Juha Ruusuvuori:
Strange bedfellows





Juha Ruusuvuori

Photo
Irmeli Jung

The writer Juha Ruusuvuori moved to a small town on the
west coast of Finland where the majority speaks Swedish
— and decided to switch language. Here he is interviewed
by Pia Ingström (herself a Finland-Swede)

Moomin valley is the fictional universe created by the famous Finland-Swedish author Tove Jansson (1914—2001) for her Moomintrolls and other fairytale folk; there idyll and disaster coexist in a peculiar way. The name is also sometimes used by the Finnish-speaking majority to refer to the Swedish-speaking minority, suggesting a narrowness of outlook and a privileged over-refinement untouched by the concerns that the majority has to live with.
     Juha Ruusuvuori (born 1957), a Finnish-speaking author, has however turned the edge of irony directly against the Finnish culture he himself springs from, and written a book called Muukalainen Muumilaaksossa ('A stranger in Moomin-valley'). He is fearlessly interested in the positive aspects of the Finland-Swedish minority — approximately 5 per cent of the population — especially the ones he thinks that Finns lack.
     Why are Finland-Swedes a little more cheerful and healthy than Finnish-speaking Finns of the same social group and income bracket? Why do Finnish family events more frequently end with knifings than Finland-Swedish ones do? Why do Finnish-speaking Finns have more accidents at work than Finland-Swedes in the same jobs?
     Ruusuvuori has obviously been inspired by the work of the researcher of public health Markku T. Hyyppä; according to Dr Hyyppä's perplexing research, there are differences that cannot be explained in socio-economic or genetic terms — it must be a question of language and culture.
     Before Juha Ruusuvuori moved to Dalsbruk (in Finnish, Taalintehdas), a small town on the western coast, in the early 1990s, he had lived in a whole series of places, acquiring a varied experience of the northern Finnish and inland Finnish way of life.
     How did he dare to write an ironic book about Finnishness, one in which a Finland-Swedish culture is presented as a model?
     'Why not? Someone has to dare to be provocative, get the discussion going. I write about things that many Finland-Swedes probably also know, but you — being a minority — would never dare to write like this. It should be noted that I call my book a pamphlet; it isn't an essay, it's not sociology. I write about Finland-Swedishness as I've experienced it here in Dalsbruk; I know very little about how you behave in Helsinki, or in Ostrobothnia further up the coast.'
     The reason why Ruusuvuori settle down in Dalsbruk in the early 1990s was that his wife Ulla had landed a permanent position there as a doctor at a health centre. She had decided to start speaking Swedish when she got the job, and Ruusuvuori thought he too would start to speak the majority language of his new home town.
     'I began with vocabulary that I had learnt in school (All Finnish-speaking children learn Swedish at school as a compulsory subject.), which wasn't really very helpful. But I set myself a task when during the first autumn I undertook to direct some amateur drama exclusively in Swedish. At first I had trouble distinguishing between "var" (where) and "när" (when), and it probably all sounded a bit strange. The theatre group would probably have understood Finnish, but I wanted to do it all in Swedish. After a year or two I began to speak Swedish fluently.'
     The couple's two youngest children both attend a Swedish-language school, speak mostly Finnish to each other but are unashamed to borrow Swedish words when necessary and speak Swedish with their friends.
     In the 1980s Ruusuvuori edited the comic book Pahkasika ('Warthog') together with Markku Paretskoi. He has also written plays and books for children. His breakthrough into literary fiction came with the historical novel Kaniikki Lupus ('Canon Lupus') in 1993, a serious dark-hued medieval epic.
     'After my time on Pahkasika I decided to be very careful about comic writing as a means of literary expression,', he says. After Kaniikki Lupus, which got a Finlandia Prize nomination, he wrote four historical novels, and in 2003 he was again a Finlandia candidate with Nokian nuoriso-ohjaaja ('Nokia's youth counsellor'), a historical and futuristic story.
     'After that book it feels as though I can write what I want - including lighter texts with a journalistic or polemical flavour. I don't see why one should have to be serious all the time. If a García Márquez can write journalism and polemics as well as long novels, why shouldn't I?'
     In his diary entry for September 1 this autumn it said 'start to write book', and in one way or another it is to be about climate change, religious fanaticism, exploitation, sacred objects and miracles, he says, helpfully enumerating it all. Miracles at any rate are something that interests him.
     'Things like that used to happen often in Scandinavia in the old days, but obviously not any more. In southern Europe the Virgin Mary shows herself again and again.'
     The writer Ruusuvuori has never, however, contemplated a switch of language à la Nabokov.
     'Nabokov was able to switch from Russian to English because he'd had an English governess since he was three. Finnish is an agglutinative language, which makes it easy to form new words as needed, and I can do things with it which I couldn't really learn to master in Swedish, even if I lived in Sweden.'

Translated by David McDuff