The Finns have a particularly irritating name for non-Finns: ulkomaan pelle, or foreign clown.      It’s a term that never fails to get a rise out of me; and regrettably, one hears it often, even – I am sorry to say – in editorial board meetings at Books from Finland. Normally it accompanies the sentiment that those poor foreign fools cannot be expected to know anything of the delights and subtleties of our country. I suppose it’s the innocent superiority of the phrase that gets to me the most (along with the only-little-meishness that allows Finns to remain blithely unconscious of the implications of its tone) – that, and the fact that no cultivated English-speaker would allow themselves to let slip a phrase of such unheeding arrogance. Every time I hear it, I bristle. And somehow it only makes it worse that, as a Finnish-speaker and half-Finn, I’m always assured that I’m not an ulkomaan pelle. Or, at least, maybe only a half-clown.      So it is a special pleasure for me to be able to report that this issue of Books from Finland comes to you from London. From time to time, and this is one of them, we put the magazine together not in Helsinki, surrounded by Finns, but in London, against a background of – well, foreign clowns. People often ask me what Finland, with a population of just five million, feels like. Does it feel small? Do Finns feel isolated, speaking such a weird language? Does the culture feel threatened?      No, I say, not really. Physically, Finland is big – considerably larger than the United Kingdom, for instance; and seen from Helsinki, Finnish culture, and the Finnish language, feel capacious, and self-confident, too. And no, it’s not much worried by the increasing use of English. Ever since it first began to dream of independence, in the mid 19th century, Finland has had a view of itself that integrates it, at the very least, with the whole of Europe; and the new Nokia-Finland has a keen appreciation of the advantages of subsuming the English language and its cultures. Besides which, Finnish-language Finland has its very own minorities – the Swedish-speaking Finns, the Sámi, and increasing numbers of miscellaneous foreigners.      Here in Camden Town, however, we’re the odd ones out, and as we put the magazine together I find my own identity ricocheting from Finnish to English and back in microseconds. It’s not just because we’re foreign (or, in my case, become so as soon as I begin to speak Finnish), though, that we’re strange. In addition to the most unforeign of Britain’s minorities, the Irish, this area has traditionally home to a sizeable Greek immigration; but then there’s the Portuguese deli at the end of the road (and the candlelit processions for Our Lady of Fatima by the local Portuguese Catholic community every May), the Moroccan coffee-grinders round the corner in Delancey Street, and any number of restaurants – Japanese, Italian, Thai, Lebanese – in the immediate vicinity. It’s not our foreignness that makes us unusual, I reflect as, leaning out of the window on a balmy evening to discuss the next issue of Books from Finland and point out the local literary shrine, Dylan Thomas’s writing shed in the next garden, I watch my new neighbours catch the sound of an unfamiliar language; it’s the fact that we’re unassimilated. The Finnish emigration to Britain has been too small for any distinctive Anglo-Finnish identity to develop; and for myself, my national origins, Finnish and British, feel not so much mixed as separate and parallel. I remember my mother – who lives in another racially mixed area, in south-east London – describing the liberation she felt when she realised that she need no longer be foreign, but could now be ethnic; but I’m not sure I buy it. My mother does a great line in impersonating a babushka (scarf and all); but, like most disguises, its effectiveness lies in the fact that it’s a fiction. My mother isn’t ethnic; she’s a Finn – albeit one who’s lived in England for more than forty years (and writes her haikus with equal facility in English and Finnish). Both within Finland and outside it, in other words, Finland remains unitary. For a magazine like Books from Finland, that carries with it the danger of a kind of solipsism – a dismissal of the rest of the world as not quite real. So the occasional view from the other end of the telescope can be salutary; a reminder that the rest of the world goes about its daily business quite happily, thank you, without necessarily knowing anything about Finland or its literature. In my case the most recent reality bite came courtesy of my ten-year-old nephew Christopher, in Ireland, who confessed to me with some embarrassment that he had always thought ‘Finnish’ was the adjective from ‘Sweden’.      But then there are the others, for whom some aspect of Finland, its art and literature, resonates in unguessed-at ways. Not far from Dylan Thomas’s writing shed, in my own back garden, stands a tall silver birch, planted some thirty years ago by the house’s previous owner, a designer, after an inspirational trip to Finland. Her dining room chairs were old Artek ones, which must have dated from the 1930s, when they were first imported here; and she gave me, as a sort of symbol of handing on the house, a simple old Arabia bowl.      Ulkomaan pelle? I don’t think so. For her, I think the tree, and the bowl, are part of a poetic imagining of another country whose personal meaning I don’t suppose that I – or maybe even she – could ever explain completely. A fiction? Probably – but one which this half-clown, at least, is more than happy to go along with.     Top of page