Books from Finland

22/06/2016

Check out our revamped homepage - as well as displaying the most recently digitalised articles it also has new-and-improved search features: http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/! This week’s digitalised texts include works by Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924–1966), who was one of the leading modernists of her day, as well as a key figure in the development of the Finnish novel.

Photo: SKS archives

30/06/2015

The party's over: Books from Finland's last post

24/06/2015

The main music critic of Päivälehti (‘The daily newspaper’) in the 1890s was the celebrated composer Oskar Merikanto. Often, but not always, Merikanto praised first performances of works by the yet more stellar Jean Sibelius. June 1895, however, saw the publication of Merikanto’s I sommarkväll (‘Waltz for a summer’s night’). The short review duly appeared the following day, attributed not directly to Sibelius but to ‘a certain prominent composer’. In it, Sibelius hints that its uses may be more than strictly musical...

Jean Sibelius on how to keep your mojo

24/06/2015

It is 150 years since the birth of Finland’s ‘national’ composer, Jean Sibelius. Much has been written about his life; Jenni Kirves’s new book casts light on his wife, Aino (1871–1969), and through her on the composer’s emotional and family life. Aino has often been viewed as an almost saintly muse who sacrificed her life for her husband. But she was flesh and blood, and the book charts the difficulties of life with her brilliant husband from the very beginning.

An excerpt from Aino Sibelius: Ihmeellinen olento (‘Aino Sibelius: wondrous creature’, Johnny Kniga, 2015). We join the young couple in 1892 as they prepare for their long-awaited wedding.

23/06/2015

Author Kalle Päätalo (1919-2000) was a rare bird in the book-publishing world. Beginning in 1962, his series of autobiographical novels were published annually in editions of 100,000 copies. At a cautious estimate, one million Finns out of a total population of five million read Päätalo. He was a unique phenomenon, and a highly lucrative one.

In this excerpt, from Tammerkosken sillalla (‘On Tammerkoski bridge’, 1982), the narrator’s excitement as he finds Martin Eden by Jack London – along with the Finnish author Mika Waltari, one of Päätalo’s great writer-heroes – in the local library is palpable.

This week, Kalle Päätalo – once Finland’s most successful author

17/06/2015

Among the obituaries of Christopher Lee, the celebrated actor who died last week at the age of 93, one fact has remained strangely overlooked: his connection with Finland.

Actor Christopher Lee loved Finland and knew the Kalevala

16/06/2015

Right at the top of the list of untranslated Finnish masterpieces, for us, is Helvi Hämäläinen’s monumental Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’,1941). Written in the fateful summer of 1939, as the world waited for war, this story of love among the Helsinki intelligentsia is at the same time both a roman a clef – it caused a sensation on publication as the real people behind the fictional characters were recognised – and a vivid picture of its age.

This week’s pick is an excerpt from Helvi Hämäläinen’s gorgeously sensuous novel

09/06/2015

Minna Lindgren’s mordantly satirical, often hilariously funny writing has earned her a wide readership. Ehtoolehdon tuho (‘The decline of Twilight Grove’, Teos, 2015), the final novel in a trilogy about life in an assisted living home, employing human staff has become too expensive and the old folk are part of a pilot project in which they are cared for by electronic devices, monitors, cameras, ‘smartwalls’ and cleaning robots: ‘there was intelligence everywhere, masses of it, just a hiccup and something terribly intelligent would happen.’

An excerpt from Ehtoolehdon tuho (‘The decline of Twilight Grove’, Teos, 2015)

08/06/2015

This week, a short story from Finland’s one and only Nobel laureate, F.E. Sillanpää. Time has largely forgotten Frans Emil Sillanpää (1888-1964), but in the interwar years of the last century this complex writer – biologist, realist, mystic and proponent of ‘life-worship’ – was one of the most prominent in Finland. His work, intriguingly archaic and modern at the same time, is well represented by Järvi (‘The lake’, 1915), the short story we publish here.

(F.E. Sillanpää in his home receives the news that he has been awarded with the Nobel prize in literature in 1939.) This week, a short story from Finland’s one and only Nobel laureate, F.E. Sillanpää

02/06/2015

The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has unearthed a picture taken of Helsinki in 1857. Other mid-century images show central Helsinki looking not unlike its present-day self. It’s only when the camera ventures outside the few blocks of the city centre that the view becomes more unfamiliar, the streets lined with one- and two-storey wooden houses.

The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has unearthed a picture taken of Helsinki in 1857

26/05/2015

For the author Leena Krohn, there is no philosophy of art without moral philosophy

I lightheartedly promised to explain the foundations of my aesthetics without thinking at any great length about what is my very own that could be called aesthetics. Now I am forced to think about it. The...

26/05/2015

This archive pick is, like last week’s, a period piece – this time a cry for help from the 1980s in the work of Juhani Peltonen (1941-1998). These pieces by the multitalented Juhani Peltonen, who wrote plays for stage and radio as well as short stories, novels and poems, were published shortly before major and irrevocable change.

This week’s pick is a cry for help from the 1980s in the work of Juhani Peltonen (1941-1998).

22/05/2015

The Finnish Literature Society is to cease publication of the online journal Books from Finland with effect 1 July 2015.

The following is a press release from the Finnish Literature Society. The Finnish Literature Society is to cease publication of the online journal Books from Finland with effect 1 July 2015 and will focus on making material which has been gathered over almost 50 years more widely available to...

15/05/2015

This week, a glimpse of Helsinki in 1912 in Runar Schildt’s finely observed short story Raketen. As the story’s translator, the formidably erudite George C. Schoolfield, remarks in his introduction, Runar Schildt (1888-1925) has often been hailed as a Finland-Swedish classic. There’s a quality of aesthetic decadence in his work that makes him very much a product of his time. There’s nothing, in Raketen, with its solid, belle epoque atmosphere, to foreshadow the change that was so soon to engulf Finland, with the granting of independence in 1917 and the bitter civil war that followed.

This week, a glimpse of Helsinki in 1912 in Runar Schildt’s finely observed short story Raketen (‘The rocket’)

11/05/2015

According to Petri Tamminen, Finns are burdened by the need to succeed. Instead, he argues they should learn to fail better. Part comedy, part tragedy, part picaresque novel, with a dash of Joseph Conrad – Tamminen’s new book, Meriromaani (‘A maritime novel’) is set in an indeterminate seafaring past of the 18th or 19th century. It tells the story of the world’s most unsuccessful sea captain, Vilhelm Huurna who, one by one, sinks all the ships he commands.

Bracing the waves. Ivan Aivazovsky, 1890. An excerpt from Meriromaani. Eräitä valoisia hetkiä merikapteeni Vilhelm Huurnan synkässä elämässä (‘A maritime novel. A few bright moments in Captain Vilhelm Huurna’s sombre life’, Otava, 2015)

06/05/2015

Between 1939 and 1944 Finland fought not one, but three separate wars – the Winter War (1939-45), the Continuation War (1941-44) and the Lapland War (1944-45).
We have become used to black-and-white images of the conflict, with their distancing effect. Among the 160,000 images in the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, however, are some 800 rare colour photographs from the Continuation War, which bring the realities of fighting much closer. The events pictured leap out of history and into the present.

Colour images bring the Second World War vividly to life

05/05/2015

The first of Hannele Huovi’s much loved Urpo ja Turpo (‘Urpo and Turpo’) books ­– featuring two little bears, the grey, bob-tailed Urpo, who likes flowers, and Turpo, the grey, intrepid adventurer – appeared in 1987.
With comically characterised illustrations by Jukka Lemmetty, these vignettes cast a philosophical light on life as seen from a small child’s viewpoint, whether the subject is monsters at bedtime, what to play on a rainy day, using the family dog as a sailing ship or learning good manners.
Hannele Huovi (born 1949) won the prestigious Eino Leino Prize in 2009. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, German, Japanese, Russian and Arabic.

This week’s archive pick is a series of Hannele Huovi’s delightfully wry stories for children

28/04/2015

How Books from Finland made reading less lonely

No one could call reading – or writing, for that matter – a social activity. No matter how many reading, or writing, groups you may choose to join, the actual engagement with a book is something you do alone. Music, theatre, cinema, dance – those really are social enterprises. You can go to them...

24/04/2015

After she stopped writing the Moomin stories in 1970, Tove Jansson (1914-2001) began an entirely new career as the author of fiction for adults. This story, ‘Summer child’, comes from her third volume of short stories for adults, Resa med lätt baggage (Travelling light, 1988), where travelling – even if only by motor boat, between the islands of the archipelago that lies off Finland’s south-west coast – is the central theme.

This week, one of Moomin-creator Tove Jansson’s short stories for adults

23/04/2015

A new, Finnish-French, animated movie sees the Moomin family caught up in a typhoon that lands them among the fleshpots of the French Riviera. Based not on Tove Jansson’s children’s books, but on a cartoon strip drawn by Tove and her brother, Lars, that ran in the London Evening Standard newspaper between 1954 and 1970, Moomins on the Riviera offers the Moomins a whole host of new experiences. The film opens in London on 22 May.

A new film takes the Moomin family far from Moomin Valley ­ – to the French Riviera

17/04/2015

This week, cluster of pieces from and about left-leaning Tampere, the ‘Red City’ of Finland. Also known as the ‘Manchester of Finland’ for its 19th-century manufacturing tradition, Tampere produced two important, and strongly contrasting, writers, Lauri Viita (1916-1965) and Hannu Salama (born 1936). Here we publish a selection of Viita’s poems and a short story by Hannu Salama. Herbert Lomas does an excellent job of capturing Viita's easy-going, unselfconscious rhythms. Hannu Salama's short story is an unvarnished account of a Tampere funeral which is, at the same time, the funeral of the old, radical way of life – which, sure enough, has vanished almost as if it never existed.

This week, a cluster of pieces from and about left-leaning Tampere, the ‘Red City’ of Finland

13/04/2015

We first published this short story by Martti Joenpolvi, an acknowledged master of the genre, in 1989; it comes from the collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988), which was nominated for the Finlandia Prize.

The subject – the story is about a man taking his mistress on a secret visit to his summer-house – provides plenty of opportunity for sly humour. But it’s a more unsettling read in 2015 than we’re guessing it was twenty-five years ago – not so much for the plot itself, which makes ironic fun of the idea of woman-as-chattel, as for the characterisation, which subtly places the woman exactly where the story does.

Enjoy!

In this short story, from his collection Pronssikausi (‘The bronze age’, 1988, on the Finlandia Prize shortlist in 1989), Martti Joenpolvi takes up the subject of the problematic transportation of a human cargo He braked abruptly; the woman lurched forward, straining...

10/04/2015

Kokko, kokoo koko kokko kokoon: crazy Finnish lessons with Sara Forsberg

Just listen to it get a whole lot weirder...

09/04/2015

Weird and wonderful: Heikki Jokinen on the highly original world of new Finnish graphic novels

It’s impossible to put Finnish graphic novels into one bottle and glue a clear label on to the outside, writes Heikki Jokinen. Finnish graphic novels are too

26/03/2015

What are your favourite weird facts about Finland?

Check out some facts you never knew

25/03/2015

Seventy-five years ago it looked as if the Second World War was all over for Finland. Documentary photographs of the day peace came.

… but not, as it turned out, for long

20/03/2015

Back in the day, in one of our periodic excursions into merchandising – the main criteria were that our goods should be flat (to fit into an envelope) and, of course, literary – we printed Books from Finland t-shirts. They were wildly popular – we must have sold, oh, dozens of them – and top of the list was a shirt with a laconic couplet by Gösta Ågren: ‘Don’t worry / it will never work out.’

This week’s pick is a selection of Gösta Ågren’s caustically tender poems. The volume from which these poems are taken, Jär (‘Here’, 1989), won the Finlandia Prize for Literature in 1989.

17/03/2015

Just because you’re a Finnish author, you don’t have to write about Finland – do you?
Here’s a deliciously closely observed short story set in New York: Hannu Väisänen’s Eli Zebbahin voikeksit (‘Eli Zebbah’s shortbread biscuits’) from his new collection, Piisamiturkki (‘The musquash coat’, Otava, 2015).
Best known as a painter, Väisänen (born 1951) has also won large readerships and critical recognition for his series of autobiographical novels. Here he launches into pure fiction with a tale that wouldn’t be out of place in Italo Calvino’s 1973 classic The Castle of Crossed Destinies…

Eli Zebbah’s small but well-stocked grocery store is located on Amsterdam Avenue in New York, between two enormous florist’s shops. The shop is only a block and a half from the apartment that I had rented for the summer to write there. [...]

16/03/2015

The words come and go.
I need words less and less.
Tomorrow maybe
I’ll not need a single one,

Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995) wrote in Niin vaihtuvat vuoden ajat (‘So change the seasons’), as early as 1964. Her breakthrough collection, Tämä matka (‘This journey’, 1956) marked a major arrival on the modernist poetry scene and her work has been widely translated. Always lyrically minimalist, Manner’s poetry sometimes seemed to approach the limits of language – silence.

Today we have a real treat – a selection of the sumptuously minimalist poetry of Eeva-Liisa Manner (1921–1995) by her near-contemporary, the British poet Herbert Lomas (1924–2011).

09/03/2015

This week’s pick is a group of very short short stories by Rosa Liksom (born 1958; real name Anni Ylävaara). When she burst on the Finnish literary scene in 1985 with her first book, Yhden yön pysäkki (‘One night stand’), excitement was intense. For a start, she managed to keep her real identity secret, even when she appeared at public events and book-signings.

This group of seven stories (http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/1989/09/brief-lives/), from her second book, Tyhjän tien paratiisit (‘Paradises of the open road’, 1989), cover territory which has become familiar in her work: a woman who marries a layabout, a bellicose butcher’s son, a cleanliness fanatic for whom hygiene is more important than human relationships.

Rosa Liksom won the Finlandia Prize in 2011 for Hytti nro 6, which was published by Serpent’s Tail, London, in a translation by Lola Rogers last year.

06/03/2015

Historic broadcasting project: the complete Koran is to be read on Finnish radio. The series begins on 7 March - tomorrow.

In an unprecedented project, the Koran, the holy book of Islam, is to be read on the Radio 1 channel of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) in 60 half-hour

03/03/2015

‘Child of Marx and Coca-Cola’, ‘Nordic beatnik’, Jarkko Laine (1947-2006) published his first work, a volume of poetry entitled Muovinen Buddha (‘Plastic Buddha’) in the 1960s and was immediately hailed as the mouthpiece of his generation. He went on to make his career as a literary all-rounder – poet, writer, playwright, translator, long-time editor of the literary magazine Parnasso and chair of the Finnish Writers’ Union.

Our archive find this week, Laine's wryly ironic story, ‘The 101 year anniversary celebration’ tells the story of what every writer must dread: a guest appearance in a local library where literature from the local town, let alone further afield, is regarded with suspicion.

From the collection of short stories, Saksalainen vävy (‘The German son-in-law’) , 1988. Interview by Erkka Lehtola Järvinen thought he must have turned up at

02/03/2015

Requiem for lost youth: photographer Elina Brotherus and writer Riikka Ala-Harja revisit former lives in France. Their book represents a personal coming-to-terms with the evaporation of youthful dreams, a mourning for lost time and broken relationships, a level and unselfpitying gaze at the passage of time: ‘Life has not been what I hoped for. Soon it will be time to accept it and mourn for the dreams that will never come true. Mourn for the lost time, my young self, who no longer exists.’

In 1999 the Musée Nicéphore Niépce invited the young Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus to Chalon-sur-Saône in Burgundy, France, as a visiting artist. After

23/02/2015

Translation, as the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin argued, is an art form. Amid all the conventional doom ‘n’ gloom about literary translation, then – and even though we at Books from Finland are among its biggest supporters, we have to put up our hands and admit that we do our fair share of hand-wringing – it’s refreshing to see this over at Better than Sliced Bread, a blog edited by English students at Helsinki University: a love-letter by Seattle student Elizabeth Oakes to the ‘vast and beautiful’ vistas that the process of translation can open up. http://www.betterthanslicedbread.info/culture/a-cheerful-note-on-literary-translation/

Seven Finnish housewives wave paperbacks at each other. The mood in this little house in a forested suburb of Seattle is elevated, as are voices. We’re discussing the hottest new literature out of

20/02/2015

Jaywalking and the tango: Stephen Chan anatomises his long-standing love-affair with Finland and Tuomas Kyrö’s satirical novel The Beggar & The Hare

In this job, it’s a heart-lifting moment when you spot a new Finnish novel diplayed in prime position on a London bookshop table – and we’ve seen Tuomas Kyrö’s