Tag: Finland

Review 2204: The Summer Book

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The event that informs The Summer Book has already occurred before the novel starts—six-year-old Sophie’s mother has lately died. Sophie, her father, and grandmother travel early to an island on the Gulf of Finland where they spend their summers.

There isn’t much plot to his novel, which is mostly centered on Sophie and her grandmother. Sophie is changeable and sometimes anxious. Her grandmother, who is not in good health, is usually wise and responsive but can be irritable. In between tales of a visiting neighbor, the construction of a new road and a large, intrusive house, a haunted bathrobe, an unfriendly cat, the construction of a miniature Venice, and some massive storms, Jansson minutely describes the world of the island—the terrain, the insects and birds, the plants.

This is a lyrical novel that implies—most of them are unstated—some truths about life, death, and love.

Jansson spent most of her summers on such an island. She wrote this novel shortly after the death of her mother.

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Review 2043: The True Deceiver

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Katri and Mats Kling are village outcasts. Katri has strange yellow eyes, and although she is very intelligent, she is brusque and has no people skills. Mats, her younger brother, is more accepted but seems lacking intellectually and is treated like the village idiot.

Katri wants two things—to find a stable home for Mats and get enough money to build the boat he wants. To do so, she has her eye on Anna Aemelin, an elderly illustrator of children’s books who is known for her drawings of fluffy bunnies.

By offering to deliver Anna’s mail and supplies, Katri begins to strike up a relationship with Anna and is soon working in her house as a servant. Katri sees herself as scrupulously honest, and when she begins managing Anna’s finances, she sees that Anna is being cheated by almost everyone. But Anna doesn’t want to see some things.

This is an odd little book about deception and self-deception but also about an unusual kind of friendship. Katri is accompanied everywhere with a wolf-like dog, while Anna is compared to the fluffy bunnies covered in flowers that she draws all over her meticulous forest floorscapes. But by the end of the novel, the dog has run away, and Anna has stopped painting bunnies.

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Review 1729: The Witch Hunter

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Here’s another one for RIP XVI!

Best-selling author Roger Koponen is appearing on the other side of the country when his wife Maria is murdered and posed in a black evening gown with a gruesome smile. When Jessica Niemi’s department has him driven home by a police officer, the car is later found burnt out with two dead bodies inside. While the team is beginning to believe that the murders are connected to Koponen’s books, two more women in black evening dresses are found, one under the ice in the lake behind Koponen’s house and one popping up from the hole, alive but barely. All of the women look a lot like Jessica.

I am not sure what attracted me to this book, possibly its setting in Finland, but it is just terrible. Let me count the ways:

  1. The main character (Jessica) is a millionaire who hides her wealth by pretending to live in a barely furnished studio apartment while actually living in a large apartment next door. How ridiculous is that?
  2. The characters, including Jessica, are completely flat. They have traits, not personalities. Some of them don’t even have those.
  3. The reason behind the string of crimes seems to have nothing to do with the bizarre crimes themselves. A manifesto is mentioned but never explained.
  4. The interactions between the teams are stunningly unprofessional, and often conversational exchanges don’t make much sense. What a person replies doesn’t always seem to have anything to do with what was said to him or her.
  5. The actual investigation seems haphazard and is unconvincing.
  6. Much space is devoted to a summer in Murano when Jessica is 19. It has nothing to do with anything.
  7. The writing or translation (or both) is mediocre and full of clichés. Some turns of phrase are odd and not idiomatic.
  8. The whole plot is overcomplicated and just plain silly.
  9. The blurb on the back of the book both misinterprets and overly reveals the plot.
  10. Jessica hardly does anything.
  11. The big thriller climax is resolved by Jessica waking up in a hospital. The end.

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Day 34: Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto

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Cover to Your Presence is Requested at SuvantoYour Presence Is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman is an unusual and disturbing novel about the events at a hospital in Finland at the turn of the century. Sunny Taylor is an American who begins a new job as a nurse for a ward of mostly American women. These women, the wives of men in the timber industry, come regularly for treatment even though most of them are probably not really ill. The atmosphere of the ward is more one of pampering than of being treated for serious illness.

While telling of seemingly innocuous everyday incidents, the book develops a feeling of darkness and uneasiness, increased by the bleak setting of the isolated hospital.

A new doctor, Peter Weber, takes over the hospital with a plan to change the ward to a maternity ward for local women. An older, troublesome woman named Julia Dey is in his sights. Sunny begins to understand that Dr. Weber wants to teach the Finnish doctors a new uterine stitch for birth problems by having them practice on the older women who are receiving hysterectomies.

Something happens, and although Sunny thinks she remembers the day of the events, she somehow doubts her memory of what happened or who might have been involved.

The novel is an attempt at a sort of Victorian Gothic. It is certainly atmospheric, but some readers may find it rather slow-going, as it takes awhile for anything definite to happen.