Focus on Finnish Writers

Kjell Westö.
Photo: Katja Lösönen/Otava

Awarded the Finlandia Prize in 2006, Kjell Westö’s (born 1961) novel Där vi en gång gått (‘Where Once We Walked’, 2006) is radically different from his third novel Lang (2002), his most translated novel to date. However, it does bear great similarity to his two earlier family epics Drakarna över Helsingfors (‘Kites Above Helsinki’, 1996) and Vådan av att vara Skrake (‘The Misfortune of Being Skrake’, 2000). Perhaps the smallest of these similarities is that Westö enthusiasts will recognise in the new novel a number of characters from the earlier novels. Here, the somewhat wider perspective unveils an entire city. According to its subtitle, the novel tells the story of the city and of trying to “stand taller than the grass”. In essence, it deals with what it means to be human and, above all, how hard it can be to do what is morally ‘right’.

Don’t worry: the novel could have taken place almost anywhere. Like people in general, the characters in this novel are, in their own way, universal, and in the imagination of another author they could just as easily have lived in St Petersburg or Paris in a different time. Just as Mika Waltari’s (1908 – 1979) Sinuhe egyptiläinen (‘The Egyptian’, 1945) – the hitherto most translated and most popular Finnish historical novel – is set in ancient Egypt, Westö places his characters slightly closer to home, in Helsinki in the first decades of the twentieth century. In their sheer cruelty, events in Finland at the turn of the century sadly do not pale in comparison to the great upheavals of world history. In 1918 a civil war broke out in Finland, the ‘reds’ fighting against the ‘whites’, brother fighting against brother. In preparation for writing this novel, Westö has clearly carried out thorough, careful historical research.

In Finnish literature as a whole, the depiction of the civil war in Väinö Linna’s (1920 – 1992) seminal work, the trilogy Täällä Pohjantähden alla (‘Under the North Star’, 1959-1962), is so powerful and has had such a profound effect on the writing of history in general that few Finnish authors have dared approach the subject since. As a Finland-Swede, however, Westö has much to add to Linna’s interpretation of history. In his novel, the ‘whites’ and the ‘reds’ are not necessarily seen as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but are somewhere in between. This is because, to a great extent, Där vi en gång gått is not only a historical novel; it is also a psychological novel about people. It boasts an exceptionally large cast of characters. The novel as a whole is not merely plot-driven, rather it resembles a very skilfully woven fabric. Its threads do not always meet one another, but are intrinsically connected to each other, at least through chance. The sympathies of both author and reader lie primarily with the more misfortunate, tragic characters. Because the novel moves between the aristocracy and the working classes of Swedish-speaking Finland, the various characters’ individual tragedies differ from each other at least on a surface level. Nonetheless, each character bears the scars of the civil war; many are plagued by a weighty sense of guilt. Some are also afflicted by a fin-de-siècle restlessness, the expectation of something better.

In this sense, among the most fascinating characters are the gloomy Eccu Widing, who becomes a controversial photographer (his photographs are often very sensual), Ivar Grandell, a relatively unsuccessful poet who refuses to swear allegiance to either the whites or the reds and who, as the civil war rages, is tortured by the enfant terrible of his circle of friends, the rich low-life Cedi Lilliehjelm, and above all Allu Kajander, a member of the working class who plays football like an angel (assuming angels play football, that is). Kajander is linked to the aristocracy through Lucie Lilliehjelm, the glamorous fin-de-siècle decadent. The two are lovers.

It is in his depiction of aristocratic decadence that Westö’s novel brings to mind the great novels of a bygone age, such as Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited or, as the veteran Finnish critic Pekka Tarkka claimed in his review in Helsingin Sanomat, the “rich, beautiful and lost people” of the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I don’t think it is any coincidence that Westö has chosen to write about such people in our current age.

Janna Kantola
FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange
27.3.2007