Book Review | How to get rid of the world of pyrkyrs?

Culture|Book review

Novel

Jukka Hakala: The lies we believe. WSOY. 400 pp.

Rarely the title of the book reveals as much about the content as those who wrote books in the field of communication in the past Jukka Hakalan the first novel The lies we believe. A good part of the novel deals with lies. Or more beautifully: branding and stories that companies tell about themselves and their products.

Hakala (b. 1968) has worked as a communications consultant and business management coach, among other things. So he writes about the field he knows very well.

The worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves. As if I’m about to give up my routine job and start doing what I want, thinks Aki, the central character of the novel. He works as the marketing director of an investment company, so he tells stories that strike others as well. And he doesn’t care if they are true, as long as they only create temptations.

Ari is divorced and living a new youth. At first, he is most interested in being promoted to the management of the company. His little daughter partly keeps him busy with life’s other responsibilities. The daughter is one of those people who act as a counterweight to the rough going of business circles.

Struggling to write finally a good old development story, where Aki finally gets to reevaluate his career and values. For most of it, he is somehow fully involved in the game of the business world, a pyrkyr like many others.

Aki has his sights set on the CEO position. It has already been decided that the previous one represents too many old world values, doesn’t know how to perform and doesn’t throw new ideas into the game.

The chairman of the board pits the candidates against each other. He is a true cynic who is only in it because he enjoys the game.

Masculine going, then, and definitely toxic – that word also appears in the novel. However, Laura, who has an idea and another work package, is picked up from the Alepa checkout. He enters Aki’s life when he defends an immigrant at the cash register.

Laura is fifteen years younger than forty-year-old Ari. And such a difference nowadays brings you to the brink of a generation gap.

This is how Hakala aptly describes not only the twists and turns of business life, but also the habits of young people with their spending habits and seemingly uncomplicated bed relationships. Sometimes, though, the description threatens to slip into typification, in which case the people seem to represent their generation in general.

Still, Laura’s character is the novel’s saving angel, both in terms of action and personal image. He has a dream. Ethical and ecological. Without him, the novel would remain a sharp but narrow criticism of business life.

The novel is in some places it almost turns into satire.

When Aki receives an invitation to the panel of the think tank, the clichés fly wildly. Growth Enabler sends its greetings from the shores of Malaysia, who would be busy working on schedules anymore. The philosopher of happiness, on the other hand, explains how a knowledge worker free from definitions owns his own means of production, i.e. his brain, and is thus even happier.

Aki reflects that “if you want to enter the market as a new gambler, the easiest thing is to declare that times have irrevocably changed”. The dinosaurs fall off the spinning ball faster and faster.

With these thoughts, Aki distances himself from his close circle, to whom he has salted advertising slogans. It’s as if an antithesis is growing in him against the thesis of the initial cold game and disposable culture.

The end of the novel then offers a synthesis that also includes wistful happiness.

The lies we believe is a smoothly written novel with fast-moving scenes. Carelessness has also crept into the narration: the colloquialism is suitable for the internal monologue of the characters, not for the voice of the narrator.

The narrative relies on both an omniscient narrator and a point-of-view technique that follows the consciousness of the characters, and these alternate in a way that doesn’t always seem intentional but unnecessarily explanatory.

Fortunately, most of Hakala’s novel progresses smoothly.