The importance of a novel is not proportional to its length, although I am sure that Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace would lose a great deal in its abridged version. Some world classics, however, are very concise in their numbers of pages – Voltaire’s Candide, the works of Rabelais, and many others.
     I am astonished by the fact that so-called best-sellers always seem to be growing in length. The first detective novels by the much-admired P.D. James were fairly concise; her later works have been like bricks. John Grisham has never been a master of laconic expression; book by book the number of pages in his works have appeared to increase, and many other best-sellers, too, are typically thick. Once upon a time the books sold to while away train journeys were slim leaflets, and the American pulp fiction that was later greatly admired was also laconic.
     I wonder whether the change derives from the supermarket principle: we will sell you more book at the same price as a miserably thin classic, a mainstream novel or a collection of poetry, and the buyer’s greed wins. If Grisham were to leave out his descriptions of the appearance and clothes of every minor character or P.D. James were not to sacrifice many paragraphs to the detailed charting of every single interior, their novels would shrink by at least a third.
     In years gone by, Finnish publishers were unenthusiastic about publishing volumes of short stories. Why? They didn’t sell. Their main fiction product, the novel, sold better even when times were bad, even though literary scholars and aestheticians debated ‘the death of the novel’ and the end of the ‘great narratives’. And when it comes to poetry, it is difficult to associate it with any market value at all.
     Although, in the Finnish context, best-sellers are few and far between, it may be imagined that here too buyers novels feel they get more for their money than if they were to spend it on a slim collection of short stories or poems. Finnish bestseller-writers, too – the historical novelists Laila Hietamies and Raija Oranen or the thriller-writer Ilkka Remes – write big books. It is, of course, not a question of mere calculation – a historical novel really does demand its world, its details and its atmosphere; although Remes perhaps belongs to the American category.
     This autumn in Finland it looks as if short prose has come into its own. Every big publisher is issuing collections of short stories or other short prose – definitions and borderlines have, of course, dissolved. Many of the writers belong to the younger generation, but there are also established authors among them.
     Have publishers’ policies changed, or is short prose of such high quality on offer that it simply cannot remain unpublished? Have the preferences of readers and buyers changed? I do not know. Because literature and reading compete with other ways of spending time, the situation could of course be interpreted by arguing that reading short prose can be done between enjoying the products of the other media. Why don’t I read a Seppälä or a Hotakainen piece during the advertisement break – and then, at tomorrow’s business dinner, I might even be able to put myself across as somehow cultural. Once upon a time an international publishing house had the idea of issuing classics abridged for businessmen, the length of a short plane journey, so that the reader could, if necessary, also discuss literature.
     No, I do not view the emergence of short prose so cynically. A shocking, moving or absurd episode can be contained within a couple of pages, and in the case of Jari Järvelä, short stories form a whole.
     Short is beautiful.
     I place no trust in the brevity of text messages and e-mails, but in the strength of concise expression which exists in classic literature too. It is not necessary to say everything, because people have the power of the imagination. A short, even lapidary mode of expression requires the reader to fill the gaps, and thus reading a text demands more active participation than mere entertainment, which does not leave gaps. Is it necessary for us to know what colour tie a security man is wearing?
     The capacity to imagine and see the invisible is the property not only of the writer, but also of the good reader.

     Kristina Carlson
     Editor-in-chief
 
 
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