Book review | Johannes Lahtela’s description of the father’s suicide on the manor’s porch seeks its precision in cruelty from its peers

Nonfiction book

Johannes Lahtela: Son of a lonely man. Oak. 237 pp.

If doesn’t get out of his own nest and head as he approaches fifty, he never does. Having left the career of first an actor, then a business management performance coach and most recently an Orthodox priest Johannes Lahtela (b. 1975) undertakes a demanding task in his latest book A lonely man’s son.

The work is extremely straightforward and startling. The surface of civility is thoroughly shattered.

The time for shame is over.

Author Markku Lahtela (1936–1980) moved in with another woman when his youngest son Johannes was less than a year old. The father took his own life when Kuupus was 4 years old.

The memories of the father are therefore flimsy at most.

However, Johannes remains the son of an exceptionally talented, radical-thinking, deeply problematic and drunken monstrous father, even though his legacy of self-centeredness and self-loathing has taken his life more than once.

Whatever Johannes did, he was always compared to his father. He himself does that too. Thus, the inheritance of fame and talent seems like a curse.

When the self oppresses, of course, the funny thing is that you have to wallow in it for a whole book: the patient of self-centeredness wallows in his own wounds to get rid of self-centeredness.

An unhappy “emotional junkie”, as the author of the work defines himself.

In terms of ingredients A lonely man’s son is a mixed fetus. There is a memoir, dramatized episodes, long quotes, doctor’s reports and other information about multigenerational trauma.

Five of the means, the essential thing is hit accuracy.

Looking from the side, it seems that Johannes Lahtela succeeds in his therapy task excellently. At the very end, all the revelations about all addictions, however, already slip a little into chatter, the meaning of which, as far as I can understand, is only really carried by the author’s close circle.

But at least it becomes clear that the author is not silent about anything. Not anymore.

Just keeping silent about the most important issues has, according to the author’s testimony, derailed the Lahtela family to self-destruction. Despite the fact that this is a group with rare expressiveness.

Grandfather Olavi Lahtela was a member of parliament and a minister who appeared in front of the troops – and in private a war-torn veteran who silenced his horrors with the power of liquor. Author name Kyllikki Kallas the grandmother who used it tried to commit suicide while expecting her first child, Markku.

“

The surface of civility is thoroughly shattered.

At the age of six, Markku was sent to Sweden as a war child, and never recovered from being abandoned.

“Even the psychiatrist had stated that Markku learned to suppress his feelings and himself and lost love, connection with other people,” the boy writes.

Only the perfect embrace of love can heal the ever-present threats of rejection, unworthiness, and chilling isolation. Or the dull slurping of booze silences them, even for a moment.

First Johannes blurts out that definition about his father, then about himself. Both men morbidly seek approval.

The author states that he fell into playing a relevant role as an actor, educator and priest. He was there, but hardly fully present in his duties.

You should also have succeeded perfectly in the role of a family man, even though the inner darkness may knock you down even in the middle of the hill of happiness, like at your own child’s first birthday:

“I punched the cake shovel through the cream frosting, and red jam gushed from the sides onto the plate. Father’s brain on the porch of the mansion. My breathing quickened. The movement of my hand stopped for a moment until I continued to act normal again.”

The book the first part’s description of Markku Lahtela’s suicide on the porch of his new spouse’s mansion seeks its accuracy in cruelty from its peers in our literature.

But it is necessary to tell, exactly, so that one can be freed from the burden of knowledge and live.

On dissecting one family’s traumas and the poison of silence A lonely man’s son grow into a broad social sermon: what you do to yourself, you also cause to your loved ones.

Suicide derails a large number of people.

John takes a long and arduous road to learn to choose differently than the loved, hated and missed Markku.

Now it is appropriate to quote a literary figure: it has been filled.