When reading a book about a person in history, you should keep in mind what kind of book it is.
When I first heard the term biofiction, I thought it meant ecological prose. Then I learned that this is fiction that deals with real people.
Of course, this is familiar to me, after all, the species is traditional and widely used. Before, there was talk of biographical novels.
This book autumn, biofiction is celebrating: novels have been received from Aino Aalto, Anita Välki, Mikael Agricola, Tove Jansson and Marja Rankkala.
It has also been discussed. Namely, it is not without problems to write fiction based on living or lived people at a time when the media is also bursting with reality transformed into stories.
For example, scholars and biographers sometimes shake their heads at bold interpretations of novels about the characteristics, thoughts, or deeds of recent historical figures.
I understand novelists very well. Readers are interested in a real connection to the past: it gives the story a more surface to identify with. That is, biofiction sells.
It’s certainly also tempting to find a small, perhaps overlooked pocket in history where you can develop events from your own imagination. This could have happened, writers often argue.
Such a pocket is, for example, Jari Tervo’s novel Swallows overwinter on the bottom of the lake epilepsy imagined for the protagonist Mikael Agricola. It concretizes the struggle for faith, and it works.
However, my sympathies are also on the side of scholars and biographers. After all, they do not have the freedom to imagine, but what is said must be based on sources. Or, if interpretations are made, they must be justified as fully as possible.
Therefore, I fully understand that scholars with the same subjects as the authors are in pain when they have to explain to the public that not everything really went exactly as in the plot of the success novel.
Ultimately however, the responsibility remains – of course – with the reader.
He has to realize that when he reads a novel, he is really reading fiction, not research or a nonfiction. It can sometimes be difficult when real personal names and years are intertwined with inventions.
No wonder the front page of more and more biofiction works is now printed in capital letters: ROMAN.
The author is the cultural editor of HS.
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