Culture|The supplier recommends
The week’s recommendations also remind us that a good enough book or movie will still seem years to come.
Last spring investigator Olli Löytyn pamphlet Farewell to domestic literature (The work) provoked a heated debate about whether Finnish literature is homogeneous, introverted and even racist.
An evaluation of the book can be found from herea different interpretation from here.
At the end of the year, the discussion continued in a kind of anthology of the Finnish PEN Freedom of Expression. Sulava – Multilingual literature in Finland contains texts from 22 authors, 17 in the original language and a total of more than fifty translations.
The work thus gives a good idea of how extensive culture surrounds and feeds the literature that is emerging in Finland today.
Melting is also a unique work of art – graphic design is Daniel Malpican – and a quick look at what writers living here for different reasons are thinking about what they are writing about.
Racism is also being addressed, but even more is memory, memories and one’s own language in a situation where it is no longer a matter of course all around.
It is always a challenge for the author, sometimes a punishment and a great tragedy.
Sulava – Multilingual Literature in Finland: A Collection. Finnish PEN Association
The brilliant Janet Frame is on display again
Your own writing preserving the language can be difficult for non-immigrants as well.
New Zealander Janet Frame (1924–2004) had to defend their peculiar expression already in their meager youth, then for years in involuntary care in a mental hospital.
Fortunately, electric shocks did not discourage it either, and so a significant literary production was born.
In time, Frame’s story was made by a colleague To Riitta Jalos so impressed that a biographical novel was born from it Brightness (2016).
In it, Jalonen – perhaps even meeting his own experiences – reaches nicely with the search, with which the author reaches out to both early memories and the surrounding reality and trusts his observations, even if no understanding is found.
In Jane Campion’s film, Janet Frame as a child was played by Alexia Keogh.
The director also succeeded in filming the same Jane Campion in his film An Angel at My Table (1990), in which the sensually sensitive Frame struggles with shyness, loneliness, and the temptation to die.
The film, which was strongly remembered decades ago, is on display again, now on the Netflix streaming service.
Riitta Jalonen: Brightness. 352 pp. Tammi.
An Angel at My Table. Netflix.
The family is falling apart, the house is worth it
Under Christmas a novel that was captured by the cover but whose author I had never heard of got into my hands.
Now I know more: American Ann Patchett (b. 1963) is both a PEN / Faulkner and Orange Award winning author and Dutch house too Pulitzer finalist from 2020.
As the name implies, there is an exceptional house at the center of the novel. First the mother leaves her way, later also her son and daughter.
Still, no one can escape the house.
The narrator of the novel is the son Danny. From one decade to the next, he says how to cope with family breakdown. Gradually we grow from a desire for revenge to curiosity, some kind of understanding and even forgiveness.
However, the protagonists are women: the abused, brave sister Maeve and the siblings’ special mother Elna. In the background is the hustle and bustle of post-war Philadelphia and the entire United States with its political turmoil.
The first Patchett translation reminds me Michael Cunninghamin and Canadian Ann-Marie MacDonaldin narration – and also EM Forsterin classic House in the shade of an elm tree (1910).
All are novels about the stages of a single family, its internal contradictions and contradictory commitments.
Ann Patchett: The Dutch House. Laura Jänisniemi, Finland. 343 pp. WSOY.
Runeberg Award-winning Quynh Tran and Third Culture Kids Anthology Library’s busiest 2-9. February
Fiction
1) Quynh Tran: Shadow and coolness
2) Niko Rantsi: Who will be next door
3) Laura Lindstedt & Sinikka Vuola: 101 ways to kill a husband
4) Nita Prose: Room cleaner
5) Meri Valkama: Yours, Margot
6) Niko Rantsi: Shed for you
Nonfiction
1) Kiia Beilinson, Mona Eid, Koko Hubara and Caroline Suinner: Third Culture Kids
2) Outi Papamarcos: And then came Trump
3) Deborah Record: The Cost of Living
4) Timo Miettinen: Europe, the history of the political community
5) Deborah Levy: What I don’t want to know
6) Elina Siltanen-Sjöberg: Secret pearls, home like a dream
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