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.

The Colonel’s Wife by Rosa Liksom, translated from the Finnish by Lola Rogers (Graywolf Press)

BookMarks Reviews: Five total—Four Positive, One Mixed

Awards: None

Number of Finnish Works of Fiction Published in Translation from 2008-2019: 65 (5.42/year)

Number of Those Translations Written by Women: 40 of the books were authored by women, 21 were translated by women.

Other Translations of Liksom’s Work: Dark Paradise (2006), Compartment No. 6 (2016), One Night Stands (1993)

Synopsis

At the end of her life, an unrepentant member of the White Guard and Nazi Party—the Colonel’s wife of the title—reflects on her life with unadulterated honesty, providing a very complicated picture of life in Finland in the time around World War II. She recounts her father’s involvement with the Colonel, and how he became a major presence in her life when she was a mere four years old. After the passing of her father, he takes over that role, until she’s old enough for him to marry.

A horrific monster of a man, the Colonel is dedicated to the Nazi Party and the purity of Finland, helping bring his young wife—who eventually is in charge of the “prison camps” in Finland—into the fold. He rapes, beats his wife, kills their unborn child. Yet, she remains loyal to him for far too long before escaping . . . To a remote village where she immediately seduces a fourteen-year-old boy and makes him her husband.

This novel is morally complicated, with a main character who is by turns sympathetic (she is abused by a system she’s not even aware of), charming (the joy with which she helps her young, second husband find an age-appropriate wife), and a monster (“My father made me a daughter of the White Guard. The Colonel made me a Nazi. And I’m not ashamed of either one.”).

Structured with a frame story depicting the day of her death, the book progresses in mostly chronological order, as if written by the Colonel’s Wife herself. The prose is direct, with a hint of ruralness to it, reflected in the grammatical errors and her admissions to neither being educated nor well-read—despite becoming a successful novelist in her later years. The voice is both earnest—even when dealing with the “evil” things she did—and textured with idiomatic phrases and word choices.

There are a number of historical references in here that might require some research and/or explanation for those of us unfamiliar with Finland’s role in World War II. The three wars that they fought in around this time—the Winter War (Finland vs. Russia just before WWII), Continuation War (Finland + German Nazis vs. Russia during WWII), and the Lapland War (Russia + Finland vs. Germans in Lapland following WWII)—are unlikely to be part of most high school world history textbooks. But for a country geographically stuck between two warring ideologies—Fascism and Communism—they were a valuable territory, and one that didn’t always pick a lane.

The novel resonates in 2020 as nationalism is back on the rise—and at odds with a twenty-first century version of “socialism”—and many of the socio-cultural structures that molded the Colonel’s Wife are still in place. (Namely, The Patriarchy.) It can also be read as a rebuke of “cancel culture” by articulating the gray space within which the Colonel’s Wife resides.

For this book to have its intended impact though, it needs to be read in full and reflected upon. Anyone immediately repulsed by the idea of a Nazi main character is unlikely to get past the first third, and the fact that she goes from being extremely sympathetic when she finally escapes her abusive husband into being a pedophile is . . . off-putting to some. The narrative tricks used to make this compelling and the ways in which Liksom plays with the impact of history on a singular human is impressive and startling.

Class Reaction

Generally positive. Uncomfortable in the sense that they really felt for the main character but couldn’t explain why or how that happened. And they all loved talking to Lola.

Origin story

Chad W. Post: I think a good place to start would be if you told us how you got into translating, and how your career has developed over the past few years.

Lola Rogers: Well, I actually got interested in Finnish language when I majored in linguistics. That’s how I became interested in the language—not knowing very much about the culture. I just found the language itself interesting. The grammatical system. I had studied Spanish for many years and as a linguistics major we were required to study a language outside of our native language family. And Finnish isn’t an Indo-European language. So that was one of the options and I was already interested in the language, so I went for it. And then, of course, as soon as I started studying it I realized that it was going to take me years to learn, you know, like ten times as long as it took me to learn Spanish. But I ended up studying it! Well, I mean I’m still studying it after twenty years. So I did that, studying the language off and on, both at the university and on my own. And eventually started just translating kind of for fun. For instance, I had, like, bands I really liked and would translate the lyrics for my friends, things like that.

CWP: I want to assume these were Finnish death metal lyrics?

LR: No . . . Actually, I’m into Finnish folk metal. Sort of neo folk metal. Anyway, at the time there wasn’t an official translation program at the University of Washington where I studied. Which was kind of good actually because I ended up designing what I wanted to do and was able to sort of craft my own master’s degree. Afterwards, I went to Finland, to work as a translation intern at the Finnish Literature Exchange, also known as FILI, which is a part of the Ministry of Education and Culture. I was there for seven months and the best thing was meeting almost all of the publishers and literary agents in Finland at the time. So yeah. At that time, there was a real shortage of Finnish translators. That’s why FILI was so active in training them. So to my great surprise, as soon as I graduated, I had so much work that I’ve worked as a translator full-time ever since.

CWP: Wow. That’s amazing. What was the first book you translated?

LR: It was by Sofi Okasaen (Grove Press, 2010) which was a stroke of luck. To work on such a well-known book for your first translation really helped me in Finland—and even in English, since people looking for a Finnish translator found me, thanks to the success of that book.

*

There are two things about Lola’s origin story that stand out to me: The non-haphazard haphazardness of how she fell into being a translator, and the value in having your first published translation be a pretty successful book published by a relatively large press.

I think the first point will play itself out over the rest of this book. Translators tend to end up being translators for a variety of “random” reasons.

Although, are they actually “random” Or even “haphazard”? That would assume there’s a normalized path to becoming a translator, which, for better or worse, just doesn’t exist. It kind of can’t. Sure, nowadays you can get a degree in literary translation—either to become a practitioner or an academic-theorist, but most of these programs are new, and not the pathway for the translators who paved the way for the modern era—but almost everyone just “falls into” translation. It might be because you were born into a multilingual family and grew up with translation as your natural state of being. Maybe you fell in love with someone from another country. You wanted to share new anime with your friends and then found out this was a profession. There are a million pathways; none of these are standardized.

Which is why actively deciding to study a language for your MA because it’s interesting feels less random than most translators I’ve talked to! But, at the same time, the idea of almost picking a language to study at random—why not study Maori? or Latvian? or Quebecois?—feels very apropos the core concept of literature in translation.

But it’s the second point that interests me: How much does it matter that the first book you translate sells well? Why do publishers decide to publish Book X instead of Book Y? And why do they have Translator G translate it instead of Translator K? What percentage of this decision is based on quality? On the translator’s reputation? On how much they’ll cost (or won’t)? On how well the translator’s other books sold?

Tim Parks got in a lot of heat about the “translation community” about an article he wrote in which he tried to separate the success of a particular translation from the skill of the translator.

Before going on, I feel like I should define “translation community.” This is an admittedly amorphous group of maybe 300 people who have a normal amount of groupthink and tend to take stands on social media platforms about what’s “wrong” or “unfair.” The Venn Diagram between their influence on culture and general readers buying books in translation is undefined and circumspect. The “translation community” might feel a particular review was incredibly biased and unfair using contemporary ideas in translation theory, and they might express this as publicly as they can. The average reader is unlikely to hear, much less be mentally troubled by these allegations.

Anyway, Parks called bullshit on elevating certain translators based on the sales of the translated book instead of the skill behind the translation; the translation community said that he was a dick, since his observation/critique is, at its base, devaluing the work of specific translators.

I’m more interested in the structural nature of this and less into the evaluation of translators because I’ve spent hours and hours with editors at commercial, Big Five presses, and their evaluation of who makes a good translator is 100% infected by marketing opportunities. They openly talk about how no one pays attention to who translates a book, unless that person is a “superstar.” And what makes a “superstar”? The fact that a previous book they translated got enough sales and critical attention that people named the translator. Once you’re known, you’re on the radar for presses looking to profit off your reputation. We shouldn’t be surprised by this, this is capitalism, this is Tik Tok.

*

FILI + Influence

CWP: According to PW’s Translation Database, there have been 65 works of Finnish fiction published in the U.S. since 2008—you must’ve done a healthy proportion of them.

LR: Well, yeah, to be honest, there aren’t that many Finnish translators. I know almost all of them—at least electronically, and most of them in person. So, yeah, I suppose I must makeup, you know, roughly one fifth of the translation since 2008. Because there’s only a small number of titles.

*

Of the 65 works of Finnish fiction published here since 2008, 10 of them have been translated by Lola Rogers. Which is 15%. I could provide comparison points with other translator totals, but even in the absolute, being responsible for 15% of one culture’s impact on another’s seems pretty significant.

*

CWP: Yeah. But there has been, and I don’t know if “boom” is the right word, but there has been an increase in interest in Finnish literature since Purge was published. I remember when this came out. It was around the time I met Iris Schwank of FILI. This was during the London Book Fair, when I was working for Dalkey Archive Press. She told me and John O’Brien that FILI didn’t even bother contacting American publishers anymore because it was just “wasted money.” Nobody in America wanted to publish Finnish books so why reach out to them with marketing materials and books? And then that’s when we ended up doing Rosa Liksom’s Dark Paradise. A short story collection, and her first English publication. That was the beginning of Dalkey’s conversation with FILI. Now that there are a number of Finnish books coming out every year, from various publishers, FILI must feel a bit differently. Why do you think this change came about? What led to this interest in Finnish literature?

LR: Well, they were the guest of honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2014 and that made a big difference. Not only were English language publishers made aware of them for the first time, but there were just so many German translations that came out at that time. Far more English publishers were able to read the books. That’s the trouble with Finnish. I mean there’s two things about Finnish. The language is unlike any language an English-language publisher has ever had contact with. None of them can read it. So they have to hire somebody to read it for them.

CWP: I’m spitballing here, but maybe one of the issues with cultivating more translators from Finnish is the fact that, unlike Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, it’s not related to the other Scandinavian languages. And whereas works from those languages are translated into the other two almost immediately, Finnish literature isn’t. Finnish novels don’t get that automatic translation—neither do Icelandic works—and that means that UK and U.S. presses don’t hear about them as fast. But that’s conflating two things: translators from Norwegian can more easily also do Swedish and Danish books, Finnish translators are relegated to Finland; and the idea that the more languages a book appears in (even if they are three sister languages), the more likely an English press will want to buy the rights.

LR: Right. And 20 or 25 years ago, there were almost no Finnish-to-English translators. There were like a couple of people bringing something out every five to ten years. That made a difference.

*

This difference is important, but let’s pause for one second to talk about FILI. Organizations like the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) are major players in this story about international books and why they get translated.

Living in a country where our current president is trying to defund the National Endowment for the Arts on an annual basis—the only national funding agency for literary arts—and has no such thing as a Ministry of Culture, these sorts of organizations might seem really foreign. But in a significant number of countries around the world, there are “book offices” that allocate not insignificant sums of money to have their cultural artifacts—including works of literature—promoted abroad. It’s a basic idea: How do you know what the country of Georgia is if you’ve never seen/read/heard anything that Georgians created?

These (frequently) governmental organizations provide funding to translators, translator training seminars or schools, editorial visits for international publishers, promotional and touring support, the ability to host events for free in their consulates and embassies around the world, promotion to members of their various cultural and governmental audiences, and, on rare occasions, a scheme in which they purchase copies of the book published in translation to distribute to libraries around the world.

These organizations are key players in what gets translated and how it gets promoted—for some presses. A commercial press doing books for commercial reasons isn’t as concerned with these organizations, which can lead to semi-awkward interactions on editorial junkets. On the one side you have small nonprofits looking for the necessary $35,000 threshold of funding and probably sales to be able to do an interesting book that you want your friends and cohort and junta to read; on the other you have editors looking for the book that will sell no fewer than 25,000 copies and hopefully 100,000 minimum because of your sales machine and the appeal of the book to the average “airport” reader. Squint all you want; these perspectives never completely mesh.

Click here for part two.

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.

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.

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.

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. Both Aliide and Zara are survivors in the truest sense of the word—their suffering purposefully repressed by sheer force of will, their sole motivation to protect themselves from further harm. And they are both connected by a dense and untold family history that has festered for over four decades.

As the novel delves into Aliide’s past and the thirty-odd years that Estonia spent under Soviet occupation, it becomes apparent that the events of the present have all spun out from the same traumatic incident—a brutal “interrogation” that Aliide endured at the hands of several soldiers. Rape and assault were frighteningly common experiences for young Estonian women during this time, although not ones which were ever acknowledged—even by others who had gone through similar attacks. Rather, these women became isolated within their own communities and families, silent and ashamed. Aliide not only goes to great lengths to secret her experience, but also to distance herself from other victims. “She recognized the smell of women on the street, the smell that said something similar happened to them,” we’re told.

From every trembling hand, she could tell—there’s another one. From every flinch at the sound of a Russian soldier’s shout and every lurch at the tramp of boots. Her, too? Every one who couldn’t keep herself from crossing the street when militiamen or soldiers approached. Every one with a waistband on her dress that showed she was wearing several pairs of underwear. Every one who couldn’t look you in the eye . . .

When she found herself in proximity with one of those women, she tried to stay as far away from her as she could. So no one would notice similarities in their behavior . . . because you never knew when one of those men might happen by, a man she would remember for all eternity. And maybe it would be the same man as the other woman’s . . . And they wouldn’t be able to keep themselves from flinching at the same time, if they heard a familiar voice. They wouldn’t be able to raise their glass without spilling. They would be discovered. Someone would know.

Even as Aliide’s attempts at self-preservation become increasingly damaging to those around her—even as she allows herself to become complicit in the violations, abuses, and deportations that take place in her own home—the novel still treats her with a great depth of empathy. This is not to say that she is absolved of her actions—much to the contrary. But she is understood to be a casualty of her time and circumstances, and utterly alone with her memories and her guilt. As she realizes late in the novel, her whole life was spent “[w]aiting for someone . . . Someone who would do something to help or at least take away part of what had happened in that cellar.”

Stroke her hair and say that it wasn’t her fault. And say that it would never happen again, no matter what. And when she realized what she had been waiting for, she understood that that person would never come. No one would ever come to her and say those words, and mean them, and see that it never happened again.

There can be no real absolution for Aliide. This fact may be difficult for American readers, who have perhaps become accustomed to narratives of trauma and emotional distress which end in redemption—in the characters achieving some sort of closure, if not an out and out resolution to their suffering. In reality, however, true healing is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, and impossible, the novel reminds us, if the victims involved are not able to discuss their experiences.

Where Purge does take hope, however, is in Zara, a young woman who has broken free of the cycle of victimization. Through her, Aliide’s experiences—as well as those of her grandmother and mother—will finally come to light. It is a painful history to be sure, as is that of the Estonian nation. But in order to move forward—in order to truly reconcile with the past—such stories must finally be heard and examined.

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.