kind of model was created by Veijo Meri (1928-). His novel The Manila Rope (Manillaköysi, 1957; translated into English in 1967) is a fragmentary and absurd episodic novel, in which war turns out to be a wild goose chase that doesn’t produce anything but senseless and grotesque little yarns.
A significant portion of contemporary Finnish literature leans one foot on Väinö Linna and the other on Veijo Meri. Its subjects tend to hark back to history, or at least deal with issues that are important to the nation in some way. Though their mode is primarily realistic, black humor, irony, and absurdism all have a firm place.
Hannu Raittila (1956-), one of the more significant Finnish authors of our time, has himself acknowledged his debt to both Linna and Meri. Raittila’s novels are simultaneously metaphorical and realistic depictions of huge undertakings in which a character’s megalomaniac efforts are finally seen to self-destruct. The novel I Don’t Lack for Anything (Ei minulta mitään puutu, 1998) describes a mass religious meeting that the organizers want to build into the largest ever; Canal Grande (2001) is the story of a Finnish research team that wants to save a city from sinking into the water; Atlantis (2003) tells about a nouveau-riche millionaire’s attempt to build a theme park containing all of Finland in miniature on an island. Each novel is told in a series of monologues—a device typical of contemporary Finnish literature—in which the perspectives of different speakers complement and contradict each other. These novels, which exploit biblical and classical mythology, have both comic and allegorical dimensions; they tell about the consequences of hubris, the difficulty of communication, and what can occur when differing worldviews collide.
Similar to Raittila, Jari Tervo (1959-) has also written novels made up of complimentary monologues. The great majority of these are set in the northern town of Rovaniemi, where the residents, particularly petty criminals and other people who thrive on the streets and in bars, churn out their linguistically imaginative tales. Jari Tervo is a master of impersonation; in his novels the police, thieves, priests, and even housewives each speak their own expressive languages. Tervo’s most significant work to date, The Mole (Myyrä, 2004), is a highly original effort. In it he uses Urho Kekkonen as his subject, Finland’s autocratic president from 1956 to 1981. This satirical novel is one of a number of fictionalizations of recent political history that are currently in vogue in Finland, and is one of the most successful of this group. Along with Kekkonen, Joseph Stalin also gets a turn at the microphone. Through Stalin and Kekkonen, Tervo shows the reader close-up how power corrupts and isolates its wielder.
Alongside Raittila and Tervo, there is reason to mention a third heir to Meri and Linna, Kari Hotakainen (1957-), and the book that has become the most important Finnish novel of the new millennium thus far: Trench Road (Juoksuhaudantie, 2002). Awarded prizes for best novel both in Finland and Scandinavia in general, Trench Road tells about a family man who is desperately searching for his own identity as a man. The plot of the story concerns the man’s tragicomic struggle to buy a house for his family. The target of the dream is a so-called “veteran house,” a two-story wood-frame building like the men in the war built after returning from the front. Matti Virtanen—a quintessentially Finnish name—even calls himself a “home front veteran.” On his home front, however, he has a powerful enemy: the equality between men and women that is typical in Scandinavia, which has stripped men of their traditional masculine role without giving them anything to replace it with.
Hotakainen’s satirical novel hit a nerve in our social discourse. It contemplates relationships between men and women in various unsettling ways, as well as the relationship of modern men to the men of previous generations. In addition, even a subject as pragmatic as the high cost of housing garnered Hotakainen’s novel a mixed reception.
At times, Hotakainen’s narrative realism dissolves into satiric absurdism. The same happens in his novel The Classic (Klassikko, 1997), in which he describes a character named Kari Hotakainen’s obsession with Alfa Romeo automobiles. In this novel, Hotakainen is poking fun at a phenomenon that became common in Finnish literature during the 1990s, when extremely superficial confessional and exposé books flooded the market. A case typical of this phenomenon was a collection of letters and confessions published by a certain female politician, in which she reported having sex with her husband and enjoying it. You wouldn’t think that this would be particularly newsworthy, but the whole nation was in a whirl over this revelation for a good long time. Presumably this kind of double-standard morality isn’t completely foreign in the United States. In any event, The Classic is a biting satire about this phenomenon of “the confession” that even infected literature, and a significant portion of the novel is made up of the imaginary Kari Hotakainen’s diary, which “reveals” this and that. I suppose that the closest American comparison to Kari Hotakainen would be Philip Roth, who also contemplates his homeland’s moral state and his own identity in his novels.
This enthusiasm for autobiography that began in the 1990s has also produced extremely high-quality belles-lettres. Tuula-Liina Varis (1942-) has written remarkably powerful portraits of her own life. In her book Turtle and the Straw Marshal (Kilpikonna ja olkimarsalkka, 1994), she tells about her experiences as the wife of Finland’s best-known poet, Pentti Saarikoski. This extremely personal work reveals the helplessness and tyranny of the alcoholic author, but the other side of the artist’s life, the tranquility of everyday life, is also described skillfully and subtly. Varis’s novel On Earth One Place Is (Maan päällä paikka yksi on, 1999) tells of her childhood in the care of strong-willed female relations who were cruel almost to the point of sadism.
Lately it’s been fairly typical in confessional books for authors to tell about their relationships with their own parents, without avoiding painful emotions. In Anja Snellman’s (née Kauranen, 1954-) novel The Time of Skin (Ihon aika, 1993), the author tells about her experiences at her mother’s deathbed and about how she comes to learn about her mother’s old lover. The name of the novel refers to the close contact between the author and her aged mother as death approaches. Hannu Mäkelä (1943-) has also written very intimately about the last days of his aged mother’s life in his novel Mother (Äiti, 1999), as well as a confessional book about his traumatic relationship with his estranged Father (Isä, 2004).
Anita Konkka (1941-) has allowed readers to get close to herself in another way. In her book The Woman in the Dream Mirror (Nainen unen peilissä, 1993) she tells about her dreams and presents psychoanalytic interpretations of them. Reality and dreams also intersect in her novel A Fool’s Paradise (Hullun taivaassa, 1988, translation forthcoming in 2006 from Dalkey Archive Press), in which an unemployed woman contemplates the essence of love in diary entries that verge on stream-of-consciousness. The novel’s central themes include the polarity of spiritual and physical life and the relationship between men and women. The strong role of dreams and imagination take this taut novel in the direction of fantasy, which distinguishes it from the mainstream of Finnish literature.
The actress and author Pirkko Saisio (1949-) articulates the feelings of many Finnish intellectuals in her autobiographical trilogy, where she examines the development of an artist and the roiling politics of the 1970s, when a large part of the Finnish culturati rebelled against their parents and supported communism. The books in the series are Least Common Multiple (Pienin yhteinen jaettava, 1998), Backlight (Vastavalo, 2000), and The Red Book of Separation (Punainen erokirja, 2003). Saisio is a writer conscious of language; she sometimes describes herself intimately and sometimes from a distance, alternating between first and third person. This impressionistic and fragmentary narrative style deftly mimics the workings of memory. The series of novels is also connected to the always-current discussion about gender roles: among other things they describe how a young woman gradually discovers her own lesbian identity.
In addition to autobiography, biographical fiction—with its object often being a famous artist—has also been popular in Finland in recent years. In Bo Carpelan’s (1926-) novel Axel (1986) the topic is our national composer Jean Sibelius, but the novel’s main character is Axel Carpelan, Sibelius’s friend and aid, who devoted himself to music and thrived in his own aesthetic solitude. The previously mentioned Hannu Mäkelä wrote in his novel The Master (Mestari, 1995) about Eino Leino (1878-1926), possibly Finland’s most beloved poet and bohemian. Strongly rhythmic and archaic language transports the reader inside the consciousness of the poet as he lives out his final days. In her novel Helene (2003), Rakel Liehu (1939-) portrays the renowned painter Helene Schjerfbeck and her fight against an incapacitating illness as well as the men who then ruled the world of painting. The novel is a strong statement about the status of women, and at the same time a sensitive depiction of how an artist experiences the surrounding world.
Helena Sinervo’s (1961-) In the House of the Poet (Runoilijan talossa, 2004) is also a portrait of a sensitive artist based on real life. Its first-person narrator, Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921-95), was one of her generation’s most notable poets, and one of the pioneers of free verse in Finland. Psychologically she was an unstable hermit who couldn’t handle everyday routine without help. Sinervo’s controlled, impressionistic novel tells in Manner’s own voice about her childhood being raised by cruel grandparents and her adulthood being abused by men. The novel also tells about the poet’s love affair with certain other real-life women.
This novel excited an intense round of discussions about what a fiction writer may and may not write about. According to Eeva-Liisa Manner’s relatives, the depiction of her grandparents is slanderous. The claim that the poet was homosexual also evoked strong objections. In turn, Sinervo has defended the artist’s right to her own opinions and interpretations, even if the basis for the work is a person who really lived. Aesthetically the novel is one of the highest quality in Finland in recent years, and it received the Finlandia Prize for the best novel of 2004.
In the new millennium enthusiasm for artist biographies also took hold of Rosa Liksom (1958-), who has been one of the most unique voices in Finland since the 1980s. Liksom’s novel Reidar (Reitari, 2002) tells about the painter Reidar Särestöniemi, a gifted, impulsive, and secretive connoisseur of the art of living. Liksom is more in her own element in short, absurd vignettes, portraying the grotesque and comical turning points in a human life. Liksom’s collection Yhden yön pysäkki (1985) was published in English (One Night Stands, Serpent’s Tail, 1993), and a further collection, Dark Paradise, is forthcoming from Dalkey Archive Press.
Johanna Sinisalo’s debut novel Troll: A Love Story (Grove Press, 2004; Not Before Sundown in the UK, Peter Owen, 2003; originally Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi, 2000) has also been published in English. It’s the tale of an advertising editor who finds a troll in his backyard and takes it into his apartment to live. In this fantastic novel, the humanlike troll figure acts as a mirror that brings humanity’s dark side into view. The man’s friendship with the troll is portrayed warmly and coarsely. This meeting of the trendy advertising world and a mythical creature takes the reader on a fascinating journey around certain fundamental questions about being human.
The new millennium has meant the appearance of a number of new and interesting fiction-writers. Asko Sahlberg (1964-) has amassed a diverse and highquality resumé in a very short time. In his debut work, Voices of the Dark (Pimeän äänet, 2000), the protagonist is a man who lives in Sweden, Finland’s western neighbor, and has withdrawn from society. He listens to the nighttime sounds of Gothenburg and sporadically meets other hermit figures. He experiences the world as meaningless and accidental in the manner of the existentialists Camus and Sartre. In a way, Sahlberg’s language is also existential—it does not explain anything, being based instead on precise sensory perception. His novel Lost (Eksyneet, 2001) depicts a youth fleeing across Finland after an accidental killing, and the novella Feather (Höyhen, 2002) concerns an insane asylum. The novel takes up the subjects of fear, hatred, attachment, and the thirst for power as pure emotions, as they occur in the mind of the simple Ville. The novel The Tracks of Twilight (Hämärän jäljet, 2002) is also a kind of laboratory for observing the human mind. In it, Sahlberg investigates a human quality rare and surprising in contemporary literature—virtue.
After these strong contemporary novels Sahlberg published his magnum opus to date, the novel Oak Grove (Tammilehto, 2004), set during the Civil War of 1918. In contrast to previous novels about the civil war, Sahlberg doesn’t bind himself to a Red or White perspective, or try to ferret out the people responsible for the war. In his novel the conflict is merely a circumstance which provides a dramatic background for the telling of three unique life stories. Sahlberg is a psychologically, perhaps even psychoanalytically oriented author, whose strong human characters and powerful language raise his characters to the level of the universal.
The same can also be said of Markku Pääskynen (1973-), who is perhaps the most promising recent newcomer to Finnish literature. So far he has written three linguistically and structurally adroit, wise, and expansive novels. Snails (Etanat, 2002) is set in Sweden’s Gothenburg—coincidentally the same city as was used in Asko Sahlberg’s debut. The novel’s central event is a calamitous trolley accident in 1992, around which the author constructs a fanciful network of coincidences. The novel is philosophical and playfully intelligent. His second novel, Ellington (2003), is also set in Sweden. The central character is aserial killer, devoid of the light of reason, the structure of whose psyche doctors and journalists attempt to decipher. Pääskynen’s third novel The Most Important Things of This World (Tämän maailman tärkeimmät asiat, 2005) is a stream-of-consciousness description of one day, during which the reader wanders through the past and future, myth and dream, Finland, Europe, and Egypt, along with a young man’s meditations. Relationships between children and parents rise to the fore, but the logical flow of thought also touches on love, sexuality, the forms of narrative, and the birth of literature.
The new millennium’s authors promise a bright future for Finnish literature. Quality works of historical fiction are still being produced, but it’s wonderful that different and imaginative literature is also, finally, taking the field.
Translation by Owen Witesman
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