Book review|Nostalgia, sensitive empathy and wit combine fascinatingly in Mikko Malila’s first work.
Novel
Mikko Malila: Chestnut war. Big Dipper. 223 pp.
In summer 1994 A class war breaks out in Turku. The parties are mostly 12-year-old boys. One, those wretched but likable, workingman’s bushes. Others, elegant and rude, children of wealthier families.
If you were to take a closer look across the front line, beneath the surface you would find many similar survivors of the last summer of their own childhood.
But who among them would bother, because the essential thing is this: us against them.
War is waged by pounding chestnuts. It sounds like a joke, but it is a merciless truth for the parties, which parents do not understand anything about.
Like they don’t understand anything else in their unhappy self-centeredness. Because: “From the age of twelve onwards, everything is downhill.”
The sentence is from working in an industrial laundry Mikko Malilan (b. 1983) from his first novel Chestnut warwhich lives on in the past with a confusing force.
The work is loaded with its basics early on. First: “You can’t influence your own life.” Then: “Civilization is just a surface, it exists only for the winners.”
“
That’s how hard-boiled realism can withstand romance.
The boys on the edge of Turku now and always go for these snacks. If they make it to adulthood, as the little warriors of the better district are allowed to wait.
However, the resupeks do not feel envy towards them:
“The wind blew through our homes. But at least we had a little love. We warmed to each other like mice in their nest.”
That’s how hard-boiled realism can withstand romance.
Soul hole the cramped everyday life is also formed by the narrator’s closest companion’s nighttime magic excursion on an airship over the rooftops on the journey of the mysterious Captain. Then the familiar corners become an ant city, and the sorrows also diminish.
So Chestnut war is not prone to waste, for example of William Golding a classic Lord of the Flies like: children’s play does not turn into a field of blood, and the flower of fantasy does not die either.
Although Malila’s boys know that the future offers nothing, in addition to physical growth, the last summer of childhood also triggers a mental change. Admiration of athletes and brute strength begins to change into an interest in music.
The most relatable character is Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain both because of the absoluteness of his music and especially because of his suicide the previous spring. Cobain didn’t agree to be a pawn in the winners’ game.
He also had exactly those against him in his own war.
Nostalgiasensitive sympathy and sharpness come together In the chestnut war in a fascinating way.
The problem is that too many of the boys in the debut remain just names, and a lot of them fall to the pages. To put it nicely, the neighborhood becomes the protagonist of the work.
In addition, the blood circulation of the text is strained by Malila’s mannerly way of breaking up sentences with periods into patches of a few words. As if the thoughts were getting bigger. That they are offered. In driblets.
Totally bigger Chestnut War the fact that no kind of bitterness can be detected, which can even be considered a rarity. The tone is assertive and warm.
Of course also pro-life, even if the fronts between classes remain among us.
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