Shortlist for this year’s Finlandia Prize announced

The Finnish Book Foundation has announced the shortlist of six novels nominated for this year’s Finlandia Prize for fiction, Finland’s most prestigious literary award, worth 30,000 euros. Here are the jury's assesments of each shortlisted work.

Finlandia Prize nominees 2010

Joel Haahtela: Katoamispiste (“Vanishing point”, Otava)

In Joel Haahtela’s Katoamispiste respect and admiration for another Finnish author shines through – the book is a search for Raija Siekkinen (1953–2004) on many levels. Haahtela’s narrative is skillful and engaging, concise and visual. At the center of Katoamispiste is the writer and the written word. Haahtela recounts a writer in crisis, as it were, but through another writer, and thus without self-pity. At the same time, Katoamispiste is both clear and mystical, every sentence measured and mastered to form a solid and memorable whole.

Markus Nummi: Karkkipäivä (“Candy day”, Otava)

Markus Nummi tells this story from two points of view, a child’s and an adult’s. The logic of the child’s story begins to take shape for the adult only by means of the world of adults. Nonsense becomes sensible and the child becomes visible. The good Samaritan of Nummi’s story is no different from other people in terms of innate goodness or beauty, he is in fact a rather reluctant helper who accidentally meets a child in difficult circumstances and slowly but surely decides, or is driven, to take responsibility. Nummi doesn’t tell us how we should act, he shows us how we could act, and what the consequences might be. He tells his story so that the reader is carried along with him to its moving conclusion, and sets us thinking about his themes beyond the novel.

Riikka Pulkkinen: Totta (“True”, Otava)

On the first page of Riikka Pulkkinen’s book is a dramatic sentence: “Everything happened so quickly: examination, biopsy, diagnosis.” After the diagnosis is received, Elsa, a psychologist with a successful career, wants to come home. There she is cared for by her husband, daughter, and granddaughter, who learns by chance the silenced story of the “other woman” in her grandparents’ marriage. The love story of the young Eeva and the married man Martti becomes the main theme of the novel, through which the author plumbs ageless questions of guilt and forgiveness. Riikka Pulkkinen’s artful narrative is captivating, and her characters linger in the reader’s mind for a long time.

Mikko Rimminen: Nenäpäivä (“Nose day”, Teos)

At first Irma, the main character of Nenäpäivä, is a riddle. She seeks out contact with other people by conducting fictitious Gallup-poll surveys from door to door. She doesn’t answer her son’s calls, and her best friend Virtanen, swimming in canned cocktails, is not the building superintendent, although that’s what it says on his door. Rimminen’s cityscape is dim and slushy, its hallways exuding isolation. Into this world the author brings his own over-the-top language and style, an inventiveness unmatched in Finnish literature. Best of all, at story’s end, along with the laughter and tears, the novel’s characters, battered by his world, arouse authentic fellow-feeling in the reader.

Alexandra Salmela: 27 Eli kuolema tekee taiteilijan (“27, or death makes an artist”, Teos)

Alexandra Salmela’s main character Ange has a goal: to die at the age of 27, like Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and many other artists, and become a legend. When she turns 27, however, she isn’t even an artist yet. Her muddled attempts to write her way to fame take her from Prague to the garden cottage of a Finnish country house, where great expectations blend amusingly with everyday country life. Salmela’s debut novel is a fireworks show of varied styles and unusual perspectives on the Finnish condition. The author describes the ambitions of navel-gazing “little people” in a manner both mocking and warm.

Erik Wahlström: Flugtämjaren (“The fly tamer”, Schildts)

In this book, Erik Wahlström reclothes Finnish national poet J. L. Runeberg and his inner circle. Wahlström’s great men and women at the birth of Finnishness are people, not just hooks on which to hang great national ideologies. The book is not a history, it is the author’s interpretation of what kind of man Runeberg was under the cloak of the poet: a long-suffering observer who also enjoys being a celebrity, a family man perpetually enamored of young women, and in the end an old man confined to his bed whose only contact with his beloved nature was an attempt to tame flies. The book is a cornucopia of varied voices, a profound and nimbly elegant melange.