Book review | Confused people wander in flooded Rovaniemi

Novel

Johanna Laitila: At the time of the rabbit. Big Dipper. 309 pp.

What connects man, rabbit and machine, asks Johanna Laitila (b. 1986) third novel In the moment of the rabbit.

You don’t come across the setting of an imaginative work set in the near future quite like this. The main character and main narrator, Alia, was born in an Esperanto-speaking eco-community somewhere in northern Finland. The group reminds me of the Iriadamant community that stayed in Kittilä in the early 1990s.

There have been no biological parents in the community, but Alia was raised in the community by Mirio. They run away from the community with their sister Mirta and settle in Rovaniemi.

Alia lives in Rovaniemi as an obviously confused person. He relieves the emptiness caused by trauma with synthetic alcohol.

Mirio, also addicted to alcohol, jumps off a bridge with one of his rabbits. Mirio survives, but lies in the hospital.

Alia goes to Mirio’s apartment to take care of the remaining rabbits and finds a translator robot named Bertha in the attic, who of course also speaks fluent Esperanto. Bertha’s daily greeting includes telling you how many days until the next flood.

A novel in the near future described, several eco-catastrophes have already been experienced. They appear mainly between the lines. In the book, the flood, which drowns and moves the different islands of the city, is an expected event like a Sunday romper market.

In the real present, you can’t avoid tourists playing ball in Rovaniemi, but in the novel, the tourist destinations rumble with their emptiness, the cottage villages have become emergency accommodation.

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Several eco-disasters have already been experienced in the near future described by the novel.

Water is a contradictory element. In the book, it represents both hope and threat, life and death. In the same way, alcohol threatens to drown. Laitila writes about Alia’s alcohol addiction in such a painful way that even the reader begins to feel nauseous. But also with black humor:

“Even though I and all my family members were named Esperanto, it was hard for me to get motivated to learn a language that could only be spoken face-to-face with the dead and drunks.”

Descriptions of the environment are imaginative in some places, but the description of the characters themselves remains surprisingly distant compared to their number.

Laitila does not underestimate its readers. He dares not to answer questions. The destinies of all people or between people do not work out.

Laitila’s firstborn Lilium regale (Gummerus, 2019) was convincing and praised. It dealt with women’s transgenerational traumas and sexuality, drawing on a kind of social-cultural atmosphere of the Nordic region between Sweden and Russia.

Followed by that Birth (Otava, 2020) took as its starting point Lenin’s hiding in Helsinki and relationships between men. In both novels, the discussion about gender norms of behavior involves war, the related power and the resulting problematics.

Linguistically, Laitila seems to have counted the rounds in the third book. I don’t end up marking a single point as a linguistically exciting moment.

But Laitila does smooth and careful work, even down to all dialects. Above all, he awakens the reader to think about the intertwined relationships between organisms and objects.

So what connects man, rabbit and machine? Based on the book, you could at least answer that we depend on each other, and in the same shit.