Finnish Literature's Wild 21st Century

By Janna Kantola

A lot of trash literature is written in Finland. The publishers think that the reading public like trash, but often they get it wrong. Trash is necessary, because it makes the good literature look even better. The books that don't clear the bar form their own corner of Finnish-language literature, but they are not discussed here.

Finnish literature is by tradition gloomy and heavy going. It blossoms when it is at its gloomiest. The same goes for the Finnish taste in music, which has the slogan, "Heavy is best even when it's worst."

The Finn certainly sees humour where nobody else does. For example, Kari Hotakainen's Löpgravsvägen (The Trench Road) is hilarious and not at all a description of the terrible predicament of Finnish men. Hotakainen is one of the few humorists in new Finnish literature, and so it is hugely ironic that he has come to embody Finnish gloominess. Humour requires intelligence, and much is demanded of these people, as a poet once said. Let's be clear: Hotakainen's Klassikko (The Classic) is much better than Löpgravsvägen. It is a classic. In it, what's being longed for is not one of the houses that were provided for demobilised front-line soldiers, but a car. So there is always something missing.

There aren't many people that it goes as badly for in literature as the Finns. Literary history has its Jobs, but the melancholic heroes of Arto Salminen's and Asko Sahlberg's novels can enrich the melancholy tally of descriptions of misery. Salminen depicts the nation's mongrels, and Sahlberg too has an understanding of life's shadowy sides. According to a very Finnish rumour, Asko Sahlberg sent a text message to his publishers saying that there are two good authors in Finland, Arto Salminen and Arto Salminen. Salminen and Sahlberg have so much in common that I'm happy to group them together. And then I would include Juha Seppälä. They say the same thing, they are on the little man's side. All of them can also write sentences that are stripped of everything unnecessary. Economy with words and in life is a virtue that Finns like to adhere to. When it works, the end result is poetry. For example, when Asko Sahlberg writes like this in his short novel, Yhdyntä (2005, Intercourse):

"The wave of slow feelings washed over him. He cooked and ate, and after the meal he sat on the chair in front of the stove. The couple who lived on the other side of the wall remembered that a new day devoted to arguing had dawned. It had to be love, two half-deaf old people who had the energy to undertake the daily shouting. The winter light moved the darkness from one corner to the other in the small apartment, and the web of crusty ice was still on the windows. He estimated the passage of time by the trams rattling along the street. Somehow one could hear that they were as good as empty as they ploughed the track. The few passengers sat in silence, each on their own, while the driver stared ahead with bloodshot eyes and the conductor was a silent type who had been forced back to work from retirement."

On Norwegian television, the Finn Piirka (who actually speaks Finland-Swedish - an impossible idea!) forces the rest of the world to its knees any time he likes, but he is nowhere near as repulsive as certain figures in Finnish literature. There are more disgusting characters than you can shake a stick at. The worst is Juha Vuorinen's crazy drunk, whose diaries have been translated into Estonian and Norwegian at least. It must be pointed out that Vuorinen is not accepted as a member of Suomen Kirjailijaliitto (the Finnish Society of Authors), because they do not have proof of his literary ability. The society is not wrong. But I am still convinced that the grandmother who appears in Juoppohullun päiväkirja (Diary of a Crazy Drunk) is the most repellent of all grandmothers in the whole of world literature.

With the help of this grandmother, Juha Vuorinen unforgettably depicts Finland's recent history. In the last few years, writers of Finnish literature have mirrored recent history in a completely different way, to be sure, and almost to the point of exhaustion. So here we have something tangible: history is the driving force for prose. A couple of examples to put flesh on the bones of this statement: Pirjo Hassinen's Kuninkaanpuisto (King's Park) and Reidar Palmgren's Lentämisen alkeet (The ABC of Flying). In both books, personal past histories line the road to insight, which of course is nothing new in world literature. The flavour of the month, however, is fictional biographies of artists and, to top it all, authors. The flavour has not been lessened by the works being filmed.

The highest-selling author of the 21st century in Finland is called Ilkka Remes. He writes exciting, inventive books lacking in artistic value. But what does that matter when the author himself has not been striving for it? To quote from Arto Salminen: "Nothing is as artificial as art. Nothing deals as little with a creaking world as art."

Ilkka Remes's books are about the real world, because he has an infallible nose. In his thrillers, Karelia has already been returned to Finland, physicists have travelled to the gates of Hiroshima, and a tired, gnostic text has been found that throws the world into turmoil in the conflicting pressures of faith, power and money. Finnish readers are not mistaken, and neither are his fellow authors. Kari Hotakainen has said about Ilkka Remes that none of the two hundred international thrillers that he has read are anywhere near as powerful compared with the twists in the plots of Remes's books.

Thrillers are the outer surface of Finnish literature's 21st century. There are any number of featherweights, but the only other contestant in the same league as Remes is the thriller author Reijo Mäki, whose hero is called Vares.

Finnish literature serves up disgusting realism in the thriller genre too. Disgusting is   in, snobbery has no place in our thrillers. A typical, if not otherwise superior example: one of the pudgiest investigators in world literature is Finnish. That is, Martti Kononen, who according to the author Eero Pasanen is "a middle-manager of violence who is reminiscent of ex-President Martti Ahtisaari". He likes sausages, which reflects the culinary side of Finnish literature. Speaking of which, it is also worth getting to know Veikko Huovinen's excellent classic, Hamsterit (The Hamsters). The scenes in Mika Kaurismäki's film Rosso could have come from a Finnish novel. One of the characters in the film is an Italian man who follows his ex-fiancée to Finland (he is in fact employed by an assassin). The woman's slightly crazy brother takes the man to his childhood home and introduces him with the immortal line, "This is Siankarlo, give him some sausage" ("sian" is Finnish for pig). Thanks to the Finnish play on words and the yokellish pronunciation, the name Giancarlo is given a flavour of sausage.

Arto Paasilinna and Jari Tervo's humour still bites at readers. And the distinctive nature of the Finnish lifestyle is amplified in their works. There aren't that many people who would hit upon the idea of collective suicide, as Paasilinna has done (his book An Enchanting Mass Suicide was published in 1990). The idea is that everyone who had considered committing suicide would set out on their mission together.

Men in Finland do not have sole rights to weighty subjects. Even teenage literature deals with everything from eco-terrorism to the exploitation of young people. Kreetta Onkeli's Iloinen talo (1996, The Happy House) is not teenage literature even though the book depicts a family's troubled life from a child's perspective. It got a lot of attention because of its autobiographical element.

Even at their most intense, the women in Finnish literature are still poets, and in the 21st century they still write completely differently from men. What characterises Finnish literature today is the phenomenon. People put authors, like other celebrities, up on a pedestal, become fans. Heli Laaksonen, for example, who writes in the language she speaks - a dialect from western Finland - fills entire railway stations and market squares when she makes appearances. This has something to do with her personality, which is the complete opposite of the morose Finnish stereotype.

The cult of the star and media sexiness are gaining in significance in Finnish literature too. Neither is literary criticism shying away from the commercial any longer - unlike before. This is in fact a change of values, a change that has happened gradually in tune with the development of society and a marked rise in the standard of living.

In the outside world, Chick Lit has attracted attention. Literature that takes its material from young women's lives and attitudes is in in Finland too. Especially in poetry, "chickness" is a recurring theme. Young or younger authors like Vilja-Tuulia Huotarinen (her collection of poetry is entitled Sakset kädessä ei saa juosta - You Mustn't Run with Scissors in Your Hands), Juuli Niemi and Merja Virolainen are good examples of this, and they are refreshingly different from their male counterparts. This doesn't imply that the young men's writing is boring.

Men's books, or Guy Lit to use a term that is not yet generally accepted, form a genre of their own within Finnish literature. I would populate the category in question with authors who depict a younger reality in their works, from the young person's world of experience, and who differ quite conclusively from the older perspective. For example, Kauko Röyhkä, Juha Itkonen, Mikko Rimminen (whose Park Life is based on a bagful of beer) and Tuomas Kyrö have all in their own way enriched the Finnish literary arena. In his second novel (2005, Anna minun rakastaa enemmän, Let Me Love More), Itkonen portrays the country's most successful rock musician of all time. Kauko Röyhkä, on the other hand, is a musician himself, and in his books "an immoral madman".

Tuomas Kyrö maintained in an interview that he writes so that he doesn't need to talk. More books than ever are being published in Finland. It's lucky that Tuomas Kyrö doesn't like talking. Finns are great believers in the old adage that "empty vessels make most noise", that it's a sign of stupidity to talk a lot.

The action in Kyrö's intense and at times absurd book Liitto (The Alliance) is set in the past, on either side of the war, and contributes some stark male figures to our literature. The work contains violence, hate and speechlessness in a way that only Finnish literature could manage. Against this, the book's pure-hearted part shines in an almost Dostoyevskian manner. When one reads Kyrö's book, it is not easy to be amused, in contrast to authors like Kauko Röyhkä. In his, Itkonen's and Rimminen's books, there is literary rock'n'roll.

Trends are difficult in that they arise only when they have several supporters. What distinguishes good literature is that it is original. There are not many who have achieved this in Finnish literature in recent years. People have set great store by poetry's new flowering. And not without cause. Finnish contemporary poetry is probably in the front ranks when it comes to strangeness. At this point, we should bring in Leevi Lehto, who has hit upon all sorts of strange things in his poetry in the last few years: he has amongst other things written an ode to the telephone directory. In other words, poetry has continued down the road that M.A. Numminen marked out when he sang Wittgenstein. There are also other types of regeneration in poetry, even to the extent that it amuses one, such as poems about the use of computer networks. Apart from Leevi Lehto, one can name Juhana Vähänen, who has made use of Alan Turing's biography, or Aki Salmela, who can shake up the poetic tradition in a way that only a cosmopolitan can. It is funny, and in a way that unavoidably turns his readers into his researchers. In this respect, intelligence is the dominant characteristic of new Finnish poetry, which conflicts with what I said at the outset about Finns' sense of humour.

Janna Kantola is Ph.D., lecturer in General Literary Science at the University of Helsinki. Freelance critic for Helsingin Sanomat

Translated by Roy Hodson