Book review|In Reetta Aalto’s second novel, a woman wakes up next to a strange man and can’t remember what happened.
Novel
Reetta Aalto: Black hole. S&S. 317 pp.
Where goes the line of rape, what does abuse mean? What if the victim has been so drunk that he doesn’t remember anything?
The right to sexual self-determination has been talked about a lot in recent years. The new sexual crime legislation entered into force at the beginning of 2023, and according to the Ministry of Justice, it “strengthens everyone’s right to sexual self-determination and the protection of personal integrity”. However, the problem has not gone away and the crimes have not disappeared.
The topic is also repeatedly presented in literature. For example Susanna Hastin Body/rooms (2022) described with ferocious fury the memory left by sexual violence on the body, and Irene Kayon fresh debut novel One of us has experience of inappropriate treatment deals specifically with the use of power and sexual violence in the art industry.
Film director Reetta Aalto known for films dealing with gender, sexuality and power. Debut novel Vadim (2020) looked at the cycles of power use between the woman directing the film and the man being filmed.
Black hole is at the same questions. Now the narrator wakes up next to a strange man and doesn’t remember what happened. A husband and a child are waiting at home.
The woman blames herself. However, in the STD tests, the nurse points out that regardless of whether the man slipped her knockout drops or whether she drank herself into unconsciousness, she has not been in a condition where she could have given her consent to anything.
Having sex with a heavily intoxicated or passed out person is rape.
Alcohol has played a big role in the narrator’s artistic life, but also in the family. The narrator doesn’t want to admit the problem, but when he feels bad, he stops drinking and goes to support groups. To his sister, he reflects on the drinking culture set by his father and mother: “When we’ve always had this, that drinking is, as it were, normal and part of it.”
Black hole explores the silent agreements, the invisible things that affect each of our lives. How much do you have to explain if you don’t accept a glass of sparkling wine at the opening of an exhibition or order wine in a restaurant.
And alcohol is not the only obvious thing. Other boundaries also waver, and only when they are broken do you see how long and to what kind of things you have closed your eyes.
Three years after the rape, Russia invades Ukraine. In Vadim the described love-hate relationship with Russia gets complicated In a black hole even more so.
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Three years after the rape, Russia attacks Ukraine.
As well as In Vadim, the narrator has close relations with Russia: he has lived and studied in St. Petersburg, speaks Russian and feels the culture as his own. Despite the fact that Russia already occupied Crimea in 2014, the attack on eastern Ukraine comes as a shock.
Russia invades Ukraine by force, like an unknown man tells the story.
The traumas are compared, intertwined: a black hole within a black hole, the pain that squeezes a person into nothingness. The program the narrator watches with his child grows into a metaphor that encloses the novel: “Black holes are monsters of the universe, terrifying space beasts that devour everything they encounter.”
These monstrous destructive forces include the normalization of alcohol abuse, submission to sexual power, and turning a blind eye to the perversity of political power.
Gradually, the woman’s eyes open as she goes through her memories about the behavior and comments of her ex-boyfriend, the Russian “big man”: thrown chairs, punches, threats.
Reetta Aalton the dialogue flows smoothly and the novel is built on concise scenes. Jumping around in places feels restless, meetings with anyone at any time remain meaningless diary entries. Perhaps it could have been condensed and the comfort of the ending is unnecessarily therapeutic, but there is strength in Aalto’s narration.
Black hole nicely brings out how deep in us is the acceptance of the norms of the society around us. What all have we accepted from a man, what from an artist. And what from Russia.
Read more: Film director Reetta Aalto secretly went to the bathroom to stir chocolate when others couldn’t afford food – in Russia she witnessed blatant class differences, and her first novel was born based on her experiences
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