The families in television advertisements still have a father, a mother, a daughter and a son, whether it is apartments, cereal, washing machines or bank loans that are being sold. If ready-made houses or yogurts had been advertised a hundred years ago, it would also have been necessary to fit into the picture a grandfather, grandmother, an indefinite number of unmarried aunts, perhaps orphan cousins and other more distant relations.
     In Finland, as in other urbanised western countries, the family means, according to contemporary concepts, two generations, parents and children. Emotionally, the family or clan is, of course, still a broader group of people than those that live under the same roof.
     The changes in family structure in Finland have taken place over a fairly short period. Fresh statistics about the current situation are surprising. In Helsinki, every third household is made up of a single person. The explanation I read did not differentiate reasons for living alone, but the metropolitan area is home to large numbers of young people who have moved south in search of work. One in three marriages ends in divorce. As the baby-boomer generation grows older, there are increasing numbers of divorcees and widows or widowers.
     Starting a family itself is by no means a self-evident matter. According to another study, one in five Finnish women will remain childless. The average age of first-time mothers has risen from 25, which is considered ideal, to 28. The youngest married couples want to continue their youth together. Later, unfinished studies and uncertainty about employment check the desire to have children. Young couples are concerned about the future of their children. Families with one or two children consider society’s support insufficient, and do not want to have more children. Statistically, families would like to have 2.4 children. In practice, the average number of children is only 1.8. (The ‘fractional children’ ofthe statistics always make for odd associations among laymen.)
     The family relations of the television soaps perhaps seem strange and convoluted, but reality is at least as extraordinary. Second families, my children, your children, our joint children. Our former husbands, wives.
     Coincidence or not, but in this autumn’s Finnish fiction the family appears to play a central role. One could, of course, refer to the classics of antiquity or to, for example, Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and remark that the subject has always been central. Emotionally, this is indeed true; Oedipus or Antigone can also live in a brick house or a concrete block of flats. On the other hand, literature also depicts societal changes that influence the family from the outside. One comic and gruesome example is Kari Hotakainen’s Juoksuhaudantie (‘Trench Road’), a novel about everyday life in Finland. Anja Snellman’s amusing Äiti ja koira (‘Mother and the dog’) shows that a woman’s life is not over in middle age even if her husband leaves her and her children are already grown up.
     In October, Finns were shocked by a bomb blast in a shopping centre in the metropolitan area in which seven people were killed and dozens injured. The perpetrator was revealed to be one of those killed in the explosion, a 19-year-old student of chemistry whose motives remain unclear. Within a couple of years, serious crimes have been committed by children or young people in Finland – however much it may still be imagined by many to be some sort of a peaceful haven. Parents, teachers and decision-makers discuss causes and consequences; many are perplexed. The family today is a rather closed unit, whether in the town or the countryside.
     Literature is hardly able to teach or to offer answers. Nevertheless, fiction is able to delineate love and hate, domination and subordination, tenderness and rage, loneliness and communication, richness and want, which are concealed within walls, conditions in which individuals seek their lives and their identities. Fiction can make visible what remains hidden.
     Behind the prose of the statistics lies this whole spectrum.

     Kristina Carlson
     Editor-in-Chief
 
 
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