What kind of role models maintain toxic masculinity, Juhani Brander finally asks in his social fiction.
Novel
Juhani Brander: America. WSOY. 303 pp.
Juhani Branderin (b. 1978) America is a great novel. Although it is unlikely to spread advertising sheets at book fairs. The work does not reveal or tear apart, but it has something to say about the upbringing of boys.
America is wonderfully old-fashioned prose written in shrill Finnish. Inconsolable and beautiful.
Brander is a literary all-rounder. He began as a poet, continued as an essayist, and now seems to have turned to long prose. America is his second novel.
A couple of years ago A bridge over the years was a development report. Now the work at hand is like a prose ballad. An enchanting combination of rural realism, nature poetry and myths.
It tells about 9-year-old Kaarlo and his grandmother. The boy is a tragic character, the grandmother a comic one. You feel sorry for the child, the snickering that is fundamental to the life experience of the elderly makes you smile.
With personal with an essay book The death of a man (2020) Brander contributed to a discussion about the perverse aspects of masculinity. I came, I saw and I struck in the essay he mentions his grandfather’s father by Felix Branderfor which America is owned.
A relative and the main character of the novel are connected by a rowing trip, but the author emphasizes on the last page that the work is pure fiction. Fortunately, there is no need to think about the authenticity of the persons!
America gains momentum from the fashionable topic of contemporary literature, i.e. the relationship between a Finnish woman and a German soldier. The remaining diary fragments tell about Aino and Hermann.
The opening scene is shocking. According to the Germans, the women who left have to choose: either they jump from the ship into the sea or they are thrown there. Aino swims to shore and gives birth to a boy.
The narrative leaps forward to the 1950s. We live in Hittola’s house, a western Finnish island keeper.
Kaarlo sleeps under grandma’s laver and collects fleas from her armpit. They live on the poverty line.
A grandmother is like a slowly rotting autumn flower and a boy is like a shoot reaching for the light. There is just very little light.
America is a paradise for Kaarlo because grandma has told him that his mother lives there. At school, Kaarlo claims that his father died in the war.
Men’s world is harsh and growing into a man is painful. Does Kaarlon also have to learn to fight and kill? The teacher and social worker are also like men: demanding and unfair.
But Kaarlo doesn’t want to join the men’s world, even though he gives his school bully a hard time. The angelic Leena and the crazy grandma appeal to him more.
The best of the work scenes are Christmas. Grandma sniffs “Jesus gas” in the Christmas church and Kaarlo feels that he is sitting in a whitewashed grave. At the Christmas meal, grandma proves that Holy Bible is a book for drunkards and atheists.
The tone of the narrative darkens towards the end. The pace also picks up, which can be seen in the nature photography, which has been following the moods of grandma and son all along.
Brander, as it were, humanizes nature into one novel character: “Spring came screaming. It had long been its turn. It arrived late, so it was in a hurry.”
Kaarlo goes to America by rowing boat to his mother. A seal becomes his guide on a mythical journey of hope.
Already earlier Kaarlo had identified with the cub, whose mother Sakari, whom he adored, had brutally shot.
“Kuutti turned to look at Kaarlo and for a moment they stared at each other, these two breathing beings in the same world; two different accumulations of cells communicating in different languages, only one of which was able to decide the lives of both.”
An animal and a child are fateful companions, maimed by man. In unfavorable conditions, the child grows up to become an enemy of nature, emphasizes the narrative.
Brander writes about inequality, both between genders, social classes, and between man and nature.
With his novel, he proves how difficult it is to break the cycle of evil. But it shows that there is hope. Education is key.
What kind of role models maintain toxic masculinity, Brander finally asks in his very social fiction.
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