Book review | An enjoyable masterpiece performs an autopsy of Finnish history of shame

Novel

Markus Nummi: District Courts. Big Dipper. 575 pp.

Assize is an enjoyable masterpiece on a brutal subject. It goes through events both in the courtroom and in the village community, which are driven by two opposing basic emotions of human life.

They are shame and connection. Shame destroys, connection makes whole, both an individual person and a village community. Shame tells when a person has crossed the boundaries where the community deems it appropriate and supportive to create a connection.

But who gets to define those boundaries? Who bears the shame?

One has all the power, the other is responsible for everyone. It is difficult from one side of the system to understand the other side, even if there is genuine effort and good will involved.

Markus Nummen (b. 1959) ending a publication hiatus of almost 15 years Assize takes you to the beginning of the 20th century, to the time before and after the wars. Even though the story is a product of imagination – although the author states in the closing words that it arises from historical material – Nummi has extracted the basic aromas of Finnish emotional history and village culture.

They do not correspond at all to the warm sense of community and unified culture of Finnish films, which many seem to be longing for nowadays. Instead of summer fun, it’s a kind of Nordic noir, which could also be characterized as Ostrobothnia gothic.

“Horror looks at horror, shame looks at shame”, when the villagers go to lighten their minds and feelings for Aunt Vilja, that half-hearted or rather half-hearted woman who became half-hearted in her teenage years, who lives in their attic as a burden to her teacher brother’s family.

Aunt Vilja sees the secrets of the village from her window, but does not tell. Until one day he tells, and the life of the whole village is thrown off balance. A policeman, actually a county detective, is sent from the city to pry into the intimate affairs of the villagers. He testifies in the trial how things have progressed in the village.

Materials from extensive embryo donation activities, judgments are handed out. But in the end, who is the most reliable witness of what happened?

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When the tensions build up to the extreme, Nummi also brings gentle, happy tones.

It was already known that it was a candidate for Finlandia Candy day (2010) thanks to the fact that Nummi is a master at making the invisible visible through a multi-voiced and dense narrative, marveling at the toes dipped in human evil so that even the touch of cold water cools the reader. However, not unbearably, because the author has comfort and hope with him.

In the districts even cathartically.

Novelty can be read as a decent old-fashioned detective story, where events are seen through the eyes of many characters. As On candy day That moor In the districts including child-like characters whose understanding of events is very different from that of adults who interpret the course of life through law, religion or even social positions of power.

Nummi builds human destinies and emotional history like Sally Salminenin the same way, from which Ulla-Lena Lundberg was awarded at Finlandia in 2012.

The ingeniously constructed novel equates the everyday suffering of women and families with the interest of men in power in political issues. You don’t want to face everyday suffering, because it doesn’t hit your mark – even though it’s precisely from that that dissatisfaction grows, which erupts as a political movement.

Tormentors the story of topics and feelings is to shock the reader, but that’s where Nummi spares him. When the tensions build up to the extreme, Nummi also brings gentle, happy tones, if also sad.

There can be many opinions about the solutions that reach the end of the work to this day. I liked the gentle escort of the reader from the realistic fictional world to the understanding that it is really the author’s imagination.

Assize is a masterpiece in which every thought is perfectly layered on top of the other, from individual figures of speech and dialect words to the arc of the entire drama. Bravo!