Books from Finland

22/06/2016

Check out our revamped homepage - as well as displaying the most recently digitalised articles it also has new-and-improved search features: http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/! This week’s digitalised texts include works by Marja-Liisa Vartio (1924–1966), who was one of the leading modernists of her day, as well as a key figure in the development of the Finnish novel.

Photo: SKS archives

24/06/2015

It is 150 years since the birth of Finland’s ‘national’ composer, Jean Sibelius. Much has been written about his life; Jenni Kirves’s new book casts light on his wife, Aino (1871–1969), and through her on the composer’s emotional and family life. Aino has often been viewed as an almost saintly muse who sacrificed her life for her husband. But she was flesh and blood, and the book charts the difficulties of life with her brilliant husband from the very beginning.

An excerpt from Aino Sibelius: Ihmeellinen olento (‘Aino Sibelius: wondrous creature’, Johnny Kniga, 2015). We join the young couple in 1892 as they prepare for their long-awaited wedding.

23/06/2015

Author Kalle Päätalo (1919-2000) was a rare bird in the book-publishing world. Beginning in 1962, his series of autobiographical novels 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 a highly lucrative one.

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.

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

17/06/2015

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.

Actor Christopher Lee loved Finland and knew the Kalevala

16/06/2015

Right at the top of the list of untranslated Finnish masterpieces, for us, is Helvi Hämäläinen’s monumental Säädyllinen murhenäytelmä (‘A respectable tragedy’,1941). 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.

This week’s pick is an excerpt from Helvi Hämäläinen’s gorgeously sensuous novel

08/06/2015

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.

(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

02/06/2015

The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has unearthed a picture taken of Helsinki in 1857. 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.

The Helsingin Sanomat newspaper has unearthed a picture taken of Helsinki in 1857

26/05/2015

For the author Leena Krohn, there is no philosophy of art without moral philosophy

I lightheartedly promised to explain the foundations of my aesthetics without thinking at any great length about what is my very own that could be called aesthetics. Now I am forced to think about it. The...

26/05/2015

This archive 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). 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.

This week’s pick is a cry for help from the 1980s in the work of Juhani Peltonen (1941-1998).