Book Review | Kallio’s young women are harassed in Karla Malmi’s debut novel

Culture|Book review

Novel

Karla Malm: Lux. Like. 332 s.

Right now it seems that the harassment experienced by young women in particular will be well seen in the literature. There have been many texts in recent years that recognize the phenomenon and tell it really well. These works include those working as a youth researcher Karla Malmin (b. 1990) debut Lux.

On the first day of school, Ace (Sonja) and Iiris will meet at an anonymous high school in Kallio. They become friends, a couple for a moment, and eventually a painful and awkward relationship.

The street and sound landscape of Kallio in the first years of the 21st century create a strong background for the work. Intoxicants and lynching rhythmize the daily lives of the main characters more than any other order:

“As he thinks of the past fall, Iris thinks of hunger, fatigue, beer drunk on an empty stomach, tears shed by the pots. Soft fading edges and silver stars at the edges of the field of view ”.

Iris’s daily life mixes into a wave of hops and strong emotions, while Ace’s spirals into pills, gigs and sex.

The obvious with the text is Anja Kaurasen Sonja O. visited here (1981), the references are as direct as the text on the toilet wall: “SO WAS HERE”.

The narrator of Iris dominates, but as the novel progresses, the Ace emerges through his own voice. His protagonist is Lux from the Lisbon film Virgin Suicides (1999).

As Lux’s initially idealized character begins to appear in the narrative as a fantasy of a masculine gaze, even the main characters begin to mature:

“No Virgin Suicides not really a movie about girls but about boys watching girls. It’s a film about what a neighbor’s boys want to imagine the girls in Lisbon to be. ”

Lux is advancing pleasantly, the structure of the whole is good, the language and perception are at a good level, the characters are credible.

However, something is needed. Lux made me remember with warmth just such newborns as Sonja O. visited here or Helene Hegemannin Axolotli overdrive (2011, Finnish Tiina Hakala). In both, a young woman goes through drugs and sexual harassment, and the impact of the situation on her becomes clear.

But at the same time Sonja O: n the language and vocabulary tell of the child of the Karelians, and the absurd axoloth of Hegemann’s collage novel, in turn, represents its protagonist in a deep and diverse way.

Lux Lisbon fails with such a motive. The sexuality and suicide of a young, abused fictional girl is underlined in relation to Luxin subject matter. Therefore, the perspective of the novel is somehow narrow.

It is structured in the relationship between Iris and Ace, the need for care, and the sexually awkward place of a high school girl. Just as if it were just this, a focus on a perspective that puts the reader strictly at a certain point of interpretation.

Gendered terror in its mundane and obscurity is, of course, a necessary subject. But it’s not just about that, especially for those who are its targets.

A work of fiction does not have to focus on its subject matter so that it becomes, above all, a sutjakka. Let the detachment, the imagination, travel to where gravity prevails!

Helsingin Sanomat’s award for the best debut book of the year will be presented in November.