Old fans will surely like the fact that the author once again sprinkles things like suicides, concentration camps, sexual violence, mental health problems and anal sex into his text.
Essays
Jyrki Lehtola: No matter: literary essays. Bridge. 382 pp.
Jyrki Lehtola has always been faster than others. Faster to notice a phenomenon, faster to grasp a contradiction, faster to come up with a nickname, faster to transport a text.
A new work Whatever the first text is written in the mouth of a young Somali woman living in Finland. The essay criticizes, among other things, the politicization of art, anti-racism and essayistics based on personal experience. It delivers quick blows and quickly moves from one subject to another.
The text is rich and aggressive, both adjectives that are not usually associated with Finnish factual prose.
Whatever is ticking to go, and the author’s sense of rhythm is excellent. Lehtola knows how to make a long undulating sentence as well as exclamations and ironic interjections. The essay collection is the third part of the series, which also includes Tesla in the forest (2019) and About emotions (2021).
In the year Born in 1963, the humorist from Tampere rose to wider awareness in the 1990s at the latest with his Ilta-Sanomie columns. Their subject was often a public figure whose actions and words were put in a comical light.
In the 1990s and 2000s, newspapers wrote about individual people and a lot of other things much more slanderously than today. Lehtola just did it exceptionally skillfully.
At the latest in the 2010s, slander columns began to disappear from the media, and at the same time, irony and satire in general. At the moment, Lehtola’s style seems to be further away from the mainstream of Finnish media than it was at the beginning of his career.
Lehtola was also scripting a comedy series Office of the President (2008–11). It often tended to be outrageous rather than funny. Lehtola has always been read not only for humor but because he says more outrageously than others. The reader is offered the feeling that we are now moving at least to some extent in a forbidden area.
Today Today, Lehtola writes much less often about individual people. “In the same way” real people get a few sentences at most.
In the collection, you will find vividly drawn fictional characters. The life story of a man stuck in collecting vinyls has a gentle touch. On the other hand, the chapter about the sleazy male artist of the old union is bitter and dark-toned.
Other topics include, for example, housing fairs, the recent pandemic, going to therapy and generational thinking.
Old fans will surely like the fact that the author once again sprinkles things like suicides, concentration camps, sexual violence, mental health problems and anal sex into his text.
It is, of course, about the satirist’s desire to take the expression far, to create contrasts and also to shock. However, not all words are slurred as much as they were in the last century.
The first one The Somali narrator of the essay describes the art students’ work he saw like this:
“Almost all the student works were a convincing collection of contemporary testimonies about the interdependence of freedom of expression and mental health problems.”
Mental health problems have lost their taboo character so much that this kind of thing no longer seems as outrageous as, say, 25 years ago. Lehtola’s humorous references to mental health problems have decreased over the decades.
A satirist is usually a moralist. The satirist not only jokes, but also teaches and teaches. Every now and then, Lehtola’s moral disapproval emerges in the book more openly than usual. For example, complaining too loudly about life’s little annoyances gets a harsh sentence.
One of the main enemies is again how much and how emphatically Finns talk about themselves and their feelings in public today. Lehtola sees in it self-conceit and complacency.
The last one the speech in the book is used by Satan, who slanders the weakness of humanity.
He also used the figure of Satan for his own cultural criticism in the 19th century Mark Twain in his sarcastic work Travel letters from the country. It is Twain’s darkest production.
This text, in all its skillful humor, is also the most angsty of “Ihan saman”. People are lazy and stupid, don’t care about climate change and waste their time on social media.
At the end of the book, it is at least clear that we are not only written by a ranting slanderer, but also by a moralist who is seriously concerned about the state of the world.
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