The house of forgetting - 2

Reviewing Timo Harju's We watered them abundantly with coffee in Hbl, Pia Ingström makes the central point about the poems in this collection:

Det är inget vanvårdsinferno Harju beskriver, utan en vanlig, hyggligt välskött åldringsavdelning. Han är inte ute efter den socioekonomiska problematiken, utan den existentiella.

What Harju describes is not some inferno of neglect, but an ordinary, decently well-kept care home for the elderly. The problems he uncovers are not socio-economic but existential.

See also: The house of forgetting

Lost and found

In Hufvudstadsbladet's Plock & Fynd, Annika Hällsten considers the slightly uusual friendship between the Swedish feminist Ellen Key and the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, and Pia Ingström reflects on some meaningful remarks cast in her direction by two literary men at the recent award ceremony for the Finlandia Prize (won this year by Antti Hyry). There is also a discussion of Slow Reading in Finland...

Common language

"Finnish authors often cultivate colloquial style as an end in itself, folksiness as an excuse for engaging in something as ladylike and erudite as writing. Carlson is not concerned with this. In her beautiful literary but organically idiomatic Finnish, Kent village life comes very close to us, without unnecessary distancing effects -- this book is about a common European heritage of culture and ideas one that is, of course, also our own."

-- Pia Ingström, reviewing Kristina Carlson's new novel Mr Darwin's Gardener (Herra Darwinin puutarhuri)

The brown decade

Reviewing a recent book on interior design, Pia Ingström pauses to reflect on Minna Sarantola-Weiss's remarkable study of Finnish everyday life in the 1970s:

The most common 70s flashback is directed towards a certain type of pop music, or it's about politics, Finnish-Soviet trade and the Taistoists (or in some circles, the wonderful Finland-Swedish feminist avant-garde).

But Sarantola-Weiss writes about everything else. Then as now most Finns wasted relatively little mental energy on Marxism-Leninism, and didn't keep a "home Russian". 'When the 1970s are seen from the point of view of everyday life and consumer culture, the decade is coloured by optimism. Life was more secure and more predictable than before. The rising living standards meant a better quality of life for the vast majority.'
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The 1970s were the decade when the paradigm shift of the sixties was adapted to everyday life. The newly-arrived residents of the concrete suburbs would learn to live urbanely and consume the newly-found affluence, wash new kinds of textiles, dance new dances, cook new dishes. Furnish with new furniture - brown Manchester leather sofa sets, for example. "Brown connects both with the earthy agrarian society and with the dark, safe world of the bourgeois home. A calm and honest colour," writes Sarantola-Weiss.

And on the sofa a hirsute man with a permanent wave (male fashion was also changing), an electric mixer in the kitchen and a Jopo bike in the bike cellar.

In search of a narrative

Pia Ingström, reviewing Emma Juslin's third and most recent novel (out in Septemnber), Ensamma tillsammans (Lonely Together):

Although the existential message is big enough - our loneliness together, the relaxed sense of sharing that still sometimes emerges, the possibility of reassessment and making the right choice. But how much more there might have been to say about these three young women, in their families, in their time. Perhaps even a little plot?

The Reading Circle

In a Hbl column, the Helsinki journalist, writer and literary critic Pia Ingström writes about a cultural institution that's especially widespread among Finland's majority Finnish-speaking population - the book club, or reading circle. She says that a large part of her Finnish-speaking life (as a Finland-Swede, she also has a Swedish-speaking one) is spent in a circle of readers "whose members are authors, editors and translators. We eat and talk about our jobs if we have one, as well as about our children, grandchildren, husbands or pets. Also, each of us presents a book we've been reading, for purely personal or for professional reasons."

At the circle's last meeting, author Anita Konkka had been re-reading Hungarian author Peter Esterhazy's novel Helping Verbs of the Heart, and her view of the novel had been changed, she said, by the life experiences she had had in the intervening two decades. Pia writes that "I need my reading circle not for discovering new books, but old ones. It's lucky that there are people who read according to an order that is completely subjective, free from passing trends and fashions."