Culture|Book review
In the name of love, religions are also renewed.
Novel
Juha Siro: Light year. Key. 254 pp.
Juha Siron (b. 1951) seventh novel for adults A light year begins to be deceptively realistic. Its narrator, an aging architect who created an international career, drifts on the wind in the landscape of defeat. The road leads from one diagnosis and one antidepressant to another, and after a while the heel screw to the Big Bear.
The professional impasse is intertwined with the phantom pain of love: the narrator has lured his ex-wife Elena into an abortion and has regretted it ever since. Along with the relationship, the housing businesses have also gone, in the same free fall.
Until the Big Bear runs into Azara, aka Sara, of Somali and Iranian background, being chased by a group of Nazis. The narrator accompanies the woman home, even though he gets thoroughly beaten in the process.
The architect, stuck in the dark soliloquy of his wolf moments, gets to know a completely different circle of life: Sara’s mother has escaped from the atrocities of the civil war in Stockholm, her sister in Italy. The rest of the family has stayed along the way.
Here, Sara has become a black woman who does shredding: a cleaner, a dishwasher and a nanny at a private daycare center.
Already budding in a love story, overcoming mutual fears and suspicions and age and cultural differences could be enough for one novel.
However, for Siro, everyday life is a springboard to other realities and parallel worlds.
Right from the first pages of the novel, we jump from the lightless depths of the oceans to the border of Kármán. Where the atmosphere ends. We marvel at the dizzying distances of the universe, as well as how the small is present in the largest: The Milky Way’s rod spiral repeats the shape of a one-hundred-millimeter seashell.
The conversation partners are the Big Bear’s core team: cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alexei LeonovNobelists Albert Camus and Albert Einstein, Chinatown elegantly cool Faye Dunaway and a visual artist shaking racial stereotypes Ellen Gallagher.
Is it about the nicknames the narrator gives to his friends?
Or has the Great Bear become a meeting place for the living and the dead, if not a space station inhabited by clones?
The narrator of Juha Siro’s novel is an architect who has created an international career.
Just this in the case of the novel, I feel like answering that probably both.
The central intertext of Lightyear is Polish Stanisław Lemin a science fiction classic Solaris (1961, Finnish Matti Kannosto 1973). It is also known as Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh as movies.
The Solaris space station orbits a self-aware, planet-sized ocean. Human figures appear near the main character, psychologist Kris Kelvin, who are revealed to be reflections of his subconscious.
Siro’s novel goes through the world explanations of mythologies and religions at a breathtaking pace. Always Thomas Aquinas from the nine-step angelic hierarchy to the pantheon of ancient Scandinavian gods, from astrology to numerology and from tarot cards to Taoism.
Science is equally puzzled by the really big questions. The basic truths of cosmology are renewed. As information accumulates, certainties diminish.
A big bear the grassroots make a cosmic revolution. The collective mental energy of humanity is being harnessed.
The same consciousness-expanding mood continues at home with Sara. Me-narrator gets the talkative Nicknames “Höperö herra janis” and “Crazy Mr. Höyhenpää” from his beloved.
In lovers’ conversations, everything about being right is discussed. Religions are reinvigorated: the ten commandments become three exhortations.
The prophets of their own two-spirit religion print postcards of the exhortations. The narrator slips cards through mailboxes or “forgets” them at the local store.
And Sara will not remain a statistic. He has his notes and journal, a long-ago secret writing project. Let’s come to the basic questions in postmodern literature: who is really telling this story? And what really happened?
Siro’s previous adult novel The arching sky above us (2019) takes its readers from the fateful moments of the Weimar Republic to the dystopia of the near future, to the Middle East of desertification and water wars.
As a reading experience, the novelty novel is not quite as epic.
A light year the strengths are rather in the multi-level and flowing narration.
Although we speak in the language of light years, the longest distances are found between two exceptional individuals looking for each other. Only the subconscious is full of dark matter.
Still, you don’t have time to frown while reading. Only a 254-page novel can fit so many cool and mischievous side paths.
They come to mind by Paul Auster (b. 1947) Oracle night and Book of Illusions: metafictional book-in-a-book structures and other experiments do not rule out the possibility that the works can also be read as reading novels and crooked heist stories.
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