Book review | A 12-year-old boy is enchanted by his friend’s mother, who is 24 years older, in Philip Teir’s family portrait

Novel

Philip Teir: Shadows of August (Eftermiddag i augusti). Finnish Jaana Nikula. Big Dipper. 259 pp.

Philip Teirin the novels represent the understated charm of the bourgeoisie. The flip side is excessive composure. Teir is careful not to say anything daring about people or phenomena in his books. This is especially evident in novels This is how the world ends (2018) and Virgin path (2020). The sixth volume, Shadows of Augustcontinues in the same unexcited line.

The novel tells about two families from St. Petersburg, with the events covering thirty years. At the beginning of the book, the main character Jakob returns to Finland after many years. The man is waiting to meet Mona. In the beginning, Jakob tells in the first person, then the he-narrator continues. The temporal distance is emphasized.

Let’s go to 1993. Mona is a class teacher and on the side edits a small culture magazine. The theme of one issue is “feminism in the 90s”, but the woman herself is upset about her union. “She couldn’t be the woman who decided to enjoy herself.”

Mona loves her garden, but it is shaded by a dead pine tree. A man is not made to cut down a tree. The allegory will not be unclear to anyone.

Mona’s son Robert’s best friend, 12-year-old Jakob, has joined the family as if as an extra member. My mother has disappeared in Christiania. The kind but unwilling father is also gone, and the son is in the care of his grandparents. Jakob is enchanted by Mona, who is 24 years older.

The boy in love with his friend’s mother is a tasty set-up, but it could have been expanded further.

For the most part from the book, a description of the symbiotic relationship between boys: from bomb clips to horror and porn movies, from rip camp to tobacco and alcohol. You have to get out of Ostrobothnia, music videos open the gate to a new dimension.

Let’s start a punk band, let’s read Kafka. Let’s twist the age-old schoolboy humor about masturbation. “I rather wanted to enter the world of adults, the world of mixed relationships and broken promises, the dangerousness of which attracted me,” Jakob recalls.

Similar depictions of youth have been written by so Tommi Liimatta than Karl Ove Knausgaard in his autofictions. Teir just can’t get the enthusiasm of youth to flow properly like the previous ones.

After growing up, the boys go in different directions. In the world of adults, connections between people freeze in relation to each other and to children, because the eternals mostly focus too much on their own projects.

Shadows of August refer, among other things, to unfulfilled dreams and one particularly unfortunate human fate. These are portrayed believably. On the other hand, the crisis can end triumphantly. In a long side story, Mona helps a Kosovar family with Jakob’s grandmother: a withering woman finds meaning in her life.

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This is how life can be.

In the shadows of August some stay, some leave. You can always choose a new family, but that doesn’t solve conflicts. Such are lives.

According to Jakob, “one and the same story can be told from a thousand different points of view”, but it is not clear which one and the same story is in the work. Different perspectives are created on people, depending on the viewer.

Mona thinks Jakob is strange at first, her daughter is lovely. Mona feels gray, Jakob sees colors in her. And so on.

A novel the compositions are carefully constructed. The relationships between people have more depth than in the author’s previous works. However, someone is rotting. Characters and events don’t stick in the mind, but fly by. Strong scenes are missing. The after-effect is thick and, despite the tragedy, loud – typically for Teir.

The book also misses good opportunities. The central characters are intellectuals: the editor-in-chief of a culture magazine, a philosophy student and a future professor. Intelligence is still not visible in people’s speech or thoughts.

The book reads like looking through a photo album of a distant acquaintance: life can be like this too.