The Big Questions

Nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Award

Asko Sahlgren
Eklunden
WSOY FIN

By Jón Yngvi Jóhannsson

In the beginning of the novel Eklunden, by Asko Sahlberg, the reader gets to know the inebriated Martin, the master of the manor, who sits alone and deserted, just as the Finnish civil war draws to a close, his servants and help having run away. In spite of this the days pass uneventfully and as long as the wine cellar does not run out of stock he wanders about in a fog of alcoholic stupor. The farm however is saved by a small miracle, as Emma the village whore comes to the rescue.

This odd couple lives together for a short while, sheltered from the outside world and the war, or until a small group of retreating troops from the red army arrives, led by the mysterious Aarne. It soon comes to light that the three of them, Martin, Aarne and Emma have a past in common and scores to settle. It appears that ghosts from the past rest heavily on the shoulders of Aarne and Emma, who turn out to be brother and sister, while the clouded memories of Martin have all but vaporized in an alcoholic oblivion.

The setting is a sort of a no-man's land, in the middle of a Finnish forest. It may be tempting to reach for the clichés about the primitive and that which is especially Finnish and interpret Eklunden as yet another depiction of the Finnish national psyche, and especially the effects of the civil war, the wounds that it left and the traumatic experiences that the nation had to live with well into the twentieth century. Such a reading however focuses too much on the staging and the costumes: Eklunden is hardly an ethnology of that sort even though some will read it that way.

Eklunden is a historical novel that depicts a divided nation and brothers fighting each other. Class division and social inequality are important factors. But the environment and the historical circumstances of the Finnish civil war are perhaps first and foremost a setting or a scene for a great drama. Maybe this drama is quite local and unlikely to take place anywhere else or at any other time, but certainly something similar could and does happen in wars. The war changes people, puts them in situations that forces them to look themselves in the eyes and face up to the self-deceptions they may have built their lives on. They will drop their masks and relationships can take on new and unexpected forms. To some extent power relations disintegrate in war, class differences become less clear and sometimes the power balance can tip over. This applies just as well to the big and official forum of the war as well as the individual lives of the characters. Martin's relationship with his servants is, for example, not a simple relationship between master and servant in which the master is all powerful. The war also causes an interesting turnabout in Aarnes household as his wife proves to be a more courageous and spirited revolutionist than he is, even though he is an officer in the revolutionary army.

The narrative method is to a certain extent the key to the story. The story follows a few main characters and the point of view changes from one of them to the other. The narrator is omniscient and he can look into the minds of the characters at will. He also has them mull over their reactions to a situation, in the light of the past and present circumstances. They recall the past but certain things are kept secret so as to create tension. The self-reflexive narration contributes to turning the subject matter, at times, into quite abstract thought about certain principal concepts: revenge, crime, punishment and, not least, power. All of these come together in the main conflict in the story that may in the end primarily concern the connection of the past to the present.

Eklunden asks fundamental questions: to what extent do the characters construct their own lives and to what extent are they prisoners of historical circumstances, class, upbringing and their respective pasts? In spite of the great emotional struggle, the novel is, when all is said and done, first and foremost an intellectual tug of war of these fundamental questions that the narrator takes on using characters as weapons, like pawns in game of chess.