Book review | All young people should read Sinikka Vuola’s latest book

Novel

Sinikka Vuola: Anatomy of a storm. WSOY. 152 pp. (No page numbering.)

Author Sinikka Vuola the production is not particularly extensive, and a significant part of it is various collaborative works or deliveries. Even an active follower of domestic literature may not notice that Vuola is one of the most central influencers in the field, who, especially as a teacher and mentor, has systematically expanded perceptions of the possibilities of literature.

The discovery requires a bit of detective work: for example, his name is quite common in the acknowledgments of first-time books.

Especially in these times, when the difference between personal accounts and literature is rarely clear to many, Vuola’s contribution must be appreciated. He knows how to bump into different styles and genre registers, digs out something like a writer from even the most flat-out feeler.

Literary influencer Tuomas Anhavan (1927–2001) was said to have started making modern poems at the turn of the 1950s to show others how to make them. Vuola’s works have the same pedagogical spirit.

In particular, he is able to show his readers how experimental literature can be just as engaging, easy to read, as it is stuck to old formulas. The self-indulgent awkwardness and the desire to show off shine by their absence.

Vuola’s previous and first own novel A replica (2016) was not only a narrative itself, but above all a narrative about why narratives are made and how they are repeated throughout history.

A collaboration that has also received international attention by Laura Lindstedt with, 101 ways to kill a husband (2022), op Raymond Queneau the classics Style exercises– clips from the #metoo era. With the help of the book, you can use a few Powerpoint slides to prove to students that form and content are not different things. Each version tells the same story, but its events would still be indistinguishable from style, even in a courtroom.

His third poetry work, published in 2013 The hardest language in the world since then, Vuola has focused on prose, and if the publishing house’s communication was to be believed, also a new one Anatomy of a storm -the novel would continue along the same lines.

Because it isn’t has dared to open the Pandora’s box called poetry, which reportedly blows away buyers from leafing through books, the publishing house has come up with a term rarely found in Finland, a mosaic novel.

Such Anatomy of a storm however, it is not. A mosaic novel would consist of separate stories with some common features, but Vuola’s work tells one story from start to finish.

The narrator is also the same in each of the five chapters, a young woman who lives in a central European city very reminiscent of Prague together with her sister who was born a few minutes earlier and her old, depressed father.

The sisters live in poverty, take care as best they can of an ungrateful thunderbolt, brooding over war memories, and fall in love with the same young man visiting the city. Father’s friend Josef comes to drink plum wine on Thursdays, and before the arrival of his lover is the only person who pays attention to the girls.

The theme emerges the absence, more specifically of the mother, which in these circumstances makes all life taste like absence: “mother, / a dim ancient word full of nameless shadows, a wind-blown void”.

The narrator has tape around his navel, which he believes hides the emptiness inside him. The howling wind in the corners of the house, which towards the end reaches a dramatic storm, is almost its own character.

The wind has been given interjections, which in the self-stories of this time are negative self-talk, i.e. something to get rid of: “and every now and then the wind whispered: stupid, stupid, stupid”.

The romantic solution of accompanying the story with personified natural forces works well in the chosen genre. A literary space opens up between the narrator and the world, where individuality disappears. He becomes the image of a person, identifiable beyond his external characteristics.

The narrator’s double being, i.e. his own sister, is by nature his complete opposite: outgoing, outgoing, self-evidently infatuated official girlfriend.

In the story itself is not exactly new, but the way you tell it stands out. Anatomy of a storm namely, it shows that a novel doesn’t have to be prose – that poetic means, such as the creative use of empty space, can sometimes say much more than bolted paragraphs.

The novel consists of fragments, shards connecting to each other across an empty space, like so many other contemporary works of poetry. Some of the fragments are more like a piece of prose, some are verses. No capital letters or periods are used.

Anatomy of a storm is a verse novel, which, like the mosaic novel, is a rather poorly known genre in Finland. However, in recent years, verse novels have been on the rise both here and internationally, especially as books for young adults.

For some reason, the age-old connection between poetry and romance best enlivens stories aimed at teenagers, such as Anatomy of a storm it could very well be.

If so although Dess Terentjevan three poems for young people are also suitable for adults to read, is Anatomy of a storm accordingly recommended for young people. It deals with the themes of growing up, love and eternal change in an understandable, concise and profound way. In a way that echoes the classics of world literature Ovid’s About transformations from

The included blood-red ribbon seals the go-to graduation present.