More Fiction with Finnish: A Fool’s Paradise and We Sinners

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!

A Not-So-Jolly Jester: Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man

Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man, which I read in Geoffrey Strachan’s translation of the original French La vie d’un homme inconnu, is the kind of book that makes me grumpy. The novel details—and I do mean “details”—the emotional and geographical wanderings of a little-known Russian émigré writer living in France who decides to visit the motherland after his much-younger girlfriend dumps him. Shutov, the writer, is a sentimental guy and he wants to visit an old flame.

Peterhof/Petrodvorets at Saint Petersburg's 300th
Anniversary

Shutov’s surname may be rooted in “shut” (sounds like “shoot”), the Russian word for a clown, fool, or jester, but he doesn’t fit in with St. Petersburg’s carnivalesque atmosphere at the city’s anniversary celebration. He says, “Nothing has changed in thirty years. And everything has changed.” Right. A paragraph later, when Shutov tells himself, “I was wrong to come…,” I wrote “Yes, you were!” in the margin. Reason A: As we all know, you can’t step in the same river twice. Reason B: The trip is a colossally awkward plot device designed to give Shutov a chance to observe changes and fail to have a soulful reunion with Yana, the old flame, who is now a busy businesswoman… but miraculously redeem the journey by meeting Volsky, an old man who inhabits a room in a former communal apartment Yana now owns.

It’s Volsky’s last night in his room before moving to a nursing home, and Shutov watches over him, listening to his life story, which includes the blockade of Leningrad, reaching Berlin for the Soviet Army during World War 2, Stalin-era imprisonment, and a love story involving numerous coincidences. Volsky’s life hits on numerous elements of the mythos of Soviet Russia and Leningrad, combining the miracle of survival and the ability to find a certain happiness amidst chaos, arrests, and death. The problem here isn’t the material, which is important, it’s Makine’s treatment, which makes Volsky feel like a clichéd composite of the Soviet period right down to a tear-jerking final trip to an old site before he moves to the nursing home.

Even worse, Volsky is a tool to inspire Shutov to find perspective on his own dull life. If, that is, the reader can believe this self-centered guy is ready for perspective. This element of the novel felt especially literarily cheap and obvious because Makine summarizes the novel’s action and message at the end, lest the reader missed something. An example: “The violent feeling suddenly overcomes Shutov that he will never be a part of the Russian world that is now being reborn within his native land.” But we knew that many pages ago.

The Life of an Unknown Man reminds me of a Soviet-era package tour to Russia: a schedule stuffed with group meals in hotel dining rooms and ideological excursions, but no contact with Russians other than tour guides and food service personnel. Sure, you see the important sites and many of them are lovely. But you feel manipulated, told what to think. There are lots of Russian novels available in translation that address World War 2 in the Soviet Union and/or the Stalinist repression that I’d recommend over Makine’s The Life, everything from I(rina) Grekova’s Ship of Widows to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Two other Soviet-era books that have become classics: Anatolii Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat and Vasilii Grossman’s Life and Fate.

To be fair, I should note that lots of readers enjoyed The Life of an Unknown Man far more than I. Among them: Kirkus, which starred it; Amy Henry on The Black Sheep Dances; Mary Whipple on Seeing the World Through Books; Viv Groskop in The Observer, and M.A. Orthofer on The Complete Review, who links to numerous other reviews.

Notes on two other books: I had so much difficulty with G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, a clunky and contrived attempt to mix a Persian Gulf cyberthriller with djinns and The Thousand and One Nights that I stopped reading half-way through. Grumpy again! I also read the first hundred or so pages of WiesławMyśliwski’s Stone Upon Stone, in Bill Johnston’s translation. Stone Upon Stone is very good, vignettes of rural Polish life that come close to qualifying as stream-of-consciousness, but it’s the kind of book I’m best reading over time, in chunks, so I don’t lose the nuance. I read wonderful passages about farming, the significance of a new road, and melees at dances. It’s easy to see why Bill Johnston won the Best Translated Book Award for Stone Upon Stone: he creates a memorable English-language voice for Myśliwski’s first-person narrator. It’s a book I’ll study and analyze, too, because its narrative voice feels like a Polish cousin to some of the Russian-language stories I’ve worked on.

Disclaimers: Thanks to Amy Henry who sent me a copy of The Life of an Unknown Man that she received from Graywolf Press, whom I also thank. Amy also facilitated my copy of Stone Upon Stone from Archipelago Books—thanks to both of them! Finally, I picked up a copy of Alif the Unseen from Grove/Atlantic’s booth at BookExpo America; I’ve always enjoyed speaking with Grove/Atlantic about literature in translation.  

Up next: Anita Konkka’s A Fool’s Paradise. Then Hanna Pylväinen’s We Sinners. I think it’s my summer for Finnish-related books… I may have to read Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book next.

Image credit: Saint Petersburg’s 300th Anniversary, from www.Kremlin.ru

Identity Theft: Frayn’s Skios

Michael Frayn’s Skios is both fun and funny, an entertaining farce about mistaken identity at a Fred Toppler Foundation conference—“Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics”—for a bunch of schmoozing jetsetters and would-be intellectuals who gather on a fictional Greek island. Skios tells the story of two Dr. Norman Wilfreds and the silly havoc they wreak on themselves and the people around them.

The passport-proven Norman Wilfred is scheduled to lecture at the conference about the management of science… but ends up at a distant house on Skios instead of the lavish conference site after being mistaken for one Oliver Fox. The ersatz Norman Wilfred, whose real name is, yes, Oliver Fox, is coming to Skios for a fling but decides to become Dr. Wilfred when he sees a woman holding a Norman Wilfred sign at the airport and decides “that would have been a good name to have.” Fox-Wilfred also sees that Nikki Hook, the woman greeting him, “plainly wanted him to be Dr. Wilfred.” Fox-Wilfred isn’t one to disappoint.

There are many layers of humor lurking in Skios, from the repetition of identity-based gags—like Spiros and Stavros, brothers and taxi drivers, who think real-Wilfred must be “Phoksoliva,” which real-Wilfred thinks must be a Greek expression—to a receptionist answering the phone by saying “How my dreck your call?” And then there’s satire involving empty-headed conference attendees, who are all too eager to believe that Fox-Wilfred is real-Wilfred. Even if they’ve met him in the past.

Identity in Skios is all about belief and labels, that people fit the labels they present; this plays nicely on contemporary thought that something will happen if you believe in it enough. Perhaps what’s most telling on Skios is that the person at the conference who most pesters Fox-Wilfred, asking him real scientific questions, is shunted aside over and over because he’s inconvenient: maintaining the illusion of Fox-Wilfred is more comfortable. Of course the illusion is also entertaining and suspenseful for the reader, as when Fox-Wilfred comes up with an absurd and messy magician-like act with coffee cups in an attempt to evade answering the questions.

There is plenty more illusion, fake, ersatz, and faux in Skios, from Nikki’s blond hair to a Russian woman’s apparent lack of English: Mrs. Toppler, the former Vegas dancer who heads the foundation, tells Fox-Wilfred to entertain one Mrs. Skorbatova at dinner by just talking, telling him, “A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice smiles.”

Frayn ends the novel with far more of a semiotic bang than I’d expected. He sets it off with a careless action (involving sweets) that spurs an utterance—an English word that has multiple meanings—that prompts an inappropriate reaction. This misunderstanding has much, much worse consequences than the Fox-Wilfred matter but Frayn still manages to end the book on a humorous note, with Mrs. Toppler thanking her conference guests. Everything is only what you say it is.

Skios, by the way, was long-listed for the Booker Prize last week. Skios is listed on the Macmillan Web site here, with a brief excerpt.

Up Next: Andreï Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man. Then G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of Skios from the publisher, Henry Holt. Thank you!

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True

Riikka Pulkkinen’s True, which I read in Lola M. Roger’s translation from the Finnish original Totta, is a novel about family, death, and dying that tells the story of three generations. Though it’s the grandmother, Elsa, who is dying in the present day, Pulkkinen tells much of the family’s collective story through an affair in the 1960s between Martti, Elsa’s husband, and Eeva, the nanny for their daughter Eleonoora.

The situations in True—a torrid affair with the nanny while Elsa is away on business—sound trite and soap opera-ish, but Pulkkinen offers a new angle by letting Martti and Elsa’s granddaughter, Anna, imagine the affair. This isn’t a stretch for Anna: she and Martti have a long-standing habit of looking at strangers and inventing life stories for them. Anna combines imagination with her own life, projecting her own pain, left over from her relationship with a past boyfriend’s young daughter, onto Martti and Eeva’s story, thinking Eeva would also suffer from being separated from Eleonoora.

Interpretations of reality and relationships float through True. Martti, a prominent painter, tells stories, too, through his art, including portraits of the women in his life, and Elsa is a well-known psychologist. Pulkkinen also weaves in the social changes of the 1960s, referencing protests about the Vietnam War and sending Eeva to Paris. Eeva is no activist, though, and Pulkkinen contrasts the personal and the social. Here’s a paragraph from one of Anna’s chapters imagining Eeva’s voice:

No one will admit it but all of us are actually more interested in the lake and the sauna and the half of a blueberry pie on the table than we are in the fact that reality is being created at this very moment in offices and meeting rooms and on speakers’ platforms and who knows maybe underground in the kinds of groups whose names have only just been thought up.

Pulkkinen refers to other Finnish sweets, including some of my favorites: breads with cardamom, which my mother used to bake using my Finnish grandmother’s recipe, get several mentions as do candies from Fazer, which I used to buy in airports on my way to and from Moscow. I suspect they draw on Finnish readers’ senses and—more importantly—memories even more than they draw on mine.

In Rogers’s translation, the narrative voices of True feel neutral and, considering the emotional subject matter, almost flat, as they describe landscapes, family relationships, and even Elsa’s death, which the reader knows must come. But Rogers’s tone felt true to me: it prevented the novel from becoming maudlin, and it fit nicely with True’s Finnish settings, where characters endure, with stoicism, hot saunas, cold swimming, and all sorts of emotional pain and distance.

I think it’s the combination of stylistics, Finnish motifs, and, of course, stereotypical elements of stories about family—meaning everything from the book’s narrative tone to the birds, the sweets, the lake, the rotting boards in the sauna, the love of ice cream, and even the closet holding Eeva’s old dress—that hold True together, making an old story feel worthy of retelling, with, of course, variations.

Disclaimers: I received a review copy of True at BookExpoAmerica from Other Press, thank you! I enjoyed speaking about Russian literature in translation with Other Press during BEA. More on disclosures: here.

Up Next: Michael Frayn’s Skios, which I enjoyed very much.

Image credit: Photo of Finnish breads from Mikalaari, via Wikipedia. 

What Are the Odds? Ben H. Winters’s The Last Policeman

The Last Policeman is a new type of mashup novel for writer Ben H. Winters, co-author of such titles as Android Karenina and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters: in The Last Policeman, Winters sets a murder mystery in pre-apocalyptic Concord, New Hampshire, creating a suspenseful and thoughtful combination of crime and natural disaster that asks refreshingly everyday existential questions of everyday people.

Winters’s narrator is Hank Palace, a police detective who insists on investigating an apparent suicide—the dead man is a “hanger” whose body is found in a McDonald’s men’s room—because his instincts tell him something isn’t right. “A man is dead,” he says. Of course people die all the time, hangers are common in Concord, and everybody in The Last Policeman is going to die in fairly short order. They’re counting down the months until an asteroid known as Maia will hit. For me, the acceleration of everyone’s demise—and the reactions it produces—is the source of the appeal of a full-on literary natural disaster like Maia. An asteroid is the ultimate unexpected guest who walks in on a static dinner party (or state capital) and changes everything.

It’s Palace’s practical, calm, and consistent voice that makes The Last Policeman work. Palace is a relatively softboiled guy in a pretty hardboiled world, though he began experiencing the trauma of unlikely events as a child, he lives alone, and he loves being a cop. Given the importance of the asteroid, unlikely events and long odds are a big theme in the book. Here’s Palace on the odds: 

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

The dead man, by the way, worked in insurance, an odds-based industry that’s not a great line of work when the world’s about to end. Of course much more than the insurance industry has collapsed in The Last Policeman: people go “bucket list” to fulfill their worldly dreams, ignite themselves, perpetuate conspiracy theories, take to drugs, stockpile weapons, and slack off at work. But not Palace:

Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

A little later, Palace, an observer of the social contract, notes the continuing responsibilities of cops, saying the public relies on them. And he laments later that the asteroid becomes “an excuse for poor conduct.”

Winters shows us plenty of poor conduct but he also shows us people like Palace who keep on with their lives, solving crimes, serving up eggs, and making espresso. Winters has a light hand in The Last Policeman, balancing humor, darkness, and pathos, offering up lines that made me laugh then sigh. Here’s a female cop telling Palace about chasing someone: “…you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, “Stop, motherfucker.”

The Last Policeman, which will be released July 10, 2012, is the first novel in a planned trilogy.

Disclaimers & disclosures: I received a review copy of The Last Policeman from Quirk Books, from Eric Smith, whom I’ve enjoyed seeing at BookExpo America, and who’s a friend on Facebook. Thank you!

Up Next: Riikka Pulkkinen’s True... I’m glad to be back to my usual reading routine after a busy spring!