Finnish Literature

LR: As you know, Finnish literature is just like the language. It’s different. It’s more different from English literature than, say, German literature is.

CWP: What kind of things mark Finnish literature as “different”?

LR: Well, I think The Colonel’s Wife is a great example. It defies expectation, right? As you read it and you’re like, what is happening in this book? You know, it’s something different, which is a good thing in my opinion. This isn’t always true. Sometimes there’s issues because of the different editing culture in Finland where books aren’t edited as thoroughly as they are in America. This is actually true of most non-English literatures. But there’s also just a different way of thinking and different way of telling stories.

Rosa is fantastic. She’s a real character. And she’s had a really interesting life. She grew up in a tiny, tiny village of reindeer herders in Lapland—the setting of this book is where she’s from. And she was, um, sort of a wandering hippie for a long time. “Rosa Liksom” is actually a pseudonym, and to be honest, I can’t remember what her real name is right now. She chose a pseudonym partially as a sort of playful stunt, but also because she wanted to write about people she knew and didn’t want them to know who was writing about them, you know, so she would appear incognito in funny ways, like with great big over-sized glasses, you know, and a scarf over her head.

She’s goofy and fun and I highly recommend meeting her if you ever get the chance. And this book is interesting too because it’s about a real person—not somebody Rosa knew personally—but that’s one of the reasons the plot is so unexpected. Because it’s very closely based on the life of a real person. Rosa isn’t passing judgment, she’s just explaining what her life was actually like.

CWP: That’s really interesting. I didn’t realize that at all. Is that something Finnish readers would automatically know?

LR: Yeah, I think so. If not by reading the book itself, then through all the publicity surrounding the book. Recently I got a message from Rosa saying that when we do another printing we really should mention somewhere that the novel is based on a real-life person because there’s nothing, nothing at all about that on the English edition. Nor in the publicity materials around it. Even though the publisher and my editor were aware that it’s about a real person.

CWP: That’s wild! “Positioning” is always a hot term in publishing. Figuring out the right way to present a book to reviewers, readers, and booksellers can make all the difference in if a title is ignored or beloved. And without the knowledge that The Colonel’s Wife is based on real person, it comes off as if Liksom just created this out of whole cloth, as if she were simply imagining what might have happened to someone involved in the Nazi Party in such a horrific way. And the, you know, the pedophilia stuff. And although I think you can write great fiction about anything and everyone, it raises the question of why. What’s her point, her rationale for wanting to write about this sort of life? But knowing that this is based in reality really mitigates that and makes it more understandable and, I think, gives touchy, sensitive American reviewers something to latch onto.

*

Paratext—all the elements that surround the text such as cover image, jacket copy, blurbs, bios, where the translator’s name appears (or doesn’t) that subtly influence the text’s reception among reader—comes up regularly in discussions of international literature. Of all literature, I suppose, but for whatever reasons, it’s a bit more heightened when talking about translations.

Which is why it’s so bizarre that Graywolf would leave this off. It’s possible that, given that we have Nazis again, they wanted to make the point that anyone can get caught up in nationalism and align themselves with horrible groups that perform atrocious acts.

But for reviewers and booksellers looking to handsell this . . . having a historical hook to rely on would be incredibly helpful. The justification for the book’s existence could be encapsulated in one simple phrase. Based on a true story, Rosa Liksom’s latest novel is an attempt to understand the mindset of a woman caught between communism and fascism at one of the critical junctures of twentieth-century history.

This may well be the reason that it only received five reviews. As sad or suspect as that might seem.

*

Sympathizing with Evil

LR: It was very interesting the thing you mentioned over e-mail about how the Colonel does some evil stuff—it’s really true. I remember when I was working on it there’s a place in the book where she’s says: “My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. I’m not ashamed of either one.” When my editor got to that point in the book he asked me, how can she not be ashamed? You know, what can we do about this? What does this mean?

In the original, those sentences are so straightforward. “My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. I’m not ashamed.” So what we did was add the word “and” to ease you into that final statement. “And I’m not ashamed of either one.” I don’t know how much difference that makes, but Rosa ended up sending a really interesting message to the editor about how the Colonel’s Wife is all the things that she is. She’s like a real person. She’s a nature lover. She loves children. She’s a teacher and an author, and she was deeply in love. She was also a fascist and a pedophile. She’s all of those things and yeah, that’s just who she is.

*

One of the most challenging aspects of this book is the fact that you want to sympathize with the narrator, and she rebuffs you at almost every turn. For example, the moment in which the reader is most empathetic toward the narrator—after the Colonel has beat her unborn baby out of her, and after years of physical and mental abuse she finally escapes—she seduces/rapes a fourteen-year-old boy from the school where she’s moved to become a schoolteacher. Not cool!

There are three things about the construction of The Colonel’s Wife that keep it from sliding off into the great darkness of pure nihilistic evil.

First off, there’s the frame story. Although it’s a bit of an easy trick—the novel opens with a bucolic description of a quiet village where the Colonel’s Wife is awakening and about to tell her story, and ends with her passing, presumably on the same day—it puts a bit of distance between the events recounted in the meat of the novel and the final moments of a life. We can all repent at the end, right? Or at least, as observers, we can take a moment to bear witness to a person’s final breath and withhold judgement for at least a moment. Plus, she seems so old and frail in these two sections, whereas she’s an active, vibrant, enthused Nazi in the rest of the book.

Then there’s the distance built around her “unspeakable” acts. Here’s the full description of her involvement with the prison camps in Finland during World War II. Pay attention to “Russki” and the Finnish locations you’ve never heard of. (Note: Approximately 19,000 Soviet soldiers died in these camps, including 15,000 in 1942 alone.)

At the peak there were twenty-nine prison camps in Inari where they locked up Russians who’d surrendered or been captured. Most of the camps were run by the Waffen-SS, and my job, since I knew German, was to keep an account of the number who died, were shot, or escaped. The Germans paid the Finnish and the Sami a bounty in liquor and tobacco for every escaped Russki they caught. One Russian was hung from a pine tree and left dangling there, another one was shot and left lying in a snowdrift, one was chased to a hole in the ice and drowned, and another one was tied naked to a tree with barbed wire for the mosquitoes to eat alive. Bolsheviks, commissars, politrouks, and partisans got off easier. They were shot on the spot. The enemy soldiers suffered more in the war than their officers did.

I was responsible for keeping track of the camps run by the Finns too—one in Ivalo, one in Palkisoja, plus prisoner-of-war camp number 9 at Ajos Harbor in Kemi, the regional camps in Rovaniemi, Kemijävi, and Sodankylä, camp 19 in Oulu, camp 21 in Liminka, number 4 in Pelso, and the one on Jäämerenttie. Jäämerenttie is the road from Rovaniemi to Liinahaamari. There were eight more camps on that road. I also kept the records of the bodies for Stalag 309, a combination work camp, prisoner-of-war camp, and concentration camp that had branches at Alakurtti, Vuolajärvi, Rovajärvi, Korijärvi, Kairala, Nurmi, Lampela, Seipäjärvi, and Rovaniemi.

By my count—if you include the “eight more camps on that road”—she was involved with twenty-seven different prisoner-of-war/concentration/work camps. But the juxtaposition of the vivid descriptions of the escaped prisoners who were killed by others and the simple accounting of the locations of her job give the reader an opening to diminish her actual involvement in what was going on in Finland at this time. (Which is undercut, in part, by a statement made earlier in the book that “If you knew how to read, you knew what the Nazis were doing.”)

The third element that makes her character somewhat sympathetic is the fact that she’s caught up in an abusive, patriarchal system practically from the jump. The Colonel is involved in shaping her life from the time that she’s four years old. If this were a book about a man who got caught up in the sound and the fury of Finnish-Germanic nationalism in the mid-twentieth century . . . it wouldn’t work at all. Even before the final reveal that the Colonel molested her as a child—a memory she had repressed, thinking it had actually happened to an imaginary neighbor girl—readers are already attuned to the ways in which a larger, oppressive system limited her agency, leaving her with only a couple of bad options for being able to survive this period of history.

*

The Dialect Question

CWP: Your editor was Ethan Nosowsky, right? I actually talked to him about this novel at the ABA’s Winter Institute a few weeks ago. We didn’t have much time to talk, but, if I remember correctly, he said that the book is actually written in a Finnish dialect that you both decided to ignore in the English translation. What was your thought process on this?

LR: Ethan was my editor and you’re right—this comes up whenever dialect is used. I discussed it with some of the other translators who worked on translating this book into other languages. And we basically all came to the same sort of solution. Aside from the opening and closing pages, which are omniscient, the book is written in dialect throughout. It’s the voice of the Colonel’s Wife and is written phonetically. We don’t really do this in English anymore. Not really since the nineteenth century and Huckleberry Finn or something. In Finnish, it’s actually not difficult to read at all—it’s actually pretty fun. But reproducing dialect always presents a problem in translation. What am I supposed to write? You know, you don’t want them to sound like they’re from the Ozarks or from Scotland or something. So what I ended up doing is just trying to introduce lots of sort of rural-isms. Which is interesting because there was a little conflict, or, uh, differences of opinion between me and the editor about when I was using “bad” grammar in my translation. There were times when Ethan just couldn’t abide it. For example, I had the character use “me” as a subject throughout the book, or “him,” which is very common in dialect—grammatical “errors” in English among rural and urban and educated people in English. It’s not uncommon at all. And he was okay with that. But I also would use lay and lie “wrong” and this he just couldn’t stand. So the voice gradually became a little more formalized as we worked through the editing process, which often happens when you’re working with editors and copy editors on an unusual style of writing. They just want to fix it because they’re concerned that people will discount the text if it has these obviously “incorrect” things in it.

CWP: Which is one of those like trappings and paradoxes of talking about international literature. There’s a book by Ben Metcalf called , that’s written in a rural American dialect. Sure, it might map onto an actual American style of speech, but the opening phrase is “I was worked like a jackass.” It’s a messy book in terms of grammar and syntax, but that’s why it’s fun to read! It’s a feature, not a bug? But in translation editors frequently try and get rid of all of that because they’re afraid that people start reading it and immediately assume it’s a bad translation because the grammar is non-standard. It’s too weird. And that’s . . . that’s so odd. It doesn’t really make sense, but it’s, ugh, the conventional wisdom or something.

I did pick up on the misuse of “he” and “I” and “me” and the subjects throughout, and it wasn’t until page 132 when I finally got it. There’s a line about how she hated reading books and just didn’t, and as I read that the light went on and I scrawled “That’s why her grammar is fucked!” in the margin. It marks her education level, her familiarity with the written word. And that makes sense to me and feels like a really nice payoff for anyone who picked up on the oddness in the first hundred-plus pages.

LR: Yeah. And she says something in the novel also about how when she wrote her first book, she just sent it off to the editor and they fixed all the “wrong language” for her. Something like that. That’s one of the beautiful bits of her character. Unfortunately, a copy editor thought that these inaccuracies didn’t make any sense, since she’s an articulate person. She’s an author, so she would know how to write. And I thought that the message of the book is kind of the opposite of that, right? That you can be an eloquent and gifted author with “bad” grammar. That doesn’t seem that odd to me at all.

CWP: It’s too bad that that particular tension in the character isn’t in the English translation, but you were able to work in a lot of unique word choices—or colloquial sounding phrases—that create the character’s voice. Like the line about “putting the cat on the table and going over it hair by hair.”

LR: I love that, don’t you?

CWP: For sure! And there’s are a number of specific word choices and phrases that create her voice. And I wonder how much thought you gave to that and how it worked in your different versions. Did you look for common English slang, or were you inventing a unique voice for her as you went along?

LR: I bit of both, I guess. That cat expression was just a direct translation. There were lots of sort of novel expressions like that that I could translate directly. But you have to use your own judgment as to whether it’s working or not, whether or not it makes sense.

And since I’m not using the dialect itself, the nonstandard form of the language, how can I indicate the unusual way she has of talking? So I can use, for instance, something like “I reckon” . . . although I don’t think I did that in this book, but you know what I mean? In place of writing in dialect, you can use an expanded vocabulary as a tool. So yeah, you do have to make those kinds of changes to try to express the way that voice sounded in the original.

*

It occurs to me now that Rosa Liksom isn’t trying to create a sympathetic character, she’s trying to create a noble one.

Riikka Pulkkinen studied literature and philosophy at the University of Helsinki. Her debut novel, The Border, sparked international interest when it was published in 2006. Her second novel, True, will mark her English debut. Riikka Pulkkinen received the Kaarle Prize in February 2007 and the Laila Hirvisaari Prize in May 2007.

Here is part of the review:

Elsa is dying of cancer. Her husband Martti, a successful artist, and her ambitious daughter Eleonoora, who is a renowned surgeon, are struggling to cope with the impending loss. In spite of their immense, largely independent professional success, neither Martti nor Eleonoora are able to comprehend life without Elsa. A commanding presence who held her family together prior to her illness, Elsa, a famous psychologist, aims to do just that during her last few weeks, electing to stay at home instead of in hospice care. Eleonoora’s daughter Anna decides to care for Elsa in the aftermath of the dissolution of a relationship. Anna is very deeply depressed, not because she misses the man (she is living with a man who she does love), but because she began to think of the man’s child as her own. Caring for her grandmother seems like the perfect distraction. However, Anna finds herself more immersed in the psychological drama that silently shaped her mother’s childhood and mirrors her own life in strange and unexpected ways. True, by Riikka Pulkkinen, is less about a family’s struggle with cancer, and more about the mind’s ability to create false memories and a family’s ability to restructure in the face of loss, and how sometimes it’s hard to recover from the same loss twice.

Click here to read the entire review.

One afternoon when Anna is drinking wine and having a picnic with her grandmother, they decide to play dress-up. Anna appears wearing a beautiful party dress she found in the attic. This drudges up a slew of old, unpleasant memories for Elsa. Elsa begins to tell Anna about Martti’s affair with Eleonoora’s nanny Eeva, who the dress belonged to. Two storylines begin to unfold: the family coping with Elsa’s impending death and Anna coping with her breakup and her inability to visit with her ex-boyfriend’s young daughter, and Anna’s identification with Eeva, who suffered from similar feelings after her relationship with Martti was cut short by Elsa discovering about it. Anna begins to invent Eeva’s life in her own mind, and it soon becomes difficult to divorce Anna’s feelings and creations from her own memories.

We soon find out that Eleonoora’s mind is playing tricks on her as well. Elsa, a successful psychologist, travels a lot during Eleonoora’s early childhood, and many of her early memories of her mother are not in fact Elsa but instead are Eeva, but Eleonoora has no way of remembering this: she was too young at the time, and Elsa has reinforced her false memories by providing false information. The lines have blurred between Eeva the mistress and nanny and Elsa the biological mother, creating one woman who raised her: Mom. The day trips she took with Eeva and Martti while Elsa was away on business have firmly established Eleonoora’s memories of her mother, although it is not actually her mother. The following passage, narrated by Eeva, illustrates one false memory in particular:

Later she [Eleonoora] remembers this boating trip, although she remembers nothing else from the whole summer. She builds memories from the words of others, but she tells her own daughter about this trip, as if it’s a precious thing—the nicest part was Mom and Dad and I went out in the boat to the island. Mom usually rowed, but Dad did sometimes. The sun was a friendly fire in the sky, it felt like the world had always been nothing but light and water and melted Fazer chocolate in a blue wrapper and I could lick it off the foil to my heart’s content.

Eleonoora has unknowingly been shaped during her childhood by Elsa, who was able to gather her daughter’s fragmented memories and reform them into a singular mother. However, this uses Eleonoora’s difficulty coping with Elsa’s death, after already having become estranged with Eeva, as a means to explore the bonds between mother and daughter, and how easily they can be altered by providing inaccurate information during the formative years. Eleonoora was confronted by the loss of the second half of her maternal figure, which shows how sometimes the mind and the heart falsely establish memories as coping mechanisms, seeking to avoid the pain of loss that Eeva and Anna ultimately shared by becoming estranged from individuals they grew to love. However, because Elsa protected her daughter (and by extension Martti) from this first crucial loss, Eleonoora is unequipped for the more significant loss of her real mother—which is really where the story begins.

Rarely have fiction’s ubiquitous and essential challenges been more forcibly evoked than in Jansson’s short novel The True Deceiver. The novel opens in a coastal village besieged by snow—“this steady snow piling up against doors and windows and weighing down roofs and never stopping even for an hour. Paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out . . . People woke up late because there was no longer any morning.” Katri Kling, the novel’s fierce, embittered, and sharply intelligent anti-heroine, is fixated on the sumptuously empty house of local celebrity Anna Aemelin, an illustrator of children’s books whose art consists of mesmerizingly detailed paintings of forest underbrush populated by plump, downy bunnies. The yellow-eyed Katri lives above the shop where keeps the books—and whose shopkeeper torments her with his presumptuous longing—and takes care of her slow brother Mats and a large, nameless dog. “It’s unnatural not giving your dog a name,” the villagers mutter; “all dogs should have names.” But Katri refuses to name the dog out of a kind of wild and scrupulous honesty: “Dogs are mute and obedient,” she reflects, “but they have watched us and know us and can smell how pitiful we are.

“People idealise their animals, and at the same time they patronisingly overlook a dog’s natural life—biting fleas, burying bones, rolling in garbage, barking up an empty tree all night… But what do they do themselves? Bury stuff that will rot in secret and then dig it up and bury it again and rant and rave under empty trees! No. My dog and I despise them.”

All but allergic to the kind of white lies most people use to get through their days, Katri has become a midwife of hard truths, both relied upon and reviled by her neighbors. Children chant “witch” when they see her, but late at night their parents call upon her cruel insight. (“Why do you go to her?” one villager asks a neighbor. “Yes, she puts your business to rights, but you no longer trust anyone when you come back. You’re different.” Katri sets about winning her way into Anna Aemelin’s life by showing her how people take advantage of her and one another through the never-ending succession of tiny, self-deceiving frauds. But as Anna falls under the spell of veracity, Katri begins to learn that even her scruples can add up to untruth. In their encounter with love, art, and lying, both the artist and the truth-teller undergo a kind of quietly cataclysmic domestication. Even the dog gets a name.

P.S. I love how the still for this video features me bending awkwardly to pick up my beer. Thanks, PEN/YouTube!

NYRB has been slowly issuing Tove Jansson’s ‘adult’ books over the past few years, starting with followed by which made the 2011 BTBA fiction longlist. (Click here for the special write-up.)

I’ve been meaning to find time to read Jansson’s books for a while now, and every review we post makes me more and more interested. Maybe after basketball . . . But seriously, she sounds fascinating, especially as one of the few Swedish-speaking Finns who have made their way into English . . .

Larissa is one of our top reviewers generally—but not always—writing about Scandinavian lit. She’s a great writer, and this review is no exception:

“There is no silence like sitting in a fog at sea and listening,” writes Tove Jansson in her newly-translated story collection Fair Play. “Large boats can loom up suddenly, and you don’t hear the bow water in time to start your motor and get out of the way.” Stuck waiting out a dense, chilling fog in a row boat somewhere between the coast of a small Finnish island and Estonia, Jansson’s aging companions, Jonna and Mari, fall into an old argument about their mothers—one had an annoying predilection for painstakingly buttered crispbread; the other was an incorrigible cheat at poker. Their conversation is short—discreetly hurtful in the way that one only can be after years of intimacy. But before the fog lifts, Jonna and Mari have come to an understanding, if not a full reconciliation. “Suddenly the sea was open and blue and they found themselves a long way out toward Estonia,” Jansson writes. “They came back to the island from a totally new direction, and it didn’t look the same.”

This episode is not only emblematic of Jonna and Mari’s time-tested relationship, it also reveals Jansson at her paradoxical best. Her prose is sparing and exquisitely clear. And at first, her stories and characters appear to be simple and straightforward. But once you’ve immersed yourself in a Jansson story, you realize that there is a great complexity simmering under the surface of her work—a whole life that exists, but is not made readily accessible to the reader. As Ali Smith puts it in her excellent introduction to Fair Play, Jansson writes “in a language so tightly edited that its clarity makes for mysterious transparency.”

Click here to read the full review.

This episode is not only emblematic of Jonna and Mari’s time-tested relationship, it also reveals Jansson at her paradoxical best. Her prose is sparing and exquisitely clear. And at first, her stories and characters appear to be simple and straightforward. But once you’ve immersed yourself in a Jansson story, you realize that there is a great complexity simmering under the surface of her work—a whole life that exists, but is not made readily accessible to the reader. As Ali Smith puts it in her excellent introduction to Fair Play, Jansson writes “in a language so tightly edited that its clarity makes for mysterious transparency.”

Tove Jansson is most often recognized as a children’s author and illustrator—the visionary behind those delightful marshmallow hippos called “Moomins.” Her adult novels, which she didn’t begin publishing until she was nearly 60, have until recently remained very much in the shadow of the Moomin legacy. Fair Play is the most recent of Jansson’s ‘adult’ novels that New York Review Books has brought into English translation, following last year’s True Deceiver and 2008’s The Summer Book. The collection picks up two of the major thematic elements that run through each of its predecessors, namely the relationship between two women, explored against the back drop of a remote, idyllic setting. (True Deceiver was set in a snow-bound mountain village; The Summer Book on a small island in the Finnish gulf.) And as with the previous NYRB titles, Fair Play also draws on autobiographical inspiration: in this case, Jansson’s lifelong relationship with her partner, a Finnish artist and scholar named Tuulikki Pietilä, with whom she lived for the better part of 40 years.

Each chapter in Fair Play serves as a snapshot, a brief window into the relationship between the frank and opinionated Jonna and the reserved and introspective Mari. Their day-to-day lives are quiet and happily mundane: they watch Fassbinder movies instead of going to dinner at a friend’s in the evening (with all its “pointless chatter about inessentials”). They re-hang pictures. They travel frequently, though their points of destination are often less than glamorous. On one trip through the American southwest, they spend a few nights at a local bar in Phoenix, Arizona; while in Corsica, one of their main destinations is a cemetery. They bicker frequently, and aren’t above childish jealousy or the occasional resentment. But mostly, they work, comfortable enough with the constancy of the other’s presence and support to spend the majority of their days writing and painting alone.

In “Videomania,” we’re told that Jonna and Mari “. . . lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side.”

Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains . . . They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected—those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

It’s in the couple’s companionable solitude that Jansson defines her ethos of artistic creation, a deeply felt belief about the importance of maintaining one’s personal life without sacrificing her creative work, and the substantial space that is required to successfully balance both spheres.

Despite the quietude of Fair Play, it is nevertheless a work of remarkable courage. Jansson’s is not the flashy sort of artistic boldness that proclaims itself by way of constant transparency and self-revelation. Rather, she is brave enough to occasionally withhold information, to provide confidential glimpses into her characters’ lives, while still maintaining a distance from them—a sort of respectful privacy. She doesn’t outline the women’s romantic lives—we don’t find them in bed together, or even see them embrace. Jonna and Mari don’t articulate their love for each other directly, although they certainly reflect on their feelings internally.

Fair Play is after all, a book about separation and space as much as it is about intimacy. “We need distance,” Jonna tells Mari, “it’s essential.” The reader is allowed a closeness to these remarkable women, but in the end, their relationship is like any one in real life: private and fully known only to those who are within it.

Click here for all past and future posts.

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal

Language: Swedish
Country: Finland
Publisher: New York Review Books
Pages: 208

Why This Book Should Win: Big favorite among booksellers; has been gathering buzz for over a year; that whole writes in Swedish but lives in Finland thing; one of NYRB’s most notable recent rediscoveries (NYRB also publishes her Fair Play and Summer Book.

Today’s post is from Kenny Brechner of in Maine.

Objectivity, like high fructose corn syrup and polyester suits, is very much out of fashion. The triumph of relativism is such that objectivity is considered now more an historical curiosity than a concept to be applied seriously. We do know, however, that the following statement, “True Deceiver should win The Best Translated Book Award for 2011,” is an objective fact. How can we be certain of that? Let us consider the matter objectively. From the standpoint of this award _True Deceiver was certainly reborn into English with a silver spoon in its mouth, for the concept of being a true deceiver lies at the very heart of translation itself. A successful translation cannot help but be the epitome of true deception, a consistent application of perspective which transforms a complex object from one shape to another. Jansson’s portrait of the corrosive effect of deception on the integrity of personal identity is compelling and unsettling to the nines. It grabs the reader with that most potent force of all: strong identification with a character in the thrall of a subtly corrupting evil. Its perfection as a work of translated fiction is plain to see in the power of its inversions, a portrait of deception and instability which yields truth and focus. These are matters of opinion you say? Hardly, for True Deceiver steps firmly away from any subjective accounting of its worth in its unique willingness and ability to speak directly on its own behalf, using only quotations from its pages, to anyone who questions it. The proof of these matters is to be found directly in the interview below.

KB: Do you feel that this BTBA will be conducted fairly?

True Deceiver: “You know nothing about Fair Play!”

KB: Perhaps not, but how can the awards committee reach truth?

True Deceiver: “The truth needs to be hammered in with iron spikes, but no one can drive nails into a mattress.”

KB: I see. Perhaps you’re right and the committee will need to take a firm line. Now do you feel that Tomas Teal handled his translation of you properly, considering how taut the prose is?

True Deceiver: “Cluttering the ground with Flowery Rabbits would have been unthinkable”.

KB: I see. Now if you had a word for a judge what would it be?

True Deceiver: “He must understand how hard I try, all the time, to put everything I do to a strict test—every act, every word I choose instead of a different word.”

KB: Is there any other objective data that would make the selection of any book other than yourself as the BTBA winner a danger to the future well being of the human enterprise?

True Deceiver: “I’ve given security where there was no security, no direction, Nothing. I provide safety!”

KB: I really appreciate your willingness to go on record and clarify these points. The stakes are terrifying.

True Deceiver: “I can assure you that you needn’t be nervous, there’s no cause for alarm.”

KB: I guess there’s nothing else to be said on the matter!

True Deceiver: “We’ve done what matters most.”

KB: Well I certainly hope so, for all human interconnection involves translation, and without an exploration of its dark possibilities we should all be much the poorer. And, if you don’t mind my saying so, you really add something vital to the whole of Tove Jansson’s sublime body of work. After all the Moomins may demonstrate the delightful exercise of freedom, but your pages reveal both the cost and the means of losing it.

True Deceiver: “Thank you for calling.”

by Sofi Oksanen. Translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers. (Finland-Estonia, Grove/Black Cat)

In terms of the book itself, I don’t have a lot to add to Larissa’s perceptive review. But to tie this particular post back into the actual WPR “Here On Earth” conversation that sparked this sporadic series of posts, I have to post a picture of Sofi, aka, the “woman with the most amazing hair.” (I feel like I must’ve mentioned this a half-dozen times during that interview . . . it was like my verbal crutch of the moment . . .):

I finally met Sofi at this year’s PEN World Voices Festival, and really enjoyed talking with her. I say “finally” because I was supposed to meet her at the Reykjavik International Literary Festival last fall, but she wasn’t able to make it due to a bout of the swine flu. And continuing with a bit of cursed luck, prior to PEN World Voices, she was supposed to read in California, but, well, the volcano nixed that trip . . . As a friend said, she could write a book on being impacted by the not-so-insignificant global disasters of recent times.

Anyway, Purge is a really interesting book, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else Oksanen ends up writing. She’s really at the top of her game right now, having recently won the Nordic Prize for Purge, and was named Estonia’s “Person of the Year” in 2009.

Although this may not be the most uplifting of the books in our summer roundup, it’s definitely worth checking out.

Since this was one of the books I recommended on “Here on Earth,” I’ll save my comments for another post (which will be up in just a minute).

Larissa is one of our regular contributors and tends to focus on Scandinavian literature, which is one of her big interests. (That said, she’s also working on a review of Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango.)

Here’s the beginning of her review:

Although still much an unknown in the English-speaking world, Finnish-Estonian playwright, novelist, and activist Sofi Oksanen has become something of a household name in northern and central Europe. Declared Estonia’s “Person of the Year” in 2009, Oksanen is the first to win both of Finland’s prestigious literary prizes—the Finlandia and the Runeberg—as well as winning this year’s Nordic Council Literature Prize for her virtuosic novel Purge. At once a daring exploration of the Soviet occupation of Estonia, as well as a wrenching consideration of the irrevocable effects of trauma on an individual, Purge navigates the tragedies, petty betrayals, and reverberating guilt of three generations of Estonian women, all struggling to survive their own violent circumstances, no matter the cost.

The novel opens in 1991—the year after Estonia reclaimed its independence from Russia—with the elderly and isolated Aliide Truu stoically weathering childish torments (rocks thrown at her window) and more aggressive harassment (her dog poisoned) at the hands of her neighbors. One rainy morning, Aliide notices an injured young girl huddling in her front yard, and despite her misgivings, allows the girl to take shelter in her home. Zara is a young woman from Russia—a sex trafficking victim on the run from her captors. Having withstood a year of degradation and repeated assaults, Zara has lost everything. Everything, that is, except a yellowed photograph of her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, with both young women and standing in front of the very Estonian house in which Zara has taken refuge.

Oksanen originally staged Purge as a play, an origin that can still be recognized in its episodic scenes and deliberately moderated tension. In its current form, however, the novel’s fluid and unadorned prose (in a musical and nuanced translation by Lola Rogers) shares a closer kinship with a psychological thriller.

Click here to read the entire review.