Books | Anna-Riikka Carlson received boxes of Eeva Kilve's notes and realized that she was in the middle of literary history: “I got confused”

From the first ones it becomes clear from the pages that this is no ordinary biography. Dear Eeva Kilpi. These parties are still going on is a sprawling work of fiction about the friendship between a publisher and an over 90-year-old writer.

At WSOY's domestic fiction publisher With Anna-Riikka Carlson it was not originally my intention to write a book. About six years ago Eva Kilpi and Carlson began to have long phone calls.

The calls turned into visits, during which Carlson told the elderly writer what was going on in the literary world, and Kilpi could dig out one of his old notebooks and present its contents.

“Those encounters were somehow so moving that I started making notes for myself about them and suddenly I noticed that they started to become letters,” says Carlson.

He started reading these letters to Kilvelle as a reminder of what had been discussed last time. Kilpi eventually encouraged Carlson to compile a book from the letters.

Now Carlson is in a new situation. He is sitting in the WSOY premises in the conference room named after Eeva Kilve, not as a publisher but as an author for the first time.

“This is just right for me to experience all these possible emotions that go with this,” says Carlson.

Eva Kilpi has lived a respectable 96 years. He is one of Finland's most loved authors, whose works are constantly being reprinted.

The spectrum of subjects on the shield is so broad that very different types of readers can find something that touches them there, says Carlson.

Kilpi has written firsthand about war and evacuation already in the 1960s and 1970s, when the subject was not yet widely discussed in public. His lyrics about human relationships and love have remained, in Carlson's words, “used poetry” in a good sense. They are recited at weddings, funerals and peace speeches.

Kilpi has also written about women's status and motherhood, as well as protecting nature and animals decades before they became mainstream topics.

Carlson believes that Kilpi, who appeared a lot in public, has made an indelible impression on many people as a person as well.

“There's something endearing about his immediacy and the intensity of his presence,” says Carlson.

Carlson's the work he wrote is full of speeches praising Kilpa in many ways. In places, the sublimity even seems prematurely elegiac. The party is still going on!

“I think to myself that I can't say it too much, that Eeva, your poems are read and people talk about you,” says Carlson and continues:

“Yes, there is repetition, but maybe it's not something that should be feared in this world, saying too many good things out loud.”

Carlson knows from experience that despite accolades or awards, many writers doubt the value of their work. Eeva Kilpi was also sincerely surprised every time she heard how her words have affected others, says Carlson.

at Carlson's has a pile of notebooks with him during the interview. One of them is a modest, light blue notebook. This is Eeva Kilve's first diary from 1944.

The 16-year-old writer named her diary Kaarina, and this is how its first entry begins:

Kaarina! Be a secret to anyone but your owner. Be my friend you my first diary. May your magazine always tell only funny things, and when I get old and have left the school desk, then bring me back to my youth and my school memories.

In the fall of 2023 Kilve son Jukka Kilpi carried boxes of the writer's diaries, notes, photographs, letters, manuscripts and unpublished texts to Carlson. Carlson also received a mandate to select wholes from the texts, which can possibly be published as completely new works.

The texts will not remain in Carlson's possession, but they will be thought about with the Kilve family for a suitable eternal place of investment.

Carlson says that when he saw Kilve's life-long number of texts concretely in front of him, he went “confused” for a few days.

“I said that we are now in the middle of literary history. That storm of emotions felt a bit like falling in love, that I had been given something so valuable to take care of.”

Carlson was amazed at how accurately Kilpi had written everything down. For example, Kilpi has carefully documented the birth of his works.

Just like in his first diary entry, Kilpi has also thought about the future and the time that the words preserve when archiving the texts. He has returned to editing the texts and has written instructions about possible publication, for example.

Carlson found a lot in the material that he didn't expect. Kilpi has written hundreds of pages of concrete description of nature, recorded with botanical accuracy the nature types of the summer cottage environment in Piskola with its plants and organisms.

“Perhaps he wanted to preserve nature in his texts in this way, but also in some way to be rooted in his environment, because he had to leave his home as a child,” reflects Carlson.

From diaries naturally, the joys and sorrows of the writer's life can also be found.

“Maybe I've endured my whole life, fights, illnesses and everything else, in the way that I've written,” says Kilpi in Carlson's work.

Kilpi has deliberately left some topics to be addressed posthumously. One such is the death of his eldest son Vesa. Eve and Mikko Kilven the boy died at the age of 46 from diabetes in 1996.

Already in Carlson's work, Kilpi's private life, broken marriage and how stormily Kilpi loved her “very beautiful” husband Mikko Kilpe, whose literary heritage Kilpi would like to bring out more, are opened up.

But there are a lot of other topics in the notebooks, which maybe we'll get to read about someday. For example, Kilpi wrote a lot about the political atmosphere of the 1970s, as well as his own role in it.

What social theme would Eeva Kilpi like to talk about if she were to participate in this interview?

“I'm sure he would like to talk about how the elderly are treated,” says Carlson

“He would remind us that all ages are present in a person. A 90-year-old is also a young girl at the same time. Everyone should be treated as human beings with desires, will and passions.”

Kilpi would probably also like to talk about forest protection.

In the notes and the diaries also contain many texts that go deeper than the already published material into the themes of motherhood and femininity.

“He talks about women's status as a social issue and distorted power structures, but never about men as a group.”

In the same way, Kilpi may have bravely raged, for example, petty-bourgeois conventionality and snobbery, but he never points a finger at anyone, says Carlson.

The current debate culture could benefit from this way of expressing things.

“His granddaughter Lyydia said that it is wonderful to talk to Eeva because she makes a person think better. There are no locked-in absolutes, but an effort to understand.”

Work contains many very eloquent quotes. Carlson said he recorded some of the conversations, but most of them he wrote down as notes during the conversations and added to them afterward.

Carlson says that he has also written visible the Shield's age and the fragility associated with memory. “It's clear that it affects those conversations.”

According to Carlson, the work is a “fictional non-fiction book” with fictional limitations. “But everything that happens on the pages has happened”.

Now was not the time for an all-encompassing grand biography. Such a thing has been wished for many times, but Kilve's wish has not been done, at least not yet.

“Eva's literary legacy will surely produce one or more great works,” says Carlson.

Anna-Riikka Carlson: Dear Eeva Kilpi. These parties are still going on. WSOY. 448 pp.