Maarit Verrone’s work starts with a possible end of the world and ends with incredible stories of survival.
Short stories
Maarit Verronen: That’s fine. Aviator. 200 pp.
Maarit Verronen career took off in the early 1990s, when his first two novels were nominated for the Finlandia Prize. At the moment, Verrose’s fiction production already covers 22 works, half of which are novels and the other half short story collections.
Works great Good like that consists of numerous short stories, of which only a few reach even 20 pages. At the very least, the story is completed in a couple of pages.
However, there is also a longer continuation in the book, Tiina’s life, whose scenes that jump in time and place are placed between other stories. The solution works, and in places Tiina’s experiences subtly mirror elements of the surrounding short stories.
If you want, you can also find an arc in the collection, because the work starts with a possible end of the world and ends with incredible stories of survival.
Short stories the scale is wide, and the stories travel both in Finland and the world.
Even when the events are at their most mundane, the author has managed to imbue the stories with a vague mystery and a feeling that something might be up. Despite this, many characters and situations are so familiar that you can even recognize them from your own life.
Together, these factors guarantee that the short stories will fascinate and engross you.
The characters created by Verrone mostly behave as if they were external observers and witnesses of the events. They sometimes wonder and analyze other people’s actions and interpersonal twists very keenly, but they never get involved in events or make a bigger deal out of themselves.
Only rarely are they active actors. Even then, they show a clear alienation from the mechanisms that define social interaction.
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The short stories fascinate and entangle.
At its best the short stories end with observations made by the main character, which reflect the characteristics of humanity and human life in a broader sense. Sometimes we move in much smaller patterns, but even then the stories contain insightful moments and observations.
The picture of our world painted by a few short stories leans towards stinging gloom: “It was sad to lose part of your faith in humanity’s ability to develop, but what did you do: it was not worth believing in non-existence.”
Verronen tells all this in his own laconic style, where the text flows naturally and avoids any kind of haste.
He uses clear and easy-to-understand language in his stories, which nevertheless contains charges and meanings. In this way, even the shortest short stories give the reader a lot to savor, and the work grows into a table that is significantly larger than its parts.
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