Small rooms, public transport

- the settings for Finland-Swedish short stories

By Ann-Christine Snickars

"We're sitting in some kind of hell, perhaps the same old one. The ceiling is low. I'm squatting down, trying to say something that will set absolutely everything right. But every time I open my mouth, a terrible storm sweeps off with my words." This is taken from the preamble to one of the sections of the first collection of short stories from Leo Lundberg (born 1971), Den stora behandlingen (The Treatment; PQR, 2005).

His stories have a high energy level; they push against the dividing wall with fantasy, as if they are trying to escape. One story is about a schoolboy, Franke, who is constantly afraid of his "pig-ugly" classmates, who not only threaten him with "the Treatment" but also show a new boy violently and emphatically who holds the power. Support from home cannot be expected. His parents are fully occupied with their own relationship, where the smell of dysfunction is "rank" - stale alcohol, "like in your parents' bedroom the day after a big party".

The claustrophobic mood culminates in "Internat" (Boarding), which consists of diary entries from a student's temporary lodgings, which he has to share with people he hasn't chosen. Lindberg has connections with the Åland Islands, and the attempts to break out in his stories can find concrete expression in ferry trips to the nearest mainland. The ferries are as big as apartment blocks but the feeling of being closed in pursues one. "Why I hate going on the Finland boat: there's something about the ventilation system that makes my eyes start to sting, and I get a sore throat and cold sores."

"Do not lean out of the window"
In Johanna Holmström's (born 1981) second collection of short stories Tvåsamhet (Alone Together; Söderström, 2005) , people are in pairs, at home or in hotels. It can come down to the same - one is left out with the other person wherever one is. Perhaps one is sitting in a car or on a bus. Public transport - buses, trams and trains - are nearly always a signal in recent Finland-Swedish literature of great isolation and loneliness, well known and hair-raising.

Sometimes the loneliness is sought-after, as in Johanna Holmström's work, where the power-play between the protagonists also finds traces of pure sadism. The story "Leken" (The Game) portrays exactly that - the heart-rending vulnerability of someone who is locked in to a relationship she isn't capable of leaving: "The evening comes slowly into Monica's room. Most of the time she sits on the bed with the handcuffs under the cushion and the little key in her hand [...] Inside her, throughout her, it feels as if she is setting out on a journey, but she also feels weak, hot and unwell."

The title of Johanna Holmström's book, Alone Together, automatically makes one think of loneliness. The name of Mårten Westö's (born 1967) collection of stories, En sorts värme (A Kind of Warmth), leads into coldness. The settings are home, or rather wherever is called "my place": a bar, a hotel room, a tram. One of the stories is called "È periciloso sporgersi", the text that you see on signs on Italian trains - dangerous to lean out [of the window]. It is for his protagonists too, but at the same time if one stays in one's lonely room, one withers away.

Of all of this season's collections of stories, this is the darkest: confusion, obsession, deceit and injustice are the ingredients. In "Ur nattboken" (From the Night Book), a woman sits writing small notes in the mental hospital. She writes and burns them straight away: "Nothing shall remain of me. Nothing. This will be my final revenge on the world."

Similar settings - small rooms, restaurant cars on trains, hospital wards - form the background for the relationships in Henrik Jansson's (born 1955) stories in Min dotter näckros (My Daughter Water-Lily; Scriptum, 2005). The mood can sometimes be reminiscent of Mårten Westö's, but the style is more flowing, and the wordiness makes the tales feel in a strange way more hopeful. What is described is often the contact - the lack of contact - between parent (read father!) and child. But one of them, or both, tries in their own way to work on and for the relationship.

The narrator's position is always clear with Henrik Jansson; it communicates a lot, as in the introduction to the story "Tranorna" (The Cranes), which also describes a room: "The first thing that depresses me is the lack of comfort: the bed is far too narrow, the desk makes me think of my room when I was a boy, forty years ago, and instead of a toilet all that's provided is a washbasin."

The genre that has stopped being modest
Finland-Swedish short story writing seems to hover around the catastrophically difficult as it tries to assert its individuality - in a world that seems to do nothing but preach individualism. It can be tempting to squeeze out a kind of meta-level from the stories, to interpret them as descriptions of all of the possibilities of the genre, or the language group, to make their mark in literature. Finland-Swedish short stories are not easily sold outside the linguistic borders, in fact not even inside them. To succeed in the wider Swedish-language book market, it's best to have a nice, fat novel in one's portfolio.

But if one believes that Finland-Swedish short story writing is a far too modest genre, one should expose oneself to Hannele Mikaela Taivassalo's (born 1974) assertive narrative style in Kärlek kärlek - hurra hurra (Love, Love - Hoorah, Hoorah; Söderström, 2005). This moves from rented rooms, classrooms and library reading rooms to locales that are more packed with imagination and promise, and more exposed, such as in the sci-fi story entitled "Regnstaden" (Rain Town).

But the most resolute thing in this experimental debut volume is the hold that the final story has; it is called "In i örat" (Into the Ear) - a blunt story that the narrator forces straight into the auditory canal of the unwilling listener. The narrator is a foundling, discovered on a church step, with a frost-bitten nose. Her project is to find her mother. The tone is demanding: "You can't leave me now! You have to stay and keep turning the pages - you owe me that!"

Translated by Roy Hodson