Northern Climes: Sweden and Finland

Johanne Lykke Holm: Strega, translated by Saskia Vogel, Lolli Editions, 2022.

There is a real yellowish-green Strega liqueur in Italy, supposedly adapted from a secret recipe created by witches. The town in which it is made (Benevento rather than Strega) is in the Apennines, close to Naples, a bit further south than I was expecting from the description of the Alpine setting for the fictional town in Swedish author Holm’s novel. In fact, the setting is not important in this strange and unsettling little novel (only 180 pages): it is enough to know that it is a grand hotel in a remote location, with only a convent of liqueur-producing nuns as the nearest neighbour. Moreover, it is a grand hotel where no guest ever comes to stay, thus continuing my theme of unsettling Gothic mansions.

The narrator is one of nine young women who are being trained as hotel maids, sent by their families in the hope of acquiring good skills – but for what purpose? For a career, for marriage, to learn obedience, to stop being a nuisance at home? Everything is fluid and ambiguous, we are never quite sure what is going on. The work is repetitive and mechanical, apparently fulfilling no purpose whatsoever; the trainers/managers are matron-like and strict (as if they were in fact in a convent), and something feels decidedly wrong about the whole set-up. The similes imply violence, the hotel remains eerily empty.

We quickly learned that each day was a reproduction of the last. Morning after morning, we set out coffee and bread in the conservatory facing the park. There were large porcelain bowls filled with black marmalade. There was silverware on linen napkins. Morning after morning, a metallic light fell through the room like a butcher’s knife. I stood and watched it happen… For a moment I thought I saw someone coming, but I must have been mistaken. I went back to work. Refilled the coffee pots, sliced the tin loaf. No guests arrived.

The girls start to form bonds with each other, but the way they are treated gets more and more uncomfortable: they are examined, prodded, starved, made to kneel, humiliated. Above all, it appears that they are having their individuality stamped out of them.

All punishment in the hotel was collective. They treated us as one body, so we became one body. We forgot our individual traits and our individual responsibilities. If one of us stole a coin, all of us had stolen a coin. They poured boiling water over our feet and made us dip them in tubs of ice. The pain was unbearable, but no marks were left.

And then, one night, the hotel fills up with guests. The girls are expected to look their best, be on their best behaviour, serve the guests impeccably, yet all the while this sense of danger and disquiet persists. This is not a jolly, happy occasion, although it is a raucous one. Sure enough, one of the girls goes missing after the party. Search parties look for her in the mountainous terrain, but the girls are convinced that she is already dead. They are frightened yet feel trapped, they have nowhere else to go – but whether the sense of entrapment is real or all in their minds is not quite clear. The narrator Rafaela has chilling imaginary conversations with the murderer.

I knew the murderer was never far. I had seen him step out of the walls. I had seen him among the bed sheets… In every woman’s life, there’s someone waiting at the gate. We are all candidates, but only some of us are chosen. I knew there were holes in the earth waiting for us… One might have an urge to say: We would rather be martyrs together than live another second in this order. One does not. One bides one’s time. One waits for one’s murderer, one sees him everywhere. One imagines the night it will come to pass. One knows all about that night. One knows the lines.

As a metaphor for the violence that is constantly being perpetuated against women, both mentally and physically, and how they collude in their oppression, this is one of the most unsettling books I’ve read in a long time. I was not sure where this book was going most of the time, but I could feel its lingering poisonous atmosphere in the sickly sweetness of the liqueur. As you can see from the quotes above, the style is very simple: short sentences, repetitions, gradually building upon the previous passages or chapters, much like the ripples in water after you throw in a stone. A steady accumulation (or drip, drip, drip) of something very dark, which caused an almost visceral reaction when reading the book.

I knew a woman’s life could at any point be turned into a crime scene. I had yet to understand that I was already living inside the crime scene, that the crime scene was not the bed but the body, that the crime had already taken place.

Antti Tuomainen: The Healer, translated by Lola Rogers, Harvill Secker, 2013.

If all you have read so far of Finnish crime writer’s Tuomainen’s work is the series featuring hapless insurance assessor Henri which started with The Rabbit Factor, or the dark (and sometimes slapstick) comedy of standalones like Palm Beach Finland or Little Siberia, then you are in for a major surprise. In this early work, the first of his books to be translated into English, we are in a water-logged world that is nearing the end. The sea levels have risen and people are fleeing to the northern parts of the globe. Helsinki appears to be too far south to be safe, and we get to see a city that is half-abandoned, with damaged buildings and infrastructure, where missing people and laws mean nothing at all anymore. The scenes of railways stations overrun with climate refugees are memorable:

All around there were shouts, arguments, pleas, entreaties and threats. There were trains going north every hour, but even that wasn’t enough to lessen the flood of people. More and more people kept coming from the east, the south and the west. There was a black market on the plaza for ticket touts, purchasers of valuables, hundreds of thieves and swindlers with hundreds of tricks and scams, and of course ordinary people, each one more desperate than the last.

Yet Tapani Lehtinen, although he is normally a sensitive observer of his surroundings, a poet who writes daily although he knows no one is reading poetry anymore, is only focused on finding his wife Johanna. Although she has only been gone for a few hours, he is worried, because they had the habit of constantly communicating with each other. Johanna is a journalist and Tapani starts to suspect that she might have been researching about a serial killer known as ‘The Healer’ and that this might have something to do with her disappearance.

I recently rewatched the film Children of Men and this book was very much in that vein of an all-too-plausible, not-at-all-glamorous vision of the near-future. Everything feels dingy, hopeless, lawless. Who cares about a missing person or even a murder or two, when there are so many crimes happening daily, when people are dying of so many natural causes, when so many buildings are boarded up and dangers are lurking around every corner? The newspapers are only out to entertain people with stories about celebrities doing gross things rather than bring any real news or uncover ‘truths’. Nobody cares about any of that.

So, all in all, a bleak view of the world, although the love between Johanna and Tapani shows that there is still some beauty and hope left. However, this frail blossom is very effectively quashed by the cynical realism of the chief of police who half-heartedly agrees to help Tapani, much against his better judgment.

Whenever some lunatic gets it in his head that a few individuals are responsible for the world falling apart around him, we go after him. And what happens when we catch him? Some new lunatic comes along, and the world keeps marching towards destruction. That’s nothing new, of course. History tells us that this kind of things has happened many times before. Civilisation blossoms, and then it falls. It’s happened on this planet in our own lifetime, to millions and millons of people… But you take it harder, somehow, when it’s your own little world that’s dying.

I was planning to read more books from Northern Climes this month, but I started the rather depressing Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament and stalled. Life just got really messy, I fell down other reading rabbit holes, library books I’d reserved kept appearing and… and… I just didn’t have the strength to review much and often struggled to finish any of my books.

Womanly Wit, Satire and Compassion

Two books I read in September (but never got around to reviewing) have stayed with me for similar reasons, even though outwardly they couldn’t have been more different. The first was a family saga of sorts, seen through the eyes of three generations of women. The second book was a satire, a series of interconnected short stories set in a nameless (but easily recognisable) international organisation.

The obvious similarity between them is that they might both have been labelled ‘women’s fiction’ – but of course that is a meaningless term. What they both brought to me as a reader was a wit at once fierce and yet tender. So if there is such a thing as women’s fiction, is it possible that women are more prone to sharp observation of character flaws, but also more gentle and forgiving of them?

Tessa Hadley: Everything Will Be All Right

Family sagas are so not my thing (although I did go through a brief period in my teens when I enjoyed the Cazalets, Flambards and the Eliots of Damerosehay). But this book is more about exploring what it means to grow up a woman in three (perhaps even four) different eras, each one with its own challenges, opportunities and limitations. Joyce grows up in the early 1950s and wants to break free of the constraints of the housewifely existence she sees in her mother’s and aunt’s generation. Art school seems to be her way out of suburbia, but then she marries her art teacher and has children. Very soon, she learns to content herself with dressmaking, homemaking and a less than perfect marriage.

Her daughter Zoe disdains these compromises and grows up in the more adventurous 1970s, with expectations of gender equality. Yet when she falls in love with fellow student, the scornfully intellectual Simon, and falls pregnant, she too struggles with the ‘tension between motherhood and intelligent life’. Finally, Zoe’s daughter Pearl is still a thoughtless teenager in the late 1980s or early 1990s: the only thing she is sure of is that she doesn’t want to end up either like her cerebral mother or her domesticated grandmother.

In her Q&A session in Morges, Tessa Hadley said that this was the most autobiographical of her novels. She certainly describes all the permutations of female emancipation in a no-nonsense Northern family, with memorable characters and sensitive descriptions of complex mother/daughter relationships. Throughout, she casts a remarkably lucid and critical eye on the shortcomings of each generation – there is none who seems to have got it entirely right. Women are all still chasing after their illusions and learning to live with disillusionment.

The multiple points of view, although the shift is a little jarring at times, allow us to see each character, warts and all. It could be argued that the men are particularly covered in warts in this story – useless, unlikeable and, above all, unreliable. Yet often, in their unsentimental, selfish way, they see things most clearly. Here’s what Simon has to say about studying with babies:

He had not wanted this baby. He had always had a horror of a certain kind of semi-academic domesticity, PhD students turned whey-faced and sour-tempered over their grubby-mouthed and badly-behaved offspring; rented flats filled up with a detritus of toys; typewriter and books pushed resentfully aside to make room for plates of baby pap. It seemed to him self-evident that intelligent women with minds of their own would not make the best mothers: how could they bear, if they liked room to think and breathe and read, to be constrained as the mothers of small children must be to the sticky and endlessly repetitive routines of domestic life?

I don’t know if it’s a sad indication of things not having moved on very much, that women nowadays still have to make those restrictive choices of hearth and career, life of the mind or domesticating the body, that motherhood still reverts us back to gender stereotypes.

Shirley Hazzard: People in Glass Houses

Shirly Hazzard worked for the UN Secretariat in New York for a number of years, but was also familiar with diplomatic service and British Intelligence, so she had quite a choice of ‘organisations’ and ‘corporate nonsense’ to ridicule. This was probably the first book to lampoon organisational man (and woman) and the absurdities of the bureaucratic world. Yet the author reserves her sharpest arrows for the stultifying, soul-crushing organisation itself, its odd rules and procedures, the way it forces people to pretend and cheat. So many great insights into how organisations with their pretensions and doublespeak grind down and dehumanise people, how only the mediocre and ‘well-adapted’ or sycophantic survive.

The people themselves are mocked with compassion, perceived perhaps as victims. We see erudite, gentlemanly but rather slapdash Algie Wyatt being given the boot. Geeky researcher Ashmole-Brown is made fun of but then publishes his results and hits the bestseller lists; Swoboda, a Slav refugee during the war, has made up for lost educational opportunities through sheer hard work – yet is denied the promotion he feels he deserves and loses all respect for his bosses. Idealistic Clelia Kingslake flies out to Rhodes to deal with a crisis – but finds that no one seems to care about or rate her peace-keeping abilities.

All this in an elegant, uncluttered prose. The anger is toned down, yet with sly asides – a very British irony which reminds me of Barbara Pym.

Clelia Kingslake was happy because, first of all, she was a Canadian. Fished out of the Annual Reports Pool at Headquarters… flown to Rhodes at one day’s notice, arriving there to sunlight and sea, to trees in leaf, flowers in bloom, to the luxury of finding herself beside the Mediterranean – all this by itself might not have been thoroughly enjoyable to her strict northern soul had she not come to assist in a noble undertaking. She had been sent to serve the peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean in their hour of need, and it was this that sanctioned her almost sensual pleasure in her surroundings…

Have you read these books or other books by these authors? I will certainly be seeking out more of their work.