Anita
Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise, which
I read in A.D. Haun and Owen Witesman’s translation of the Finnish original Hullun taivaassa, and Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners share more than Finnish ancestry:
structurally, both books link vignettes or stories into novels, and both books offer
straightforward writing and rather bleak, atmospheric pictures of loneliness.
I read A Fool’s
Paradise first, enjoying Konkka’s first-person narrator’s dark humor: her
storyteller is an unemployed young woman who’s involved with a married man and enjoys
referring to Russian literature and writers. In the first chapter, she has a
stone from Pasternak’s grave in her pocket. The woman’s accounts of her life,
much of which isn’t particularly interesting in term of activity, read, to me,
like a stream of vignettes, often incorporating observations about strangers and descriptions
of dreams. “Our life passes in sleeping and waiting,” she says. She also says
her only duty in society is to report to the unemployment office.
It’s Konkka’s use of detail—a bird flying into a room, a
gypsy on a ferry, childhood memories of learning about Yuri Gagarin—and tone,
as conveyed by Haun and Witesman, that made A
Fool’s Paradise so strangely engaging for me. Here’s an example:
A young man is distributing leaflets in front of the K-Market and asks whether I believe in Jesus. No woman has ever asked me that. Perhaps they’ve agreed that men will save women and women save men, since people are more responsive to the allure of the opposite sex.
Repentance and sin are, as promised by the title, a crucial element of We Sinners, a novel-in-stories
that chronicles the lives of the Rovaniemis, a family of Finnish descent living
in the U.S. that has nine children. The Rovaniemis are Laestadian Lutherans who
aren’t allowed to watch movies or TV, go to school dances, use makeup, or drink
alcohol. Among other things. Of course they break the rules a lot, and several of
the Rovaniemi children leave the church during the course of the book. One of
the younger Rovaniemis sums up the church this way, “It’s a kind of Lutheranism
where everyone is much more hung up on being Lutheran than all the other normal
Lutherans. End of story.”
All those rules and alleged deprivations (I love life without
a TV!), along with the expected transgressions from all manner of sinners, were
less interesting for me than Pylväinen’s grace in structuring the book, her
debut novel. She tells the family’s story chronologically, economically covering
a couple decades in under 200 pages by carrying threads from one story to
another. In the first story, children get chicken pox and their father, Warren,
may be offered the job of pastor at their church… Pylväinen starts the second
story by letting the reader know what happened for Warren.
Pylväinen also creates an interesting illusion with her
story-chapters, many of which focus on a key episode in one character’s life
with references to other family members. The characters—from father Warren, who grits his
teeth from anger until a crown breaks, to Brita, a daughter whose first press
of the keys on her new piano is silent—are members of a crowded family living
in a crowded house but they often feel tragically alone in their anger, disappointment,
and relative poverty. Much of the siblings’ interaction comes through solidarity
in leaving or staying with the church.
Two scenes involving the mother, Pirjo, especially
stuck with me. In the first, her discovery (at the movies!) that one of her
sons is gay seemed especially alienating for everyone involved, “She felt slapped, she
felt rejected, she felt like he had looked at the life she had made for him and
he had spit on it.” So much for forgiveness. Toward the end of the book, Pirjo tells
one of her daughters over the phone, “We’re here to remind you of what is
right. We know you know in your hearts what the right thing is, of course we
know you know that—” But then her daughter cuts her off, yelling, “Assholes!”
Up Next: Seven Days by Deon Meyer.
Disclaimers: I
received a review copy of We Sinners
from publisher Henry Holt, thank you!