Focus on Finnish Writers

Sofi Oksanen. Photo: Toni Härkönen /WSOY

“Aliide Truu stared at the fly and the fly stared back. It’s eyes bulged and Aliide was disgusted. A blowfly. Unusually large, noisy, and eager to reproduce.”

Sofi Oksanen’s (b. 1977) novel Puhdistus ('The Purge', WSOY, 2008) opens with an impressive lead motif. Aliide, the main character, is in her kitchen stalking a fly that persistently evades the blows of her fly swatter.

This initial scene opens a window on a remote area of newly independent Estonia in 1992. Aliide, who lives alone in a farm house, discovers a young woman named Zara in her yard. Through the two characters, Oksanen deals with the horrors experienced by the women of Soviet Estonia. The essence of the story is women’s resistance, and the blurring of good and evil that is its consequence. It is no accident that Aliide Truu appears as a killer in the first scene of the novel.

In Finland, Sofi Oksanen has become the chronicler of Estonia’s mute recent history. In her first novel, Stalinin lehmät (Stalin’s Cows, WSOY, 2003) she used eating disorders to explore the problems of immigration. In her second novel, Baby Jane (WSOY, 2005) the scene was set uncharacteristically in urban Helsinki in the 1990s, and the theme was anxiety disorder.

Oksanen has a Finnish father and an Estonian mother. She was born and raised in Jyväskylä, in central Finland. Oksanen now lives in Helsinki and has recently graduated from the Theatre Academy with a degree in dramaturgy.

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The background of The Purge is unusual for a novel. Oksanen wrote a play of the same name in 2007 which was produced at the National Theatre. The novel is based on the play, but they diverge in many of their themes, as well as in their final scenes.

The book’s main theme is the exploitation of women that can occur in any era – the violence simply changes form. The novel contains highly charged, dense scenes, bitten off in clean style. A loaded gun cannot be left unfired.

The plot of The Purge opens gradually. The narrator lingers delightfully over details such as the elderly Aliide’s canning and preserving activities. They serve as a metaphor for the history that she has hidden all her life.

Zara, the girl who appears in Aliide’s yard, is her sister’s granddaughter, a victim of human trafficking and the Mafia, who has made a desperate escape from her pimp. The narrative alternates between the viewpoints of these two characters and moves by means of clear signals from one time frame to another.

The story condenses the history of 20th century Estonia. At the end of the 1930s, Aliide’s sister Ingel marries Hans Pekk, whom Aliide had desperately wanted. The virtuous and beautiful Ingel marries him and has a child. Aliide cannot bear it.

Under communist rule after the war, Aliide arranges for her sister and her daughter to be sent to a prison camp in Siberia. She believes that she will be able to make Hans Pekk, who is in hiding, love her, if he has no other alternative. Aliide hides Hans in a closet, and it doesn’t end well.

When her sister’s granddaughter arrives at her door in dire straits decades later, the tragedy of the entire family begins to come to light.

Aliide says that she never had a sister.

Zara has a photograph.

The pimp and his henchman are coming closer to the house every moment.

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Both of the women in The Purge have no power over their own bodies. They have been disgraced, and they will carry that shame for the rest of their lives. When the moment of resolution comes, they are ready for anything.

Oksanen has done her homework carefully. The narrative is broken by Hans Pekk’s notebook entries from May of 1949 to October of 1951. Characters are delineated in a lifelike way, from the pimp to the respectable Communist husband. Guilt seeks cleansing.

The Surge is not an exclusively bleak book, because Oksanen has an eye for detail, for jelly jars and new dresses. Everything is packed into the language, every verb lives and breathes.

In the end, the body and the blowfly meet, because a corpse cannot escape.

“Powerlessness was collapsed on the floor of Zara’s room.

The walls were panting, the floor gasped, the floorboards bulged with moisture. The wallpaper crackled.

She felt steps on her cheek like the feet of a fly. How could they see to fly in the dark?

Aliide understood now.”

Lauri Sihvonen

24.9.2008

Translated by Lola Rogers