Number three was a book called ‘Find mindfulness by colouring’ (Väritä itsellesi mielenrauhaa, Atena).

Colouring books like this one have now become enormously popular; Johanna Basford’s books, for example, have sold millions of copies in various countries.

Has the oh-so-trendy ‘mindfulness’ has now become so frantically pursued that colouring patterns represent a kind of instant, fast-food-type mandala substitute?

Number six on the best-seller list was The 1000 Dot-to-Dot Book by Thomas Pavitte. Haven’t we all done these as little kids: after connecting, tongue in cheek, the dots with a erroneous pencil, a picture of a doggy or a flower, miraculously, appeared on the page? Yes: for adults it’s doggies, too, but also Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Madonna or John F. Kennedy, or the Eiffel Tower (coming up soon, masterpieces of the world art).

Also available is a Kama Sutra dot-to-dot book (first published by Random House: ‘…this wickedly witty book only exposes its 30 exotic positions to the most persistent hands. Put a little lead in your pencil and get stuck in’).

‘It lets me feel like a “real” artist even though it is a simple dot to dot’, said one customer on Amazon’s pages, where the books are sold with the following sales patter: ‘…much more sophisticated than the one-dimensional images created in childhood connect-the-dot activity books…. Dot-to-dot puzzles have also been proven to increase short-term cognitive acuity, hand-eye coordination, and concentration skills.’

Readers say they feel that they ‘realise their creativity’. Uh-huh? (A scary prospect: some say they might even give their finished pictures to friends as gifts.) It isn’t creative though – rather, contemplative. Or was that navel-gazing…

These trends were interpreted in a recent article in the Swedish newspaper Dagbladet as demonstrating the infantilisation of contemporary society. People want to flee from their stressful grown-up duties (life, reality…) – by retreating (or regressing) to their own simple childhood pastimes?

How about, instead of doting on connecting dots to make time pass, people made live contacts with childhood, i.e. real children, or friends, or read a real book? Their brains would benefit more – and so would their mindfulness.

Mirkka Rekola. Photo: Elina Laukkarinen/WSOY

Enigmatic stories, poems and aphorisms by Mirkka Rekola

This week, poems and aphoristic short stories by Mirkka Rekola (1931-2015).

Rekola, as the long-time Books from Finland translator Herbert Lomas put it, was ‘a minimalist before minimalism was invented’. Amazingly enough, her sparklingly terse writing was considered ‘difficult’, and she had to wait until the 1990s before her work was widely read.

Rekola produced her first collection, Vedessä palaa (‘Burning water’) in 1954, making the cardinal mistake of choosing as publisher the conservative WSOY rather than the avant-garde Otava. The book received mixed reviews; as she said, ‘for readers of traditional verse I was completely unfamiliar, while for ultra-modernists I was not modern enough.’

All the work we revisit here shows the extraordinary vividness, accuracy and exuberance of her writing – both in the poems and the often ruefully funny short stories called ‘Mickeys’.

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 402 articles and book excerpts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Agony uncle?: Jean Sibelius during his travels in Germany, in 1889

Jean Sibelius on how to keep your mojo

The main music critic of Päivälehti (‘The daily newspaper’) in the 1890s was the celebrated composer Oskar Merikanto, writes Vesa Sirén in Päivälehti’s successor, Helsingin Sanomat. Often, but not always, Merikanto praised first performances of works by the yet more stellar Jean Sibelius.

June 1895, however, saw the publication of Merikanto’s I sommarkväll (‘Waltz for a summer’s night’). ‘Tomorrow’s Päivälehti should have a review by Sibelius!’ wrote an excited Merikanto.

The short review duly appeared the following day, attributed not directly to Sibelius but to ‘a certain prominent composer’. In it, Sibelius hints that its uses may be more than strictly musical:

This waltz is extraordinarily pleasant and clever in both form and content. The introduction immediately reveals the composer’s intentions. This waltz contains an extraordinary passion. It is like our sky, which seems so grey, but which reflects that grey light that is born in black eyes when one is with one’s beloved. Everyone should buy it, for it is the shortest route to acceptance by one’s beloved and to one’s true desires.

Anyone for a waltz?

Kalle Päätalo. Photo: Gummerus.

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

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

Despite his popularity, this former forestry worker and builder never achieved critical acclaim; the literary establishment remained cool towards him. What was the secret of his enormous appeal? By 1987, when we published this week’s extracts, the way of life Päätalo was chronicling was fast disappearing; he portrayed of the living and working conditions of the far north and the rich dialect of the region with a near-anthropological accuracy. Päätalo’s autobiography was almost coterminous in scope with the existence of independent Finland, and his depiction of the ruggedly individual characters of the north was at the same time a celebration of national values.

In this excerpt, from Tammerkosken sillalla (‘On Tammerkoski bridge’, 1982), the narrator’s excitement as he finds Martin Eden by Jack London – along with the Finnish author Mika Waltari, one of Päätalo’s great writer-heroes – in the local library is palpable. And many of his readers would have remembered the difficulties of living in small apartments at close quarters with other family members, in this case a less-than-congenial mother-in-law: ‘My cock cowered among my pubic hair like a guilty prankster after a practical joke…’.

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 400 articles and book excerpts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Christopher Lee. Photo: Devlin crow / CC BY-SA 3.0

Actor Christopher Lee loved Finland and knew the Kalevala

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

Lee (born 1922) specialised in monsters and villains; his most famous roles included Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s monster, Count Dooku in Star Wars and the wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings.

Writing in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, Veli-Pekka Lehtonen reveals that Lee knew Finland well. As a very young man he had volunteered for service in the Winter War of 1939; the British soldiers’ skiing skills, however, made them less than useful and they were sent home.

Lee also had an extensive knowledge of the architecture of Helsinki, and loved the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala.

That love came full circle in his role in The Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien, the trilogy’s author, was also a Kalevala fan – the inspiration for his work on the kingdom of Middle Earth lay in the Kalevala’s story of Kullervo. As he wrote to his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, in 1955, ‘the beginning of the legendarium… was an attempt to reorganise some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.’

Tolkien, a professional philologist, particularly loved the Finnish language. He described finding a Finnish grammar book as being like ‘entering a completely new wine-cellar filled with bottles for an amazing wine of a kind a flavour never tasted before.’

Christopher Lee may not have known Finnish, but he had clearly sampled the same wine.

Two small boys carry a wounded angel; a farmer’s wife gives milk to a little devil and her twins; skeletons tend the plants in the Garden of Death. The mythical figures that populate the paintings of the symbolist artist Hugo Simberg (1873-1917) have a wayward and macabre charm that is all their own.

The Helsinki Ateneum Art Museum’s new website, The Other World of Hugo Simberg, offers an opportunity to explore Simberg’s life and work. Showcasing twelve of his best-known paintings, it lays a trail through associated visual and textual material – different versions of the works, photographs, sketches, letters….

If you’ve ever wondered what Simberg’s characters might be thinking or saying, the website also gives you the opportunity to provide thought or speech bubbles, which can then be uploaded to the website.

Angelic meetings: ‘Why are we naked?’ ‘Let’s pray for clothes!’ (above); ‘Do you come here often?’ (below).

Helvi Hämäläinen. Photo: Literary Archives of the Finnish Literature Society.

This week, an excerpt from Helvi Hämäläinen’s gorgeously sensuous novel Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’,1941)

Right at the top of the list of untranslated Finnish masterpieces, for me, is Helvi Hämäläinen’s monumental Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä.

Written in the fateful summer of 1939, as the world waited for war, this story of love among the Helsinki intelligentsia is at the same time both a roman a clef – it caused a sensation on publication as the real people behind the fictional characters were recognised – and a vivid picture of its age. The falling cadences of its luxuriantly proliferating phrases offer a voluptuously aesthetic poetry of the senses as they slowly tell the story of love lost and then, gradually, regained. And the book answers the question, what was it like to be alive then?, with incomparable vividness. In this extract, the novelty of apartment living in the 1930s, the colours and smells, the new social habits, are all brought to life with extraordinary intensity.

We also republish a selection of poems published much later in Hämäläinen’s life, many of them impassioned elegies for the lives lost in the Second World War, giving voice to the sheer weight of sorrow, of grief for those who were lost.

If you’d like to read more, Soila Lehtonen’s evocative essay on Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä accompanies another excerpt; while a glimpse of its sequel, Kadotettu puutarha, (‘The lost garden’, 1995), follows the story onward to an elegiac description of the parts of Karelia that were ceded to the Soviet Union in the Second World War.

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 396 articles and book excerpts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

F.E. Sillanpää in his home receives the news that he has been awarded with the Nobel prize in literature in 1939.

This week, a short story from Finland’s one and only Nobel laureate, F.E. Sillanpää

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

Finland’s only Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded, perhaps not coincidentally, in the fateful year of 1939, and when Sillanpää travelled to Stockholm to receive his award, the Soviet Union had already attacked Finland. After the award ceremony, Sillanpää stayed in Sweden to raise funds for his beleaguered country.

Read the short story

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 393 articles and book extracts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Old Helsinki: this image, taken in the Esplanadi park more than 150 years ago, shows the old theatre building, which was demolished in the 1850s. Photo: Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

Hidden in plain sight in Sven Hirn’s Kameran edestä ja takaa – valokuvaus ja valokuvaajat Suomessa 1839-1870 (‘Behind the camera and in front of it – photographs and photographers in Finland 1839-1870’), published more than 40 years ago, the image shows four men standing in front to the theatre designed by Carl Ludvig Engel in 1827 (and demolished when it became too small to accommodate the city’s enthusiastic theatre-going public in the 1850s). Unusually, in those days of slow shutter speeds, the photograph shows people, among them Carl Robert Mannerheim, father of the Marshal Mannerheim who was to lead Finland’s defence forces in the Second World War (third from left).

Among the other photographs published by Helsingin Sanomat are some images of Helsinki decked out in garlands awaiting the arrival of Tsar Alexander II to the capital of his autonomous grand duchy of Finland in July 1863.

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

Most intriguing of all, however is a sequence of eighteen photographs taken in 1866 by one Eugen Hoffers from the top of Helsinki Cathedral. Helsingin Sanomat has linked them into a panorama with views of Suomenlinna fortress, the new Russian Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral, Books from Finland’s old publisher Helsinki University Library, and the burgeoning city beyond.

Imperial welcome: Helsinki is bedecked with flowers to welcome Tsar Alexander II on 28 July 1863. Photo: Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

Pomp and circumstance: elaborate floral tributes for the visit of Tsar Alexander II in  1863. Photo: Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

New and old: the recently completed Uspenski Cathedral is surrounded by a shanty-town of tumbledown cottages in this image from 1868.  Photo: Hoffers Eugen, Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

Strange and familiar: this picture, from 1865, shows the Cathedral, the Senate and the University Library surrounded by low wooden buildings and unbuilt land. Photo: Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

City of wood: beyond the familiar buildings of the few blocks of the then city centre, in this image from the 1860s, lie streets of modest one- and two-storey wooden houses. Photo: Gustaf Edvard Hultin , Helsinki City Museum / CC BY-ND 4.0.

Photo: Steven Guzzardi / CC BY-ND 2.0

Imagine this: you’re a true bibiophile, with a passion for foreign literature (not too hard a challenge, surely, for readers of Books from Finland,…). You adore the work of a particular writer but have come to the end of their work in translation. You know there’s a lot more, but it just isn’t available in any language you can read. What do you do?

That was the problem that confronted Cristina Bettancourt. A big fan of the work of Antti Tuuri, she had devoured all his work that was available in translation: ‘It has everything,’ she says, ‘Depth, style, humanity and humour.’

Through Tuuri’s publisher, Otava, she laid her hands on a list of all the Tuuri titles that had been translated. It was a long list – his work has been translated into more than 24 languages. She read everything she could. And when she had finished, the thought occurred to her: why not commission a translation of her very own?

Tuuri’s publisher offered her a shortlist, from which she selected a novel called Taivaanraapijat (Skywalkers), the story of the life of a skyscraper-builder called Jussi Ketola in New York. The first step was to commission the translation of an excerpt.

The translator chosen was Jill Timbers. ‘When Otava contacted me to tell me that an individual reader was interested in commissioning the translation of one or possibly two novels,’ she says, ‘I thought someone had been partying too much. Did she have any idea of what this would cost?’

The sum was ten thousand euros. ‘I was startled when I heard the cost,’ said Bettencourt. ‘On the other hand you could spend the money on something silly like clothes. This way I would have something splendid.’

And so the project got under way. ‘Antti Tuuri is renowned for the thorough research he does for every book,’ says Jill. ‘Skywalkers tells of a community of Finnish workers building skyscrapers in New York City in the early 1900s. I learn American history from Tuuri. We follow the crew of the Finns in their daily life as they and their Mohawk co-workers balance high above NYC on the skyscrapers, court Finnish maids at midsummer celebrations carry on ribald discussions or wistfully sing Christmas hymns in the Finnish-American church. Tuuri brings to life US election politics, the bitter labor union struggles of the time, and the strong bonds that the Finns maintained with their home country. Tuuri is also known for his humor, and many of the interactions are laugh-out-loud funny.’

Cristina Bettencourt devoured Skywalkers and then wrote to say that she didn’t want it to end. ‘Guess what?’ says Jill, ‘It doesn’t!’ Skywalkers is the first book of three about the same main character; the second follows him through the bitter civil war period, where Jussi is forced at gunpoint to become a carrier of corpses, while the third sees him kidnapped and transported to the Soviet Union by the right-wing Lapua Movement. (An extract from the third volume, in Jill’s translation, can be found in the online journal Words without Borders)

Antti Tuuri commented: ‘I am really very flattered that there’s someone who wants to put money into a project like this. It also felt good that all sorts of things can happen in the world. I’ve been a writer for 25 years, and I’ve never experienced anything like it.’

We join the story at the point where the Finnish workers are invited by the architect of the building they are working on to a party in a swanky Fifth Avenue house – where they are passed off as Mohawks!

Excerpt from Skywalkers, by Antti Tuuri.
Translated by Jill Graham Timbers.

Late in the afternoon, before we finished work, Lind came up again and talked a long time with Seppälä on the lower level where the forge was. We were starting to gather the tools and cables and fasten them so the wind wouldn’t blow them all over Manhattan at night. We saw Lind leave without speaking to us. He had a habit of winking at us when he left, he wanted to show that we were all a team and he didn’t consider himself better than us even though he was the boss.

After Lind had gone, Seppälä told us what he’d been discussing on the four hundred foot level: architect LeBrun had invited all of us working on the skyscraper’s highest level to a party on Sunday at his home beside Central Park. His house was on Fifth Avenue, where rich people lived; he’d said to wear our best clothes.

Rankila said he wasn’t going to any gentlemen’s party, and I also wondered what business we’d have there. Seppälä said LeBrun wanted to show his guests real Indians and that he thought that’s what we were, too. We went down together to talk to Lind. Seppälä asked whether LeBrun thought we were all Indians and told Lind to tell him we were from across the Atlantic and the only thing we had in common with the Indians was building the skyscraper.

Jocks and Diome had come with us into Lind’s hut. They agreed to go to LeBrun’s party but lamented that they’d left their party clothes at Kahnawake, on the reservation; they would have liked to appear wearing feather headdresses and loincloths.

The rest of the week we talked a lot about LeBrun’s party, whenever the rivet guns weren’t battering, and we concluded that we would take the path of least resistance and go to the architect’s party to show his guests what skyscraper builders looked like. We agreed we would go to the party together and we would stay together there and keep an eye on each other, and we would also leave there together. Saturday was a windy day, it rained and the wind whipped water like hail into our faces. I got wet through and the beams we were supposed to walk on were so slippery we couldn’t work. Rankila talked all day about how it would be good for architect Pierre LeBrun and his guests to come see now what kind of war was being waged up here against the forces of nature and the steel and the iron. In his view LeBrun should bring all his party guests here, the women in their long gowns and the men in their waiter’s coats and tails: we’d show them what a soldier’s war is like. His sputtering made us all laugh.

At the boarding house Fiina took charge of the good clothes I would wear; she took them to her own quarters and cleaned and brushed and ironed them, and put her late husband’s gold watch in the vest pocket, with its gold chains. She said I would look very dignified and like a real financier in the Fifth Avenue house that she had rushed off to see as soon as Rankila told everyone eating dinner and Fiina and the maid that architect LeBrun had visited the top of the skyscraper and invited us to his party.

Fiina had talked about the architect’s house and party every day since. She thought it was a big thing that we had been invited as guests to a house like that which Finns usually only entered as paid help. She told me many times that she didn’t know a single man as young as me who had been invited to such a fine house as a guest.

I didn’t think that way, though, and I asked Seppälä if I really had to go with them on Sunday. Seppälä thought I should, because Lind had taken LeBrun a list with our names, and the architect might ask later why his invitation hadn’t been good enough for me. Landing on the construction worker blacklist would mean I’d never again find work on New York buildings.

So I, too, decided to go to LeBrun’s place on Sunday. We met at 7 in a bar Seppälä and Rankila knew on 59th Street. Rankila came for me at my quarters and we went together. In the bar, Seppälä told us in Finnish that we should now buck ourselves up with a glass of whiskey even though some of us belonged to the Rauhan Toivo temperance society and had taken a strict vow of abstinence. He said he himself belonged to the friends of moderation and could have a glass. Kankaanpää pointed out that in this group only Seppälä belonged to the temperance society, and everyone agreed that a glass of strength and courage would do us good. Seppälä said the same thing in English to the Mohawks. They had no difficulty agreeing to a glass of whiskey. Seppälä made us all promise that none of us would have a second drink before we entered the architect’s house and if they offered drinks there, none of us would succumb to the temptations of King Alcohol. We all promised.

…

We reached the address we’d been given, at the corner of Fifth Avenue. There was a line of cars and horse-drawn carriages on the cross street and the coachmen were settling their horses for a wait. Strang and Kankaanpää said we should have come by carriage, too, not on foot like hired men. They also discussed the carriages along the street. In their opinion they were not the carriages of poor people. I dropped behind the others, I felt I shouldn’t be the first to climb the stairs.

There were not very many stairs up to the outer door, just a few. I had imagined LeBrun’s house like Fiina’s boarding house, only bigger, and the stairs from the street to the first floor, bigger and wider. I just had time to see that this house also had a basement, and basement windows along the ground.

Seppälä went in the door first, and we others behind him. When I got inside, servants were already taking the boys’ hats. I came in last so I was able to do everything right from watching what the others did. A waiter conducted us across the large entranceway and through several rooms. He led the way and told us that the master had said to bring us straight to the garden.

I had no chance to look at the rooms before we were already in a courtyard within the house. There were people there. The one who looked like a waiter told us to wait, and left. We stood in the doorway, not knowing how to begin to speak with anyone even though we saw that they were staring at us. Seeing the men’s tailcoats, Rankila said that all the men here were dressed like restaurant waiters and the women were not on their way to any laundry room, either. We all blew softly under our breath as we looked at the outfits of the architect’s guests and at our own, but we didn’t have to stand in the doorway very long before LeBrun, who had come up to see us on the upper level of the skyscraper, arrived from somewhere in the back of the garden and shook hands with each of us and bade us welcome to the party.

LeBrun called out loudly for silence among his guests and when everyone had stopped talking and turned to look where we seven men and he were standing, he signaled the waiter, who immediately brought each of us a glass and gave the same kind of long-stemmed narrow glass to the architect himself, too.

I was quite surprised when the architect began to tell his guests in a booming voice that we were some of America’s original inhabitants, Mohawks from the Kahnawake reservation near Montreal, and we had come to New York to erect the Metropolitan Life Insurance skyscraper that he had designed. LeBrun said that together we were waging a war against nature’s harshness and steel’s hardness and earth’s gravity; many brave men had already lost their life in this war and many had been crippled for life. In this battle the Indians — in other words, us — were fighting side by side with the white men — in other words, LeBrun; we had buried the tomahawks which our fathers had brandished and together we were charging forward against our common enemy. He talked some more and when he had finished, he asked us to say a few words.

Seppälä pushed Jocks to the front. He was surprised and looked around as if he wanted to run away. LeBrun put his arm around his shoulders and pressed him to himself. LeBrun cried that he was the brother of this red man, too, and a soldier from the common front in whose frontmost trenches America’s original inhabitants were fighting as they rapidly moved the continent toward a completely new day.

Jocks began speaking in French. I don’t know what he said, but all the guests listened closely, and when Jocks had finished, LeBrun thanked him, holding onto his hand, and praised Jocks as a true man of the world and a gentleman. LeBrun said that his own ancestors had long ago come to this side of the Atlantic from France, the cradle of all civilization; he still had a lot of family there.

And so, thanks to Jocks’ speech, we all became men of the world, and LeBrun led us to a room on the first floor where there was a long table spread with all manner of food and drink. He told us to eat and drink everything on the table, to finish the platters and empty the bottles, no one else would be allowed into this room to eat. LeBrun left and we looked out the windows at the garden, and when the guests had gone inside from the courtyard, we began to eat what the host had set out.

Seppälä asked Jocks what he had said in French and where he had learned the French language. Jocks and Diome said they had both learned French in Canada, where it was taught to all the Mohawks. He said he had talked about the same thing as LeBrun, about the war that we were fighting together against everything that tried to prevent or obstruct the raising of the MetLife tower, and for that work we asked help from the spirits who lived in the wind and the rains and the hard rock, and we also asked the spirits of the sands for help, and those great spirits who lived in the Hudson River and all of their offspring. We also asked for help from the spirits of the iron and the steel, because it would be impossible to build the MetLife tower if the spirits living around us set out to oppose our work; that would mean sure death for all of us.

Seppälä asked whether Jocks had thought to mention anywhere in his speech that we were not Indians but rather had come here from Europe, from Finland, and that we were subjects of the Russian Czar. Jocks had not said anything about those things, and Seppälä told him to go tell the architect in very clear language that Finnish workers were waging war on his construction site right alongside the Indians, and that on MetLife’s highest platforms there were more Finns than any other nationality.

In Jocks’s view there was no point going to bother the host anymore because the architect had a lot to do taking care of his guests, and it would be best for us to begin eating what was spread on the table.

So we began to pile onto our plates all the good things that were offered to us. We didn’t know the names of all the foods or what animals they came from or what part of the animal they were cut from, and we didn’t know the names of all the vegetables on the platters. Most of them we did recognize, potatoes and carrots and red beets and turnips and roasts and knucklebones, and we knew some of the fish. Jocks and Diome recognized most of them but they only knew their names in French and in their own language.

I began to taste what was on the table. Seppälä believed that today we could make an exception to the temperance society rules and drink a glass of wine, even though we had already had a glass of whiskey in the bar, which the old rules did permit. Rankila pointed out that we had already gotten a glass of champagne in the garden, which was also considered a sparkling wine and among the beverages in which the spirit of the bottle resided. We agreed that we wouldn’t tell anyone that we had a third drink.

Jocks studied the bottles. He found a corkscrew and opened all the bottles of wine, of which there were many on the table, sniffed each bottle and then poured us glasses. We picked them up. Seppälä said he did not agree with everything LeBrun said about the Indians’ and white men’s war against matter and the laws of nature, but he wanted to wish us an enjoyable evening and he reminded us of the pact we had made in the bar, that we would take care of each other and stay together in this skirmish, too.

Juhani Peltonen. Photo: C-G Hagström / WSOY.

This week’s pick is, like last week’s, a period piece – this time a cry for help from the 1980s in the work of Juhani Peltonen (1941-1998).

Like Runar Schildt’s short story Raketen, written shortly before Finland gained independence from Russia and was almost immediately plunged into civil war, these pieces by the multitalented Juhani Peltonen, who wrote plays for stage and radio as well as short stories, novels and poems, were published shortly before major and irrevocable change.

In the short story ‘The Blinking Doll’, we are a year short of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it seems as if things are never going to change. We follow two forty-year-old lawyers, Juutinen and Multikka, as they trudge along the beach in one of the charming resort towns of the west coast in which they have spent a couple of days dealing with a minor felony case.

They’re both forty, and divorced, disillusioned with their jobs and with the world; and both are infatuated with one of their colleagues, a woman whom they call ‘The Blinking Doll’.

There is, Peltonen says, a ‘pact of friendship and mutual assistance between the men’ – a jocular reference to the notorious treaty of 1948 in which Finland was obliged to resist attacks on the Soviet Union through its territory, and to ask for Soviet aid if necessary. In 1988, this seemed as if it were written in stone – and the men’s emotional lives are similarly petrified. They discuss their isolation, their lack of purpose, their inexplicable weeping fits. The most painful thing, says Multikka, is love; or, says Juutinen, and which comes to the same thing, the lack of it.

As Erkka Lehtola, our then Editor-in-Chief, remarks in his introduction, Peltonen – Finnish literature’s best-known comi-tragedian, he calls him – focuses on the difficulty of loving in a violent, mechanical, oppressed world. Is it the passage of twenty-five years that imbues his writing with such a poignant sense of stasis and futility? There is a sense of desperation, barely controlled. As one of his poems has it,

Too abundant in the course of the evening
Cries for help from the heart of stifled detail, legato.

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 388 articles and book extracts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

Sinikka Tirkkonen. Photo: Otava.

Short short prose from Sinikka Tirkkonen

This week, a short story by Sinikka Tirkkonen (born 1954), which we published in 1988 – a piece of confessional prose, ‘comfortless and depressed’, as Tero Liukkonen’s introduction has it, about life in a bleakly solipsistic world; the kind of writing, one’s inclined to say with hindsight, that only the young, or at least the not very old, have the leisure to produce.

‘Things are only right for me,’ says the unnamed narrator, ‘when they bring grief and distress in their train, when they pile up guilt feelings, harsh self-criticism and self-denial… All my life I’ll be deprived of something, always – full of cares, fears, terrible agonies. I’ve no right to live.’ There’s a train journey north, two women in a car on a long drive across Lapland, work, a husband’s unfaithfulness, pointlessness….

It’s beautifully done, though, with an appealing poetic minimalism. Enjoy!

The Books from Finland digitisation project continues, with a total of 388 articles and book extracts made available on our website so far. Each week, we bring a newly digitised text to your attention.

A soldier playing his accordion. Photo: SA-kuva

Between 1939 and 1944 Finland fought not one, but three separate wars – the Winter War (1939-45), the Continuation War (1941-44) and the Lapland War (1944-45).

We have become used to black-and-white images of the conflict, with their distancing effect. Among the 160,000 images in the Finnish Wartime Photograph Archive, however, are some 800 rare colour photographs from the Continuation War, which bring the realities of fighting much closer. The events pictured leap out of history and into the present.

The large numbers of photographs of guns and aircraft will be of primary interest to military historians, professional and amateur; but among them are images which bring home the political realities – the victory parade for the short-lived recapture of Viipuri in 1941, for example, or a photograph of Field Marshall Mannerheim, the Finnish leader, shaking hands with Adolf Hitler on a visit to Germany in 1942, marking Finland’s co-operation with German forces in the fight against the Soviet Union during the Continuation War.

Inevitably, however, some of the most affecting images are not of fighting but of the ordinary life that continued through the conflict. Warming a sauna; soldiers’ washing hung out to dry in an eastern forest; a private on the front reading a letter from home: Russian women chopping firewood; army pack-reindeer in their saddles; and a soldier, little more than a boy, far from home, playing his accordion.

The victory parade for the short-lived recapture of Viipuri in 1941. Photo: SA-kuva

Soldiers’ washing hung out to dry in an eastern forest. Photo: SA-kuva

Russian women chopping firewood. Photo: SA-kuva

Members of the women’s defence corps  pause for coffee by the lakeside. Photo: SA-kuva

Off-duty. Photo: SA-kuva

A private on the front reading a letter from home. Photo: SA-kuva

A woman air defence officer photographed on the Lahdenpohja air surveillance tower. Photo: SA-kuva

Warming a sauna. Photo: SA-kuva

Runar Schildt

It’s a period that seems sometimes to have disappeared from view – Helsinki in the final years of Russian rule – but Runar Schildt’s short story brings it vividly to life. The characters – Sahlberg the baker and his mortal enemy, Johansson from the customs service; the restaurant-owner Durdin and Elsa, daughter of a commissionaire at the Senate, around whom the story revolves – spend a lazy but sexually charged summer Sunday in their villas just outside Helsinki, their hidden emotions all too familiar to those of a later age…

As the story’s translator, the formidably erudite George C. Schoolfield, remarks in his introduction, Runar Schildt (1888-1925) has often been hailed as a Finland-Swedish classic. There’s a quality of aesthetic decadence in his work that makes him very much a product of his time. There’s nothing, in Raketen, with its solid, belle epoque atmosphere, to foreshadow the change that was so soon to engulf Finland, with the granting of independence in 1917 and the bitter civil war that followed. Schildt was in Helsinki during the months when it was ruled by the Red side in the civil war; afterwards, he served as a clerk in the terrible detention camp for Red prisoners of war on Suomenlinna island. It was a new world, in which all the old certainties were questioned. Timid, conservative and something of a dandy (his friend Hans Ruin said he always looked as if he had stepped out of a bandbox), Schildt may well have felt out of tune with the times. By 1920 he had ceased to write the prose at which he excelled, and had turned to drama, with which he had much less success.

Schildt shot himself, in 1925, in the courtyard of the old university clinic in Helsinki. He was not yet 40.

Read the short story

With comically characterised illustrations by Jukka Lemmetty, these vignettes cast a philosophical light on life as seen from a small child’s viewpoint, whether the subject is monsters at bedtime, what to play on a rainy day, using the family dog as a sailing ship or learning good manners.

Hannele Huovi (born 1949) won the prestigious Eino Leino Prize in 2009. Her work has been translated into Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Estonian, German, Japanese, Russian and Arabic.

Read the extracts