Sofi Oksanen

[Eric]

Sofi Oksanen (born 1977) is a rather unusual Finnish writer. Her public persona is theatrical, her hair dyed a piercing shade of ginger, her face blanched in characteristic Gothic wise. Plus the garishly red lipstick.

But she has now written three well-received novels that deal with some quite disparate themes.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Stalinin lehm?t (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalinin_lehm%C3%A4t), [Stalin's Cows]2003
Baby Jane (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Jane), 2005
Puhdistus (http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puhdistus), [Purge / Cleansing / Pogrom] 2008

Readers tend to focus on different aspects of her works, and on the internet, debates also show a many-sided author.

Her first novel [I]Stalin's Cows had, as part of the blurb: "Why are all Estonian women whores?", which was guaranteed to be eye-catching, as Estonia is Finland's next-door neighbour. In this novel, Oksanen interweaves a story of bulimia with one of Brezhnev's bureaucratic oppression of the Baltic countries. The bulimia is, evidently, autobiographical, but given the fact that her mother was born in Estonia, she is not ignorant of the history of that country, either. The novel deals with the shame and stigma involved in the lives of Baltic women who fled to Finland during Soviet times. As Estonia was little discussed in Finland for decades, this book came as a sensation and is evidently a page-turner. It exists only in Swedish translation.

I cannot find much on the internet about her second novel. It is evidently set in urban Helsinki and involves panic attacks.

But her third, Purge is being translated into English, and will appear in the United States. This deals with the complex and paradoxical lives of old Estonian women, about sexual exploitation and prostitution of younger ones who are lured abroad, to Finland or Germany, by the chance of earning lots of money, and sometimes end up in prostitution.

The guilt of those who stayed behind when others were deported to Siberia from Estonia, and what happened to those who returned is also taken up. While Jaan Kross described such things from a male point of view, Oksanen has talked with older female Estonian relations and built up her works on what she has heard.

The novel was preceded by a play on the same theme that was staged at the Finnish National Theatre. This play exists in an English manuscript version, but has not yet been published.

Both the Finnish and Estonian press make a lot of her status as angry young woman regarding women's issues and the distortion of Soviet history as related to Finland and Estonia. But she does know her onions. Under the Gothic exterior lurks a knowledgeable person.

[Stewart]

But her third, Purge is being translated into English, and will appear in the United States. This deals with the complex and paradoxical lives of old Estonian women, about sexual exploitation and prostitution of younger ones who are lured abroad, to Finland or Germany, by the chance of earning lots of money, and sometimes end up in prostitution.

Sounds a little like the Lukas Moodysson film, Lilya 4-Ever, which is about a Russian girl who gets lured to Sweden and forced into prostitution. Even if it is in Russian, it was filmed in Estonia.

Do you know who will be publishing this one?


Both the Finnish and Estonian press make a lot of her status as angry young woman regarding women's issues and the distortion of Soviet history as related to Finland and Estonia. But she does know her onions.That's good to know. I get the impression that Poland offered up Dorota Masłowska as its angry young woman but her first novel, White And Red, I found excruciatingly boring (at least, what I read of it) and her later work doesn't seem to have attracted much interest, not enough to warrant further translation.

[Eric]

I remember the name Maslowska - and I was quite put off by what I read. I thought that Oksanen was going to be similar - all showwomanship and nothing of substance. Nicking trendy things from next door, etc., and adding a few whores and digestive disturbances for good measure. The appearance in photos did not bode well.

But I then read all of the debate in the Lukupiiri online literary blog section of the Helsingin Sanomat (Finland's biggest daily) website several days ago. This had lasted for most of May. And I was pleasantly surprised at the astute comments by one or two readers of her novel Puhdistus (Purge), plus, especially, the very analytical and exact comments by Oksanen, when she finally, after fifteen or twenty postings, weighed in herself.

For a woman of 31, and a Finn to boot, she is remarkably well-informed about Estonia. But she has relations there on her mother's side. So she will have heard older people telling their stories. At the same time, being a foreigner, she is not as inhibited or bound by local rules as Estonians who, in public, have learnt to keep their mouths shut, from the days when there were informers in every pub and meeting during Soviet times.

Plus the fact that she, unlike the vast majority of Finns, can actually read and speak Estonian. Most Finns are shut out of Estonia intellectually, and are completely ignorant about the complex history of the country right next door. Most Finns come to Estonia as tourists to get pissed out their minds, or pick up a whore. They act like neo-colonials, the Finns, that is. Most (but not all) of the Estonian prostitutes are Russian-speaking, sometimes citizens, sometimes not. (When in bed one's tongue is only needed for certain activities...) And Oksanen has published things in the Estonian as well as Finnish press, even given one interview to a Swedish newspaper. So you can approach her from several angles.

I now have a copy of Puhdistus itself, but I am a bit daunted by trying to read it in Finnish, as the language is pretty difficult. But I have two further options: to wait for the Estonian translation, out next year, or, better still, the English one. But I do have the manuscript of the play that preceded Puhdistus and is on the same theme. And it's in English! So, that's the logical place to start.

I know who Sofi Oksanen's literary agent is, I know the name of the American translator. But unfortunately, I have not yet discovered the name of the press where the novel will appear in English. I'll get back to you on that, when I know.

[Eric]

Sofi Oksanen is front-page news in Finland today (6th August 2008). The Finnish consul in Saint Petersburg has decided that she is not welcome at a poetry festival to be held in that city, just before Christmas. He claims that the playwright and novelist is not a real poet.

Others, including the Finnish PEN Club see this as a return to Finlandisation, in other words, kowtowing to the Russians, who are loath to allow any criticism of many things. Oksanen is particularly outspoken about Russia's relations to Estonia, and its Soviet past.

So who said that literature isn't political?

See:

St. Petersburg consulate refuses writer Sofi Oksanen (http://www.helsinkitimes.fi/htimes/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2465:st-petersburg-consulate-refuses-writer-sofi-oksanen&catid=33:general&Itemid=201)

and

Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition - Culture (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Writer+Sofi+Oksanen+dropped+from+poetry+evening+in +St+Petersburg/1135238385309)

[Eric]

I note the BlogSpy report here on Tibetan writing. I cannot be a co?ncidence that this (post-?) colonial issue is being discussed in the light of the fact that the Olympic Games are starting the day after tomorrow. Literature and politics.

Likewise, the Sofi Oksanen story won't go away in Finland and Estonia. Finnish PEN are threatening to pull out of the Saint Petersburg poetry festival, in protest against the Finnish consulate's decision not to invite someone who is, after all, one of the leading lights of contemporary Finnish literature.

It is a storm in a teacup, really, but the symbolism is that it isn't the Russians themselves that are banning or shunning Oksanen, but the Finnish consulate, a representative body, not a literary one - one representing her own country. The Finns are sensitive about accusations of "finlandisation" ("suomettuminen" in Finnish) which was a buzz word 25 years ago, when the Finns would avoid saying or printing anything that would upset what was then the Soviet Union.

There is lively comment in the Finnish press by readers, with about 100 replies. Finns have strong feelings on this subject, owing to Finland's geographical location.

[Stewart]

He claims that the playwright and novelist is not a real poet.
What makes a poet real? Does he have an answer on that one?

[Eric]

What makes a poet real? That is what the wiser Finns are also asking.

Oksanen has written three well-received novels, plus a play on the same subject as one of them. No has ever heard of her writing and publishing poetry.

So this Finnish consul in Leningrad, sorry, Saint Petersburg, claims to have decided that Oksanen, one of the highest profile younger Finnish authors, couldn't appear at the poetry event because she, well, isn't a poet.

But the people at Finnish PEN and elsewhere don't buy that. They know, as anyone who is acquainted with the tiniest bit of Finnish history, culture and geo-politics knows, that this is a feint, because the consul and his cultural secretary or whatever, are scared that Oksanen will offend some Russians, and bring Finland into disrepute.

If you read a potted history of Finland, such as the Wikipedia article, you will see that most encounters that Finland has had with Russia are bad, and involved colonialism:

History of Finland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Finland)

and

Russification of Finland - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification_of_Finland)

Britain has had the luxury of long periods of peace, and hasn't been invaded since the Norman Conquest. So totally a-political novels, such as those of Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf have had room to be published (despite the underlying feminist traits, which are socio-political). Finland, however, has had many bitter conflicts, meaning that many of their authors, such as Runeberg, Diktonius, V?in? Linna, Waltari, and now, latterly Oksanen, do have political themes in their works.

What is also lurking in the background of the Oksanen Affair, as it will become to be known, is the curiously unresolved situation where 18 Finns are suspected of having spied for the GDR. But the list just never seems to get published. The GDR was a mere puppet state, run by the Russians, so the threads once again lead back to Moscow.

For Finland-watchers, all of this is as exciting as if postcolonialist revelations were to emerge about Salazar, Pinochet, Honecker, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, or any of the big players. Finland too has a literature which reflects its historical past.

*

Though it has to be said that Finnish poetry especially is often a-political, Modernist, etc. For instance: Edith S?dergran, Gunnar Bj?rling, Rabbe Enckell, Arvid M?rne, Eeva-Liisa Manner, Pentti Saarikoski, V?in? Kirstin?, Tommy Tabermann, Eva-Stina Byggm?star, etc., etc., hardly deal with wars, conflict and strife. Paavo Haavikko somewhat more.

Maybe the Finnish consul in Leningrad wanted to maintain a low-key, a-political image, so that the Russians wouldn't get too irate, and will keep supplying the fuel. The Finns are building new nuclear power stations, but it will take a while before Finland is significantly less reliant on Russia. Hence, all this fuss about one novelist.

[Eric]

Sofi Oksanen's novel "Puhdistus" ("Purge") has been nominated for the national annual Finnish book prize, the Finlandia, along with novels by Olli Jalonen, Arne Nevanlinna, Pirkko Saisio, Juha Sepp?l? and a first novel by Katri Lipson.

So there are a few new names for you.

The Oksanen novel is, if you remember, about life in post-deportation Soviet Estonia from a woman's point of view.

The Saisio book looks interesting, but Oksanen's main rival is perhaps the well-established Finnish novelist Olli Jalonen.

[Eric]

I see from Thursday's Finnish press that Sofi Oksanen, the Gothic Finn, has won this year's Finlandia prize with her novel "Puhdistus" ("Purge"). So Estonia's going to be in the news in Finland, whether some Finns like it or not.

Those of you that read the more accessible language Swedish can read a review of the book at:

Recension | roman-I skr?ckens och skammens tecken (http://www.hbl.fi//text/kultur/2008/5/20/d13582.php)

Just to remind you of her appearance:

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135241653721.jpeg

The book is being translated into English in the States and will hopefully appear soon in English.

[Eric]

I've heard rumours recently that the Sofi Oksanen novel "Puhdistus" (Purge) - with which she won the prestigious Finlandia Prize - may be appearing in America within a couple of years and even maybe in Britain. That would be great.

But it's not as if these two countries will be the first to have it translated. (OK, Finnish is a difficult language, but the translators don't usually learn it from scratch...). I also heard that the rights have been sold to parts of Scandinavia, and maybe the Netherlands, Israel, and elsewhere. So: get your finger out, Britain! Why are the Brits always the last to dodder across the finishing (Finnishing, geddit?) line when it come to translating novels that are regarded as interesting by half of Europe?

Given the time-frame within which translations appear in Blighty, this book may appear in Britain in 2030, or thereabouts, when the literati and intellectuals of various cliques have managed to deem it "possibly worth considering, although written by a foreigner from gloomy Scandinavia, and not even a bestselling crime novel". Although, in fact, it is a crime novel. Lots of crime involved: the rape and exploitation of women, and the occupation (also a form of rape) of a sovereign state are just two examples.

[Eric]

Architecture and manor houses

Here's another, very cultural, dimension of Sofi Oksanen, the Finnish author. She visited a number of manor houses in Estonia last summer.

Those of you that are interested in architecture and stately homes can look at the 32 photos on the following website, complete with map of Estonia. This is from the daily Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat:

HS.fi - Kuvakooste (http://www.hs.fi/kuvakooste/1135228453808)

You start there with a map of "Viro", which is the Finnish for Estonia. You can see the route travelled by Oksanen.

If you proceed, photo by photo, down the right-hand column, you can enlarge them by clicking on them. They are from various manor houses, mostly built by the Baltic Germans in the 19th century. Some were burnt down during the 1905 revolution, but many crumbled during Soviet times.

When you get to the bottom of the column, click on "Seuraavat 15 kuvaa" (The following 15 pictures) for more. I can't help you with any more Finnish (you can learn it over the weekend), but you get some idea of the lost architectural gems of Estonia. Latvia is similar, in this respect, also thanks to the German barons.

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228456801.jpeg

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228458138.jpeg

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228484774.jpeg

[titania7]

Eric,
Many thanks for sharing this. How did you know about my interest in architecture? ;)

The two photos you've posted are magnificent! I can't wait to visit the website to see more of these "architectural gems," as you call them. Sofi has a strong presence, doesn't she? I think it's impossible not to sense that when you see her, particularly in these pictures.

Cheers,
Titania

[Eric]

What I like about Oksanen is the fact that she combines the persona of a person who dresses provocatively in rather weird Goth-inspired clothing, but that she still does serious things, like write novels about the rape of women and countries, and goes tootling around Estonia to look at damaged, but still extant, manor houses. I like the picture of her in reddish-brown boots among the rubble.

The latest Oksanen news, for connoisseurs, is that her passport has got lost in the post. So what, you might say. But Ms Oksanen has been trying to get a visa to attend a poetry festival at the Finnish Embassy or Cultural Centre in Leningrad (whoops - Saint Petersburg). Earlier this year, the Finnish consul there (N.B. not the Russian authorities) said that she wasn't invited - because she wasn't a poet. She's "only" published three novels and no poetry. Then the Finnish Foreign Minister, Alexander Stubb, who has been in the news a lot regarding OSCE observers in South Ossetia, said that she was welcome, after all. The Russians themselves have kept tactfully quiet. And now her passport, with visa, has got lost in the post. Looks like dirty tricks.

Here's a couple more photos. I do appreciate that Greek columns are not the most original adornment of buildings, but these 19th century Germans appeared to have a penchant for them. One German architect was so barmy he copied Balmoral Castle in Scotland and built a replica on the shores of Lake Peipsi / Peipus in eastern Estonia (not visited by Oksanen).

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228456275.jpeg

Above: Riisipere Manor ["eravaldus" means: private property].

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228456423.jpeg

Above: The entrance hall at Suur-Lahtru Manor.

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228457729.jpeg

Above: Holdre Manor.

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/iso_webkuva/1135228457107.jpeg

This last, redbrick one, Sangaste, is in good shape. The Finnish caption says that this is because it was used a Pioneer summer camp location during Soviet times. The Pioneers were the Communist equivalent of the Scouts and Guides. The Communists had no originality. They nicked the manor houses from the German nobility, and nicked the Scout idea, complete with neckerchiefs, from British imperialist Lord Baden-Powell.

I, of course, have nicked these photos from Helsingin Sanomat.

[Lola]

I thought you might like to know that Purge, the English translation of Sofi Oksanen's novel Puhdistus, which is scheduled for release in April, is available for pre-order from many online booksellers. Sofi will be touring the United States as part of the PEN New Voices series. The book is officially unavailable in Great Britain, but Amazon UK seems to have it available for pre-order. More information is available at Grove/Atlantic: Grove/Atlantic (http://www.groveatlantic.com/#page=isbn9780802170774-all)

[Eric]

That was good news, Lola. As Grove Atlantic appears to own the Scottish publishing house Canongate, I was wondering whether they have chosen to distribute this book in the UK. Anyway, the translator's task is now finished - let the reading commence.

Maybe this book can become one of those read here by people here, in the same way as Canongate has sent out seven free copies of the translation, from the Dutch, of a book by the Iranian emigr? author Kader Abdolah.

I'm afraid the Grove Atlantic link didn't work. I'm not sure what the problem is.

[Lola]

The Grove/Atlantic site seems to be down. I think the link is correct, and should work once they get the page back up.

[Stewart]

As Grove Atlantic appears to own the Scottish publishing house Canongate.
Nope. Two separate companies. (Although Canongate US is an imprint of Grove/Atlantic.) Not Canongate UK.

[Eric]

Is the name "Canongate" a mere coincidence, then, or are there financial or business links? Because if Grove/Atlantic and [the Scottish] Canongate are linked, it seems odd that the Oksanen book is appearing in the USA but not in the UK, which happens to speak the same language.

When I translated things for Harvill, then part of Random House [which is part of Bertelsmann], my translations were also issued in the USA, Australia, etc., as far as I know.

[hdw]

As well as handling (and selling!) translation rights for many of our authors and having many great publishing partnerships all around the world, Canongate has particularly important relationships with two fellow independents ? Text Publishing in Melbourne and Grove/Atlantic in New York.

Text is part-owned by Canongate but is very much an Australian company, publishing a wide array of writers including many that we also publish here in Britain (Barack Obama, Louise Welsh, Steven Hall, Niccolo Ammaniti, James Meek, Kate Grenville, Scarlett Thomas, Ismail Kadare, Helen Garner, Neil Strauss, MJ Hyland, Yann Martel, Michel Faber and the whole of the Myths series) and others that we wish we did (including Tim Flannery, JM Coetzee, Lloyd Jones, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Lionel Shriver and Murray Bail). Founded in 1994 by Michael Heyward who remains its widely admired publisher and managing director, Text has emerged over the last decade as the most exciting new list on the Australian publishing scene.

Grove/Atlantic celebrated its fiftieth birthday recently and is the fusion of Grove Press (Barney Rosset's maverick independent list, founded in 1951 and responsible for publishing the likes of Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Henry Miller and Harold Pinter) and the Atlantic Monthly Press (another great independent with a long and influential history). The two lists were brought together in 1991 by Morgan Entrekin who continues to run the company with enormous skill and passion, publishing the likes of Kiran Desai, Charles Frazier, Francisco Goldman, Kenzaburo Oe, Tom Stoppard, Anne Enright, Donna Leon, PJ O'Rourke, Kathy Acker, Richard Flanagan and Mark Bowden. In 2004 Canongate entered into a joint venture in America with Grove/Atlantic and as a result we publish a number of our most important writers on both sides of the Atlantic as well as in Australia too.

Harry, from the Meet at the Gate website.

[Lola]

Purge is scheduled to be published by Atlantic UK in July 2010. They don't yet have any information posted about the publication, but here is there web address.

Atlantic Books: Home (http://www.atlantic-books.co.uk/)

[Stewart]

The Literary Saloon (http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/200912c.htm#ps1) points us to this article (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Sofi+Oksanen+named+Person+of+the+Year+in+Estonia/1135251574010) in Helsingin Sanomat about Sofi Oksanen being named 'Person Of The Year' by Estonian newspaper, Postimees.

[Eric]

I'm glad for Sofi Oksanen that she has attained the title of "Person of the Year", not least because of the subject-matter of her most visible book, which English-speaking readers can now read thanks to Lola.

Apart from her literary and theatrical achievements, Oksanen has managed to draw the Finns' attention to the plight of the Baltics during half a century of occupation. (To be clear, "occupation" means when another, more powerful, country takes yours over and forces all manner of things onto your subjugated country like government, a new farming system, closed borders, and the threat of being sent to Siberia.) Owing to finlandisation, i.e. the Finns' self-censorship and an unwillingness to upset Russia, the enormity of the Russian invasion of the Baltic countries was always brushed aside in Finland. Most Finns were glad that the Russians only took Southern Karelia and a bit off the top of the country, but didn't occupy the whole of Finland after WWII. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fared far worse.

But things have changed now that the Baltic countries have been independent again for twenty years (which is the only length of time they got last time, during the 1920s and 1930s). Now, at last, the whole period of Soviet history is being examined anew in Finland. A few eccentric Communist loyalists, such as Johan B?ckman, keep on trying to undermine Oksanen and her firm stance in favour of Estonia - and the truth. But when B?ckman was revealed to have published his anti-Estonian book with a publisher who was ex-KGB, that piece of character assassination backfired. Though I'm sure that B?ckman is cooking up something new.

I have read that some of the Estonian reviews of "Puhdistus" / "Puhastus" / "Purge" have been rather critical. It cannot be denied that some of the subject matter treated by Oksanen has indeed been written about in Estonia itself, by Estonian poets and novelists such as Jaan Kross, Ene Mihkelson, Mats Traat, Viivi Luik, and others. But these authors, even Kross, have not quite received the international visibility and acclaim that they should have. So, now that a Finn has written a book about the role of women in society during the Soviet occupation, this is an important step towards internationalising the visibility of Estonia's troubled past, which will also by analogy help Latvia and Lithuania into the international limelight. Oksanen's novel has a political as well as cultural-historical dimension, something I hope American readers with grasp.

[Eric]

Stewart referred us to a recent article in the international edition of the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat. A quote from that article:



Today - Friday, the Estonian cultural journal Sirp has finally published a review on Oksanen?s novel. It is surprisingly critical.


Source: Helsingin Sanomat - International Edition - Culture (http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Sofi+Oksanen+named+Person+of+the+Year+in+Estonia/1135251574010)

I too found this article, written by the editor-in-chief of the Estonian cultural weekly newspaper Sirp, Kaarel Tarand, surprisingly critical. Maybe one reason is that the literary editor of that same weekly, Sirp, happens to be the Estonian translator of Oksanen's Finnish novel. Maybe Tarand did not want to be too positive and show favouritism towards the translator, Jan Kaus, i.e. to a fellow editor at the very same publication, Sirp.

Otherwise, I found Kaarel Tarand's article rather unfocussed, and was not a little surprised to read the following (my translation):


Those foreigners in the field of culture that take an interest in Estonia can, broadly speaking, be divided into two groups. Some are oddballs / weirdos ("veidrikud") in their own countries who take an interest in peripheral subjects, and do this for no personal gain. On the other hand there are those who can be taken seriously, and are people with respectable status in their own societies, who, over time, become knowledgeable in Estonian affairs. People such as Edward Lucas of The Economist, and the Danske Bank analysist Lars Christensen.
One type of person that Tarand totally fails to mention is the accomplished and professional literary and academic translators, from a dozen or two countries, who have helped raise the profile of Estonia abroad. Unless he is counting us literary translators among the weirdos, that is...

I hope that Kaarel Tarand, the son of an ex-prime-minister of Estonia and himself the head of a culturally influential weekly, will in future make a more nuanced assessment of the contributions of literary translators to the image of Estonia abroad. I hope that the term "weirdo" was not attached to us literary translators. Nor should Oksanen's contribution to putting Estonia on the map be pooh-poohed, as when Tarand says:


"Purge" is most certainly the literary event of the year in Estonia, but by no means necessarily in the category of belles lettres.
Is Tarand implying that Oksanen is a bit of a journo who has got out of her depth, I wonder?

It pays to be able to read a national language. You can then find out what people are saying for local consumption only. People who write for online publications only have themselves to blame if they get "found out" by translators.

[Eric]

I read that the Estonian translation of the Oksanen book has sold 16,982 copies. Not bad for a country where around one million people have Estonian as their mother-tongue.

The Dutch translation of "Purge" has also just appeared and is in the bookshops.

Has Lola Rogers' translation into English been reviewed in the British press, I wonder? Hope so.

[hdw]

"I've learned that while many people don't mind as long as you stick to writing books and winning prizes ... as soon as you say something like this, the reaction is "Get back to Russia, you Estonian whore," says Oksanen, who grew up in Jyv?skyl? with a father who is Finnish and a mother who is Estonian.

Small countries tend to be very twitchy and over-sensitive about how they are seen and portrayed by outsiders. I'm reminded of the situation here in Scotland where our parochial media love to publicise the gushing praise of appreciative tourists, but when any criticism of the country is offered by outsiders, they hit the roof and treat it as a major scandal, with angry comments from politicians and tourist chiefs.

Harry

[Bjorn]

I got a review copy of Purge the other day. It's near the top of my pile, will post my thoughts when I've read it.

[Eric]

I went to my local, suburban, bookshop yesterday and the woman informed me, without prompting, that they in that shop had sold 6 copies of the Oksanen book in Dutch translation. As the main bookshop in the city I live in had it prominently displayed with a recommendation by one of the staff, they may have sold more. This could mean by extrapolation that it sells respectable numbers in Dutch.

*

The Finns have a love-hate relationship with the Estonians. Some very dumb neo-Communist Finns tried to undermine the Oksanen book, which does not put Soviet life in the Baltic republics in a particularly positive light.

But Oksanen, who is also an actress and schminks herself up as a Goth for book-signings, knows how to attract an audience.

However, what complicates matters for Oksanen is that her mother is Estonian. The Finns don't mind listening occasionally to Estonians saying what it was like in neighbouring Estonia, but they feel that anyone from their midst, especially a half-breed, who starts going on about Estonia is a kind of traitor to Finland. Not least because this could imply that Finland treated Estonia badly in certain respects during the Cold war to appease Russia.

All countries that have been occupied or have lost territory tend to be touchy, for the simple reason that they know what it feels like to be ruled over by foreigners. Up to 1917, Finland was in the same boat as Estonia - part of the Russian Empire. But the Finns were lucky. They got their independence for more than a mere 20 years. Nevertheless, Finland suffered a devastating internal division between the Reds (Communists and fellow-travellers) and Whites (the middle and upper classes) that has never fully healed since various atrocities were commited by both sides during the Finnish struggle for independence around 1917.

And some Estonians, from a nation that occasionally suffers from envy, pooh-pooh Oksanen's book, saying that everything she writes has been said before by Estonians. Maybe, but perhaps you need a Finnish Goth rather than an Estonian writer to get the Finns interested (remember Lordi at the Eurovision Song Contest?).

If small countries are touchy, both Finland and the Baltic countries have good reason to be so. While Harry knows much more than I do about Scottish parallels.

*

I'm reading a fascinating book just now about the Stalinist wing of the Communist youth movement in Finland in the 1970s. In those days, even these manipulated young people were very noble. But the KGB knew how to twist their minds. Nowadays, anyone left in Finland praising Communism is regarded as a basket case.

[Eric]

Just read today in the press that Oksanen will be getting a medal from the President of Estonia for her books which, of course, discuss the fate of that country. Good on old Ilves!

[Eva]

This award is very well deserved. "Purge" is a remarkable novel.

[Eric]

For those of you that can read Swedish, here is a review from 10th February of the Swedish translation of "Purge" / "Puhdistus" / "Puhastus" / "Zuivering" / "Utrensning":

Med skammen fastetsad i kroppen - Kultur - UNT.SE (http://www2.unt.se/pages/1,1826,MC=5-AV_ID=1012076,00.html?from=puff)

Any of you seen any more ones in English?

[Lola]

Reviews are starting to trickle in for the American edition of Sofi Oksanen's Purge. Both Kirkus and Library Journal have reviewed the novel. Kirkus calls the book a

wonderfully subtle thriller... With a tone somewhere between Ian McEwan’s Atonement and the best of the current crop of European crime novelists, this bitter gem promises great things from the talented Oksansen.

The whole review is available to subscribers at Kirkus Reviews online (http://www.kirkusreviews.com/kirkusreviews/search/search_results_taxo.jsp?startDate=11/17/2009&endDate=02/15/2010&cf=&ct=&cu=&rpp=10&sb=REFERENCE_DATE&so=DESC&ti=2&tp=vnuTaxoPool&numRet=200&src=&showAbs=true&srchMeta=true&shwTotal=true&metaSrchNum=250&numMeta=20&pi=&pubList=Kirkus%20Reviews&kw=oksanen&au=&mt=&mv=&esindct=false)

Library Journal says Purge is a

...riveting tale of two women struggling to survive in Soviet-occupied Estonia... Oksanen... keeps us turning pages to reach the dramatic conclusion. Verdict Highly recommended for fans of classic Russian writers like Tolstoy and Pasternak, as well as those who enjoy a contemporary tale of lust and betrayal.

Library Journal hasn't yet posted their review online, but it's available from the Seattle Public Library online catalogue.

Cheers!
Lola

[Eric]

As Lola says, it's a trickle, but let's hope it gradually turns into a flood of reviews of European literature in English translation.

The only thing that worries me is that because Scandinavian crime novels are now in vogue, every book coming from the North has to be dealt with as a crime novel, however many other dimensions it happens to have alongside death and crime.

[Lola]

Here is a tentative schedule for the Pen World Voices U.S tour, featuring Sofi Oksanen and other authors:

Wednesday, April 21 --PEN WORLD VOICES event with Berkeley Arts & Lectures co-sponsored by The Believer. Former San Francisco Book Editor and Publisher of McSweeney Oscar Villalon will moderate: Other authors participating: Tommy Wieringa JOE SPEEDBOAT and Christos Tsiolkas SLAP

Friday, April 23---PEN WORLD VOICES event in Seattle hosted by Elliot Bay Book Company and the Seattle Public Library. Sherman Alexie to moderate the event. Other authors participating: Tommy Wieringa JOE SPEEDBOAT and Christos Tsiolkas SLAP

Sunday, April 25--PEN WORLD VOICES event in Buffalo hosted by Talking Leaves Bookstore and the University of Buffalo. Other authors Tommy Wieringa and possibly Martin Solares

Tuesday, April 27-- PEN WORLD VOICES event in Pittsburgh with Christos Tsiolkas

Wednesday, April 28-- travel to NYC for PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL

[Lola]

Here is a tentative schedule for the Pen World Voices tour of the United States, featuring Sofi Oksanen and other authors:

Wednesday, April 21 --PEN WORLD VOICES event with Berkeley Arts & Lectures co-sponsored by The Believer. Former San Francisco Book Editor and Publisher of McSweeney Oscar Villalon will moderate: Other authors participating: Tommy Wieringa JOE SPEEDBOAT and Christos Tsiolkas SLAP

Friday, April 23---PEN WORLD VOICE event in Seattle hosted by Elliot Bay Book Company and the Seattle Public Library. Sherman Alexie to moderate the event. Other authors participating: Tommy Wieringa JOE SPEEDBOAT and Christos Tsiolkas SLAP

Sunday, April 25--PEN WORLD VOICES event in Buffalo hosted by Talking Leaves Bookstore and the University of Buffalo. Other authors Tommy Wieringa and possibly Martin Solares

Tuesday, April 27-- PEN WORLD VOICES event in Pittsburgh with Christos Tsiolkas

Wednesday, April 28-- travel to NYC for PEN WORLD VOICES FESTIVAL

More information at the festival web page:

PEN American Center - PEN World Voices (http://www.pen.org/page.php/prmID/1096)

[Eric]

Sofi Oksanen seems to be going from strength to strength. What will certainly boost Lola's translation, and indeed those into several other languages, is the fact that Oksanen has now won the Nordic Council Literature Prize for 2010 with that same novel we have been discussing in a couple of threads, variously called Puhdistus, Puhastus, Purge, Zuivering, Utrensning, etc., in the various translations. Soon, she'll be more famous that Larsson & Mankell...

I hope Lola's translation will soon become available in the UK as well. Britain and the USA could also learn a thing or two about Estonia, the Soviet occupation, people-trafficking, prostitution, and so on in the context of that novel and in the context of the Soviet occupation of several countries from the Second World War to 1991, and what this did to public morality in the occupied territories.

There are now three of her novels available in Swedish translation. I've just bought the one called "Stalin's Cows" or, in Swedish "Stalins kossor". This also has an Estonian theme, which is not surprising, given the fact that Oksanen's mother is Estonian. And it starts with a nice bout of puking. But it's not all slapstick and bulimia. Oksanen is also very aware of the mutual social and political misunderstandings between the Finns, who stayed in the West after the Second World War despite some manoeuvring and compromise to keep the Russians next door happy, and the Estonians who were saddled with a military occupation for about half a century.

The Swedes and Finns have virtually ignored these unpleasant facts (barring the bulimia) for decades. And now a Finnish woman, who dresses like a Goth, is shaming all the shirt-and-tie politicians who have thought that silence is the best policy.

[Eric]

I was wondering whether Canongate, which has some dealings with Grove in the States as I believe, is going to publish or distribute the Sofi Oksanen novel "Purge" in Lola Rogers' translation in the United Kingdom.

This book is now available up to now in Spanish, Dutch, Estonian (where another Oksanen novel, "Stalin's Cows" in English, is stupidly listed as "Russian" on the Amazon website, in true arse-elbow fashion), Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and, of course, English in the States. Maybe the Brits also want to read an award-winning novel about Soviet violence from another source than the usual Russian one...

[Eric]

Sofi Oksanen has won the Nordic Council Prize this year, has been translated into Spanish, Estonian, Dutch, English, Swedish, and no doubt half a dozen other languages. She has a column in a leading daily, and so on.

What reward have her publishers given her for hitting the bestseller lists in various parts of the world? They have kicked her off their novels list. They won't be publishing any more of her books.

Is this a return to that old Finnish attitude of Finlandisation, because Oksanen reveals what a "paradise" the Soviet Union was? Surely not! But what lies behind shooting themselves in the foot and shedding a bestselling author?

Answers on a postcard, please.

[Ziggurat]

Apparently Oksanen is accusing WSOY of breach of contract. She says it "about a small but very concrete matter"

Sofi Oksanen potkuistaan: Syyt ep?kirjalliset | Viihde | Iltalehti.fi (http://www.iltalehti.fi/viihde/2010061511869262_vi.shtml)

(in Finnish)

[Eric]

I read the Iltalehti article carefully, and with a dictionary, to avoid missing any nuance. I'm as curious as anyone else to find out what this small detail is, but I'm sure that such a large and prestigious publishing house as WSOY has signed, and will always sign, the most watertight and transparent contracts with important authors, so that there are never any ambiguities or fuzzy patches in such documents.

I don't suppose this will affect Sofi Oksanen's success much, but I'm sure it will leave a Gothic taste in her mouth. Anyway, maybe she won't be dealing with so many of Stalin's cows in future and will purge herself of any Baby Jane complex she may have entertained. I imagine that Sofi Oksanen will be more circumspect and exacting next time she scribbles her signature at the foot of a document involving her income and prestige.

[e joseph]

Ordered the Englished Purge. Imma read it sometime.

[Johan]

I just finished Baby Jane, my first Oksanen. Well constructed, my only objection is the teenagerish use of song quotes. I can definitely relate to it, knowing and having known quite a lot of people like the main characters.

I did find it a little sad that the text on the back(blurb?) avoids mentioning that it's about a lesbian romance, despite that fact being central. What year is this, 1957?

[Eric]

I think it would be rather nice if homosexuality and bisexuality became boring.

I read an article in yesterday's Helsingin Sanomat (the main Finnish daily) by Sofi Oksanen. My Finnish doesn't stretch so far that I can understand all the nuances, but Oksanen is comparing the Helsinki Pride events with that of Vilnius Pride. And she also suggests that in the 1930s, Estonia was liberal regarding homosexuality, while there are influential people today in Estonia who are less tolerant.

As far as I know, Sofi Oksanen is bisexual. She has, again as far as I know, decided to live with a man. But she remains a fighter for balance. I don't therefore think that the lesbian romance needs accentuating. If, in my ideal world, such sexuality would become boring (i.e. not worth sensationalising), we could accept what is reality and move on to discussing other things. What does shock me is that not all the immigrant groups that enter the Nordic space accept homo- and bisexuality as boringly normal, and therefore undermine a rational discussion of such issues.

I only have "Stalins kossor" and her famous book "Purge". I have not yet bought "Baby Jane" although it is in every railway book kiosk in Sweden. But someone who tackles such complex issues as homosexuality and Soviet imperialism in the same book is a very interesting author. Many Nordic readers had little idea, before Oksanen started becoming popular, what had been going on socially in the Baltic countries during the Russian occupation (1944-1991). Oksanen has, laudably, broken the taboo. So whether the blurb mentions lesbianism is a relatively minor issue. There are many people who break a lance for lesbianism, while the Baltic countries remain relatively unknown.

[Eric]

Let's talk more about Sofi Oksanen (which some of you weren't doing).

According to both Helsingin Sanomat and Hufvudstadsbladet, the Times has compared Sofi Oksanen with Stieg Larsson. I hope this isn't the kiss of death (as is calling her the literary Lady Gaga), because while Larsson was a turncoat communist who wallowed in capitalist money, Oksanen is highlighting the plight of women and of the tiny republic Estonia during the Soviet years. Yes, I am biased.

I've not actually found the URL for the Times article. So, good luck. Find it yourselves.

[Johan]

Well, it's certainly extremely flattering towards Mr. Larsson.

[Eric]

Flattering indeed. Judging by the press photos, Larsson had a bit of a cheeky chubby chipmunk face - but he wasn't as pretty as Sofi Oksanen. I wonder whether Stee-Egg ever used to put on Gothic make-up.

[Settembrini]

(as is calling her the literary Lady Gaga)

That's the best definition of this pale, straw woman alike girl that anyone could do nowadays.
I've read that boring story about the bullimian lesbo, her quisling mother and the poor "genocide" victim of her grandmother -"Las vacas de Stalin"- and I'm waiting for the french edition of "Purge".
I understand the Estonian critics: Oksanen is a Finn, not an Estonian, so she has no right to write about their national crisis with some authority. Her eye is a foreign one. She don't have a real look of the dimension of Estonian present (and so she don't have a real look of the value of Estonian history in Estonia, I mean she don't know nothing about Estonian politics). The only thing that she could do is to write those travel books, which are similar to those books that the British travellers wrote as a way of doing some espionage for the Crown.
It reminds me that scribe of Vargas Llosa when he wrote that lousy novel about a Dominican dictator. If you are a Peruvian, stay in Peru, and let the people from other countries to do their homeworks.
Anyway, the girl seems very much like a politically correct author, a Nobel candidate -but not that Nobels candidate as Soyinka, Walcott or Naipaul (the ethnic quota to wash up West guilts), nor Saramago or Coetzee (the Thomas Mann heirs) but as K?rtesz, Toni Morrison or Gao Xingjian (the "testimonial" writers)- so that's why she drew the attention of a bunch of veidrikuds (aka hipsters), who knows more about the history of forgotten little countries than what's happening in their own native lands.

[Eric]

Naphta, your raging wind-up is inaccurate on a number of points:

The Goth, bulimia, and bisexuality (N.B. not lesbianism) aspect does not take away the fact that she writes not from a solely Finnish, but from a half-Estonian point of view. She speaks Estonian, so will have heard the tales from older women in Estonia (i.e. relation).

Not all Estonians are envious of her success, although envy is one thing baked into the loaf of the Estonian character. The more sophisticated ones do actually recognise that while not wholly original, she did manage to do what no Estonian author did and that is put the way women were treated in the Soviet Union, especially in the occupied territories, on the map. She, because of being a Finn, has succeeded in becoming visible where the Estonians have somehow not managed to market their takes on similar things.

Oksanen is certainly not politically correct. Both the Finns and the Swedes have spent decades pretending that the Baltic countries did not exist in sovereign cultural and political terms. While we further West may have realised that the Soviet occupation of the Baltics was just that - an occupation carried out without the consent to the people living there - Sweden and Finland have tried not to upset Russia too much.

For a Finn specifically to upset the applecart and deliberately open old wounds is a good thing. This means that two countries (i.e. Sweden and Finland) that still anxiously keep secret to this day the names of the key collaborators with the KGB and Stasi will at least learn of how phoney all that 8th March stuff was when women were praised for the day, and in good old Tom Lehrer fashion were expected to work in the home and in the factory for the other 364 (bar holidays, when they still had to make the food).

Oksanen is concentrating of the experiences of women, but she does obviously also touch upon the general ills of the region during Soviet times.

One shouldn't overuse the term "veidrik" (eccentric) lest the term boomerang on the user. The only brave "veidrik" who has stood up to this heinous Gothic woman is the chubby Lenin lookalike Johan B?ckman, an eccentric latterday Communist who had his biased book about Estonia published by someone who used to work for the KGB. B?ckman has become a kind of anti-stalker, following his "loved one" around and trying to spoil her glory. If only his reactionary imperialist book would sell as well as her novels, he might stop having his anti-crush on her.

[Settembrini]

Naphta, your raging wind-up is inaccurate on a number of points:

The Goth, bulimia, and bisexuality (N.B. not lesbianism) aspect does not take away the fact that she writes not from a solely Finnish, but from a half-Estonian point of view. She speaks Estonian, so will have heard the tales from older women in Estonia (i.e. relation).

Oksanen is concentrating of the experiences of women, but she does obviously also touch upon the general ills of the region during Soviet times.


If you strip out the political background of her books, you will get a story which seems to be bootlegged from a Lifetime TV movie.
The lesbian/bisexual division is just for multiplicate the consumers categories, it doesn't exists in the reality (everybody knows lesbianism is a political affiliation and/or a way for not dying alone -as we can conclude from Dean Hamer investigations-, and so bisexualism is a manner of doing some kind of radical politics but without giving up to biological satisfaction, I mean is a very hypocrital way of showing that you are in the center of the political spectrum, despite the fact of you are using left-wing rhetorics).


Not all Estonians are envious of her success, although envy is one thing baked into the loaf of the Estonian character. The more sophisticated ones do actually recognise that while not wholly original, she did manage to do what no Estonian author did and that is put the way women were treated in the Soviet Union, especially in the occupied territories, on the map. She, because of being a Finn, has succeeded in becoming visible where the Estonians have somehow not managed to market their takes on similar things.

If you are a writer, then you would like to write your own autobiography. Isn't that true? But what about if someone -who perhaps is a better writer- came and tells the story of your life in a book which shows his signature? Wouldn't you be angry? Wouldn't that make you feel like a child or an illiterate?
If a foreign nation invade your country to raise the flags of "liberty" and "free market" would you be happy? Perhaps you would, but what if they took all the credit and then they don't want to leave your country and they do want to rule over the place where you live? You would be still happy?
That is how the Estonian intelligentsia feels about Oksanen (specially the intelligentsia with some dignity).


Oksanen is certainly not politically correct. Both the Finns and the Swedes have spent decades pretending that the Baltic countries did not exist in sovereign cultural and political terms. While we further West may have realised that the Soviet occupation of the Baltics was just that - an occupation carried out without the consent to the people living there - Sweden and Finland have tried not to upset Russia too much.

For a Finn specifically to upset the applecart and deliberately open old wounds is a good thing. This means that two countries (i.e. Sweden and Finland) that still anxiously keep secret to this day the names of the key collaborators with the KGB and Stasi will at least learn of how phoney all that 8th March stuff was when women were praised for the day, and in good old Tom Lehrer fashion were expected to work in the home and in the factory for the other 364 (bar holidays, when they still had to make the food).

I'm using the "politically correct" concept in the way it appears in the Western discourses: if you are a preacher for democracy, an anti-totalitarian advocate, a supporter of every spurious lobby which seems to be in favor of individual liberties then you are a politically correct person.


One shouldn't overuse the term "veidrik" (eccentric) lest the term boomerang on the user. The only brave "veidrik" who has stood up to this heinous Gothic woman is the chubby Lenin lookalike Johan B?ckman, an eccentric latterday Communist who had his biased book about Estonia published by someone who used to work for the KGB. B?ckman has become a kind of anti-stalker, following his "loved one" around and trying to spoil her glory. If only his reactionary imperialist book would sell as well as her novels, he might stop having his anti-crush on her.

This is a different discussion. B?ckman is a left-wing populist, who tries to move Finland out from the European Union towards an alliance with Russia and the BRIC group. From that point of view is very logical to see Estonia just like a kind of tax haven. That's why B?ckman see Estonia as a state which has to be absorbed by Finland or Russia. And that's why he tries to reject that vision of Soviet Russia as a brutal dictatorship.

[Eric]

Naphta, if you're so keen on protecting Estonia from veidrikuid and exploitative capitalists, you could always help the visibility of the decent parts of Estonia at a cultural level by translating some of their many readable books into some language that might be read by quite a lot of people.

The Estonians have a good and varied literature, but they seem a little sluggish when it comes to actually getting people to read it abroad. So Oksanen got in there first. Given all those children and grandchildren of exile Estonians sprinkled around English-speaking countries such as the USA, Canada, Australia, I always think it rather odd that only a handful have tried to promote their heritage by translation over the past half-century. Estonian painters and composers have done better, as you can look at a picture or listen to music without needing a translation, but it has taken a very long time for Estonian literature per se to come to the attention of the world.

I think that B?ckman is not capable, either single-handedly or with the help of ex-KGB publishers, of really moving Finland in any direction. He's like the charming souls that rant at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. Unless he becomes puppet prime-minister of the People's Republic of Finland, he will remain a figure of fun and a harmless weirdo. But as you will know, in the 1930s, no one in their right mind would have thought that a gyn?cologist who doubled up as a Modernist poet who also translated poetry from French, would become the puppet prime-minister of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic. But he did, with a little help from Zhdanov & Co. So if the Communists ever take over Finland, Johan B?ckman would be the perfect dark horse candidate for either prime-minister or president.

[Settembrini]

I think the translation is a reward for a book, but not a purpose in itself. I mean, if I were an author from Estonia I would write in my language for my people. If it gets one day translated, I would certainly feel glad about it, but if it not, I would continue writing for the people of Estonia, because Estonia needs a literature. So, what I'm saying is that Estonian culture is mainly an Estonian business, which the culture makers in Estonia knows how to do it -and how to profit from it.
If other countries want to know about Estonia, well, they would have to do their homework and translate. If they do not want to know about Estonia, who can blame them? The Western countries has their own histories and their own literatures, they don't need Estonia at all. Anyone could live without Estonia (except, of course, the Estonian people).
So I'm in the side of the Estonians against the invader Oksanen: why the lesbo-junkie doesn't stay in her own country? The fact that Finland lives in an strike of literary events (I mean they don't have histories about totalitarism and that shits which please the Nobel jury) isn't enough to bring up her Estonianiness just to give a nice background to her boring stories for soccer moms and Gilletted wrists girls.

[Bjorn]

the invader Oksanen: why the lesbo-junkie
Jesus fucking christ.

[Beth]

I'm waiting for the french edition of "Purge".


If you are able to read this, you might have something to add.

[Eric]

"Lesbo-junkie" does not necessarily need a hyphen. The term has a whiff of the excrescences of a homophobic reactionary even without such punctuatory additions. One will, of course, note that the bisexual author Thomas Mann (he fancied boys, or who was Tadzio and that dirty old man Gustav [von] Aschenbach?) made Settembrini a figure of liberalism, against the dark Luk?cian control-freakery of the odious Naphta. And he made the intellectual waffler Mijnheer Peeperkorn a figure of fun.

Estonians must be the first readership for Estonian literature - otherwise there would be no point in writing in that language. But as someone who myself voluntarily chose to translate the novel Vastutuulelaev by the accomplished Estonian author Jaan Kross, I do find your views a little on the extreme side. (I'm not sending you a free copy, you cheeky bugger.)

There is junk written in Estonia too, and some books are only really understood by Estonians. But a translator has to make a judicious decision as to which books could be read with pleasure and understanding by foreign readers.

Naphta seems to be suggesting that Estonians should hide their light under a bushel and keep all their books secret from the outside world. Like a coven of Freemasons. Well, hard luck, as I'm translating one book, the good or bad side of Estonian literature will be forever exposed to the gaze of prying outsiders, through that and several other novels and books of poetry.

The fact that the book I've nearly translated has already appeared in Finnish, French, and Swedish does suggest that it should not be kept an Estonian secret by an Estonian for Estonian eyes only.

You still haven't answered the question as to why no one from the generations of exile Estonians since 1944 has bothered to translate much of this super-exclusive, secret Estonian literature into foreign languages. All those flags waved in Toronto and elsewhere during the Cold War, yet few translators. There was, however, someone born in Sweden and brought up in America who translated some poetry from Estonian and has, of late, got a pretty good job, back in Estonia itself. You should go up to him one day and tell him his translation efforts were not needed. If you don't know who I'm talking about he was once a RFE journo in Germany, and does quite a lot of travel nowadays. He even popped over to Israel a couple of months ago.

I do think that Bj?rn's succinct, if somewhat unsubtle, comment rather echoes my gut reaction to Naphta's utterances, though I clothe my replies in a lot of pseudo-sophisticated words. For I'm a translator, and wield words every day.

As for Sofi Oksanen, scandalously enough for Naphta's thesis, she went and married a bloke, not a tribade.

[altai]

I really don't understand why is it that there are the whole 4 pages about Sofi Oksanen here. I mean, how many of you have even read "Purge", for example? And here in Finland she is all over the news for the good deal of the last year, and I really can't find anything outstanding about her writings. Except that she somehow manages to get into one scandal after another and promotes herself 24/7. I wouldn't be surprised if next thing I see she is in the parliament...

[waxwing]

I read Purge a couple of months ago, and although it was a good, quick read set in a country I knew little about, which made it more interesting, I was surprised by how cliched it was in it's thriller and gothic elements. Especially the prostitute on the run from her cruel pimps; and the crazy guy hid away in the secret room. Even the old lady seemed unstable less from her suffering under totalitarian gangsters, than from her extreme jealousy of her older sister. It would be a great movie role for Meryl Streep though, she'd finally get the chance to display an Estonian accent.:)

.

[Liam]

Jesus fucking christ.
You kiss ladies with that mouth, Bjorn?

[Eric]

Altai, we at the Department for Ideological Truths would like to know where your angle on this book is coming from. It may be good or bad as literature, but we are adamant to find out where any criticism of this book is coming from so we can adopt counter-measures. As we at the Department have decided that this is a book that tells some home truths about the treatment of women in the Soviet Union, it would be nice if we are allowed to promote it without dissidence and carping.

By next week, we will make sure there are 8 pages about Sofistica Oksentaa, as she is the best author since the great neo-Communist writer Darren Dudin-Dymshits, Order of Lenin, who has translated the complete works of Oksentaa into Esperanto, but has recently denounced her as a filthy Finn at a recent meeting of the Society of Conformist Sycophants and Toadies. The Dymshits biography of Oksentaa will be filmed with Meryl Street starring as Oksentaa along with Andy Kaufman, who will be playing the non-ferrous Robot of ?skemen.

[Settembrini]

OK, so Sofi is not a Monique Wittig alike lesbian nor she do drugs either. She just dyes her hair, has tatoos on her skin, talks about the "mystic" side of motherhood-sisterhood-daughterhood, promotes her image of a power puff girl who loves hugging trees and watching japanase na?f cartoons, and tells everybody that she once ate some pussy, while she writes those stories which mix fairy tales, the typical Lifetime TV mother and daughter film and soviet totalitarian history. I don't know about you guys, but in my country girls like her are called "attention whores". That's why she is the Lady Gaga of the Scandinavian literature.

About the other thing, I think you are missing my point Eric. I'm not saying Estonian literature must be a narrative just for the initiated; waht I'm saying is that "if your paint your village, then you will became universal". Oksanen is not painting her village, she is painting someone else village. And the worst thing is that around the world -thanks to the book industry whims and impostures- she is being read and translated. I mean she is nowadays taken someone else place.
When you write a book usually you don't start the task thinking that some dutch fellow will translate it to another language. You start the task thinking about your own context, the literary field which the work is going to be inserted. You begin a (confessed or unconfessed) dialogue with your closest coleagues and with the galaxy of influences you have. And you do that to mark a point about something, to raise your voice so everybody could listen what you think about the theme you are writing.
Well, I think this girl Sofi Oksanen is not writing for the Finnish nor the Estonian in particular, but for the markets. So that's why she spices her stories with the denounces of totalitarism, to cover up the fact she writes mainly for a female audience and to give her literature a seriousness background.
She is some kind of marketing construction, who produces pretranslated literature to fill the hipsters necessity of some cultural references about Estonia and soviet violence. The hipsters are, of course, the fraction of the consumers market who buys several books each year just for the pleasure of the reading (aka buys fiction).
I'm wating for "Purge" just to prove my hypotheses.

[altai]

Eric, that's exactly the problem. I've noticed you vocally protested in the thread about "Siberian education" against the kind of literature that cashes on the gore sides of the Soviet life, but it seems here the ideological bureau officially condones the practice. Now that would be an obvious grotesque exaggeration, but, for me, the 'Purge' tells as much 'truth' about the treatment of women in Estonia or Russia, or about the history of Estonia, as Tarantino's 'Inglorious basterds' shed light on the history of Nazism.

[Eric]

We have a saying in English: "Two wrongs don't make a right".

There is no reason whatsoever for people to have to choose between the atrocities perpetrated on behalf of an Austrian immigrant and those on behalf of of a Georgian one. It is a false choice by the logic of genocide. Both men were pathological monsters and emotional cripples, and the two countries I am thinking about were stupid enough to import them. And both dictators used the cattle-truck method to move people to their new 'homes', whether these were ovens or barbed wire enclosures.

Even if every single Estonian had collaborated with the Nazis and / or the Communists, that would be only one million people. Some countries have had more people than that, just as police informers.

We Brits like to pat ourselves on the back that, after inventing the concentration camp, when some 25,000 Afrikaner women and children died of starvation during the Boer War, we have never used the tactic again, in peace or war. The Germans collected up and systematically murdered six million Jews, but realised by the time the BRD had been invented that this was rather a bad idea; those Germans unfortunate to live in the GDR had quite a different history. None of the things mentioned in this paragraph so far are "grotesque exaggerations". Because they are true. However, some countries become touchy and paranoid, should anyone even suggest that they have ever done anything wrong during the past thousand years or so. Every time they are attacked for genocide, inhuman behaviour, censorship, informing, a bad economy, control freakery, ecological mayhem, or similar things, there are loud protests, and the local agit-prop brigade of smooth talkers and disinformation experts springs into action. And I'm not talking about Estonia.

It's good fun being part of an ideological bureau staffed by self-righteous people, because our propagandists don't need to exaggerate anything. That saves a lot of work. Those who disagree with anything we say will, of course, be subjected to that very British habit of rounding people up in the middle of the night and shipping them off in trains and cattle trucks (the British are so good at order and discipline!) then to be sadistically worked to death in remote areas of the country. (There are plenty of remote valleys in Britain left over in our post-industrailist phase to build little barbed wire enclosures for unwholesome citizens.) We Brits like a bit of sadism. Good for the moral fibre! That is the way we have always treated dissidence, as Blair (Eric) suggested in his dated book, and it is not a grotesque exaggeration to tell such truths about Britain again and again. As I said above, we invented the concentration camp. It is a matter of minor interest that others copied us to improve the industrial capacity of their inefficient and corrupt nations. And I'm still not talking about Estonia. Because that is for Sofi Oksanen to talk about. I think that Sofi's a good lass, even though she used to puke up what she ate.

[altai]

Eric,
I got completely lost in your post about crimes of the totalitarian regimes.
The literature on the Soviet crimes has been existing for as long as the Soviet Union itself, and there has been so much written about nearly every aspect of it by so many writers, some good some bad.

And Sofi Oksanen might be a very good lass in all aspects (at least for some people), but, in my very personal opinion, she writes secondary kind of literature, the sudden success of which is mostly due to the aggressive marketing campaign and her fitting certain political trends in Finland and maybe in Europe at large. But this doesn't mean that Estonian history is not an interesting subject, on the contrary, I think, it is much more than a couple of cliche black and white characters set in the cliche environment.

[Bubba]

I'm with altai on this one, insofar as I'm at a complete loss as to what Eric's doing in his two most recent posts on this thread, unless maybe he is making somewhat obscure fun of himself (about Purge I must, for now, withhold judgment).

Much as altai has done, I would note that Eric is a frequent critic of what he sees, probably accurately, as young American Jewish authors' trying to cash in on the persecution and other sufferings endured by their fellow Jews during the Second World War. Is what Oksanen is doing all that much different?

All is forgiven, of course, even base motives, if she has actually managed to turn out a good book. And perhaps she has.

[learna]

I guessed that her book used some kind of cliche-propaganda to earn some money and now, Altai, you have confirmed my thoughts.


she writes secondary kind of literatureand if it is not interesting as a fiction...

[Bjorn]

I guessed that her book used some kind of cliche-propaganda to earn some money and now, Altai, you have confirmed my thoughts.
And I would say that's a very superficial reading of it, and it would be a pity if people took that one negative opinion over all others. But hey.

[Eric]

Yes, Altai, the post was meant to be confusing - as well as amusing. I've learnt a thing or two from Goebbels. He used to mix truths, half-truths, and downright lies in his propaganda speeches. So while it is perfectly true that Britain invented the concentration camp during the Boer War, all that stuff about concentration camps for British dissidents is rubbish. That is called black humour. Brits allow black humour without censorship or free trips to Siberia. That is why we Brits are shocked that other nations use such labour camp tactics to get rid of people they don't like.

My problem with Russia is simple. While the Germans have realised that their activities between 1933 and 1945 under their Austrian immigrant were crimes against humanity, Russia has never fully admitted that their Georgian immigrant killed as many people if not more, and that this too is a crime against humanity. How many ordinary Russians know the full story of what Stalin did for and to Russia? And believe it is not CIA propaganda?

The Bolsheviks under Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky were a bunch of bandits with a hunger for power. Yet the oblast around Saint Petersburg is still called the Leningrad oblast. There are still statues of Lenin in Russia (imagine a statue of Himmler or similar at the Beer Festival in Munich!!!). And there seem to be old people in Russia who still think that Uncle Joe, as we call him, actually saved Russia from the Nazis when in fact he had all the best Russian generals shot in the 1930s purges. Read, for instance, Rybakov. Russia was then forced to adopt the desperate tactic of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, to hold off the Germans for another year. And Stalin too was an anti-Semite who had several leading Yiddish writers shot in 1952.

When a few old Balts march in SS uniform, Russia is terribly shocked. Hitlerism revived! (Although Shimon Peres did come to Estonia a few years ago to open the new synagogue in Tallinn.) But when old comrades of the Red Army march, this is a heroic event. Double standards. Did not such Red Army men also round up the whole of the Estonian cabinet and Members of Parliament in 1940? The government of a sovereign country which they had just invaded. Most of these members of the Estonian bourgeoisie died of exhaustion and or were shot, by 1942, in Siberia. Russia did all this to "protect Estonia from the Nazis".

Now that Russia is beginning to realise that shooting 22,000 Poles at Katyń was also a crime, it is about time that Russia apologised, without loopholes and ambiguities, for the crimes committed in the Baltics by the Stalinist r?gime, including Zhdanov. We hear a lot about Balts collaborating with the Nazis. But for some reason Balts collaborating with the Russian invader is OK. Double standards.

What is the tune of the current Russian national anthem, by the way? What anthem used to be sung to the same tune?

*

Oksanen only touches upon many of these events. But the way women were treated in the Soviet Union, also in the occupied territories of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, is part and parcel of crimes committed by the Soviet Communist r?gime against innocent Soviet citizens.

Finland was taken from Sweden by Russia (one imperialist power taking over from another) in the early 18th century. So you can imagine that the Finns would have something against both Sweden and Russia. But Finland did not fight the Winter War against Sweden. Nor did Sweden take chunks of Finnish territory after WWII. Oksanen is a Finn. Oksanen knows the history of her own country, as well as that of Estonia. So beyond people-trafficking and prostitution, there are important national and international events that are alluded to in her books.

[altai]

Eric,
as much as I love talking about history, and especially Russian/Soviet/Finnish history, which I think I know the best,
this is not the right place, so
I'll answer to you in the off topic communism thread if you don't mind.

[TuleTaevasAppi]

Hello all, a person from Estonia here. Would like to add some spice to the discussion by quoting Jaan Kaplinski (Jaan Kaplinski - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaan_Kaplinski))



Oksanen's book falls into the same category as the Stalinist books of my childhood, only the heroes and anti-heroes have exchanged their role. It's a skillfully written horror story with many corpses. Let it be. My only, but very serious objection to the book is that it pretends to be a realistic story about life in Soviet Estonia in the second half of the XXth century, and seems to have been accepted as such by the public in Europe and America. S. O. who has no direct experience of the time and events she describes has taken parts of our life, sewing them together according to some age-old rules of ideological-mythological literature, and is now selling it in the West. She is selling something that pretends to be our life, but isn't.


The rest can be found here: Ummamuudu: Sofi Oksanen and the Stalin Award (http://jaankaplinski.blogspot.com/2010/08/sofi-oksanen-and-stalin-award.html)

In any case, I was born in 1992 - so the realities of Soviet Estonia are behind a kind of a "social event horizon" for me, but I tend to trust the opinion of Jaan Kaplinski about the matter. Secondly, I haven't read the book yet and I suspect I will not be able to judge how well it actually reflects life during Soviet time anyway...

[Eric]

Heaven help us, Kaplinski may even win the Nobel this time round, but I'm not entirely sure where he's going with his Oksanen comments. I heard a similar complaint only last week from someone here in Sweden, but I admire her for bringing up these issues because she is Finnish. The Finns and Swedes have turned a blind eye to a lot of the glaringly obvious things that were wrong with the Soviet Union for decades. And given a degree of eesti kadedus (Estonian envy) you can't deny that although the Estonians have not been part of the Soviet Union for twenty years (!), not one of the novels that any Estonian has written about Soviet abuses has become as visible internationally as those of Oksanen.

Let the Russian disinformation experts say what they like, but Oksanen is doing a good job in giving Finland, Sweden, and elsewhere a taste of what the Soviet Union was like, even though she focuses on women's issues and other things that she has only heard second-hand.

If you were indeed born in 1992, TuleTaevasAppi, you haven't experienced one minute of the Soviet Union personally either. And your information about that period will depend entirely on what you have heard from older Estonians. Kaplinski has written his own book which covers various issues, including his childhood, Polish-Jewish academic father, etc. This book is available in English. And he is a very good poet. But he's not as famous as Oksanen. Maybe the Estonians should be grateful that someone, somewhere, is trying to show what monstrous injustices were perpetrated in the occupied Baltic countries.

There are Estonian authors (e.g. Jaan Kross, Raimond Kaugver, Heino Kiik, Arvo Valton, Mati Unt, Ene Mihkelson, Enn N?u, Mats Traat) who have written lots about Soviet things in fictional form, as well as historians who wrote facts about deportations, occupation, murder, labour camps, informers, the KGB, the anti-Soviet guerrilla movement, etc. But they are not widely read in Western Europe and the USA, mostly because so little is translated. And the occupation of the Baltic countries by both Communist Russia and Nazi Germany, plus all the deporations and murders, is still ignored to a large extent in our part of the world.

Maybe the Estonians should do much more to promote the authors I've listed above, and their translation into big languages such as English, French, German and Spanish.

I think that Kaplinski's comment is rather surprising when he says:



The USSR after the death of Stalin was not a prison camp. It was a lousy country, but there were and there are many much more lousy countries in the world. One of my basic convictions is that there is no Devil (probably no God either, but here it's not important). Soviet Union was not a diabolical country. And the lives we lived in the second half of the XXth century in this country were not lived according to some diabolical rules and supervised by the Devil or his henchmen.

It wasn't a prison camp for some (Kaplinski himself was never sent to the GULag!), but some of those who later became Baltic authors like Arvo Valton, Heino Kiik, Knuts Skujenieks and especially Estonia's best known writer, Jaan Kross (8 years in a labour camp and internal exile!), and others who spent good years of their Baltic lives deported abroad to Russia, would perhaps not agree.

So TuleTaevasAppi, ask the children of deportees, not only of ex-members of the Estonian Communist Party, how their parents experienced Soviet life. Both the good and the bad things. Don't let 100 words by Kaplinski form your only picture of Soviet and Soviet Bloc life!

[altai]

I'm so glad you found an Estonian writer who basically summed up my opinion about Oksanen's book.

[Eric]

Jaan Kaplinski and several other older people clearly do not regard the Soviet Union as one huge prison camp, fine. But Kaplinski and TuleTaevasAppi (which means "hello folks" in Estonian), like you Altai, and indeed like me, have never had to live in barracks surrounded by barbed wire - or in a country where you couldn't really travel to the West at all - making the Soviet Union, in effect, like a prison.

Soviet citizens couldn't just leave the country when they felt like it, because of a strict passport and visa r?gime, and because the currency was so rigged that it was worthless abroad. You had to apply for a passport to travel abroad, and then hand it back to the authorities when you got home again. Ask you parents and grandparents, if you think I'm a Western propagandist telling lies about your country.

I'm sure, Altai, you could right now hop on the next plane to Berlin, Honolulu, Madrid, or New York if you want to (allowing for the price of the ticket!).

All through the Cold War, we in the West were able to travel to most countries, with a currency that did not evaporate when you took it abroad. We played the decadent rich types when visiting the Soviet Bloc, because we could buy far more for our money than Russians could. We stayed in expensive hotels drinking red champagne and eating three big meals a day - because the Soviet control freaks didn't want us mixing with the Soviet proletariat or staying in their homes to see how they really lived.

When Soviet citizens tried (if the KGB allowed them) to exchange their worthless roubles for real money they could go on a chaperoned trip abroad. Chaperoned, because every Russian tourist group that went abroad was monitored by a KGB informer who had to report back if anyone on the trip got too pro-Western. And all tourist trips around Soviet cities for Westerners had nice tourist guides who reported back to the KGB to make sure that decadent Westerners didn't speak too intimately with Soviet citizens and tell them how much better life was in the West.

All that makes me think of prisons...

I hope Russia is a free country now with democracy, full press freedom, no discrimination of any sort, and especially no irritating secret police informers snooping around every bloody foreigner that enters the country.

Talking of the KGB, you said you didn't belong to it, Altai. Ha, ha, ha! The KGB no longer exists. Except for in that paradise next door to you, Belarus.

So Oksanen is doing a service to sanity, by reminding Westerners of how rotten the Soviet Union actually was, although she has picked up most of her information from older people who actually experienced the luxury and pleasure of Soviet life for the proletarian masses.

[altai]

So what do you think, Eric, if you ask the Estonians who lived in the USSR, or Russians, or any other people, do you think the vast majority of those who grew up in this country would consider it evil, rotten prison, from where they are so so happy to get out, and do you think reading Oksanen they would see once again the painful truth about the traumatic experience they had in this abominable totalitarian state and feel the same indignation for the lives wasted away in this gigantic prison of people, encompassing almost the whole Eurasia and having friendly regimes all around the world? These people, the citizens-prisoners of this space from Berlin till Beijin, now having at last the long suffered for freedom to visit also Finland, France and even the USA (although due to the prudent politics of the most democratic free state in the world, champion of human rights around the globe, the beacon of hope for the desperate hungry masses in the twilight zone of the Red Plague, obtaining a visa to the aforementioned Land of Free is extremely difficult for the citizens of the RF) ), wouldn't they just use all means possible to emigrate to the Fortress of Europe?

[learna]

I remember once I decided on impulse to spend 10 days in one of Europenian countries. I went to a travel agency and a manager said that the embassy of that country asked to gather some papers. I could not help but smiled and said that if they thought that people would collect a suitcase of papers within a day to give them money thay were mistaken. In a couple of days I flew to another country :).

[Eric]

Altai, I'm not sure what contrast you are trying to make. Please rephrase your question. I can't quite see the point you are trying to make.

All I am saying is that the Soviet Union was a prison, because people could not travel freely abroad and Soviet money was virtually worthless outside the Socialist countries. I suppose nowadays you keep your passport at home, can travel without a visa to some countries, and Russian money is worth a lot more than the Soviet rouble, but I don't know. You do. Tell us, without cryptic hints and unnamed travel agencies and countries. Straightforward facts, please.

The problem with Fortress Europe is that everyone wants to live here. People are occasionally drowned in the Mediterranean Sea when they try to reach the paradise of the EU via Malta or Greece or wherever, sailing in dodgy boats from Libya. And, as far as I know, there are also people from Russia who would like to live in the EU and the USA. Are there still Russians who want to emigrate, or is everyone happy with Russia, anno 2010?

*

Anyway, Oksanen. There was a one-page review of the German translation of "Purge" ("Fegefeuer" in German) in Die Zeit this week. Anyway, the article says, among other things, that her book is appearing in 28 countries. In the Die Zeit article it says:


Estland ist ein Land in dem die Begehrlichkeiten ?ber die Jahrhunderte tiefe Narben hinterlassen haben. In 13. Jahrhundert unter d?nischen Herrschaft, bis zum 16. Jahrhundert vom Deutschritterorden einverleibt, dann in schwedischer, in russischer Hand, im Zweiten Weltkrieg von den Nazis besetzt, von den Russen zur?ckerobert, bis zur Unabh?ngigkeit am 20. August 1991 eine geknechtete russische Kolonie.

And so on. I think the German cultural journalist, Susanne Mayer, has got the message: Estonia's had a rough time over the past thousand years. I'm glad that this fact is being discussed in many countries. A lot of the discussion is due to the success of Oksanen's book.

[learna]

Eric, you can name any travel agency bacause they are only intermediaries and do what have to do.

As for a country, if a citizen of RF is going to visit a Schengen country he/she has to get a Schengen Visa and it takes - at least- some time.

[Eric]

Learna, can you, or cannot you, as a Russian citizen, travel abroad when you want, anno 2010? How long does such a visa take to get? Is there an agreement between the Russian Federation and certain countries of the EU for visa-free travel? (Travel worldwide is more restricted than it used to be because of the threat of terrorism.)

If I happened to have the money for the ticket, and I decided to travel to any country within the European Union and some others, I could go to the airport right now, buy a ticket, and get on a plane if there's a seat. Passport yes, visa no. Can a Russian do that to any other country? Do Russians now keep their passports at home or in their pockets or handbags, as most West European people do? Or do you still, as in Soviet times, have to collect it from an office and take it back afterwards?

If Sofi Oksanen wants to travel to Estonia, she can. Immediately. Half an hour on the hydrofoil to Tallinn from Helsinki. From 1944 to 1991 this was impossible. When Oksanen tried to travel to Saint Petersburg a couple of years ago, the Russian authorities made it difficult for her by denying her a visa to speak at a book festival. We don't do things like that in the West. We don't exclude normal authors, unless they have threatened to kill someone. Schengen means that within a certain group of EU countries, you won't be stopped at the border. This is unfortunately exploited by criminals. But the Schengen zone still exists.

Sofi Oksanen is not a criminal. She is merely writing, in fictional form, about crimes that were committed during Soviet times.

[altai]

where have you heard such things? I want the source of this information.

Russia has non-visa agreements with many states, most of the ex-Soviet states except Georgia and Baltic countries, with many Latin American states, with Turkey and some African states. With the EU there is a visa regime but it's very mild.

[Eric]

To tell you the truth, Altai, I don't know. But as soon as I find a source, I will show it you. Because there were two types of passports in Soviet times, one for identity, and one for travel abroad:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Soviet_Passport_Cover.jpg/150px-Soviet_Passport_Cover.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Passport_Cover.jpg)

It's the one in the picture I'm talking about, the one for foreign travel. See article:

Passport system in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport_system_in_the_Soviet_Union)

[Eric]

Altai, I think I got the information a bit garbled. Here is what I've found about Soviet passports. My feeling is that when you travelled abroad, you had to hand in your internal "propiska" passport to get you one for foreign travel. But I cannot find any information on this.

This is one article about the Soviet passport system:



The passport system in the Soviet Union underwent a number of transformations in the course of its history. In the late Soviet Union citizens of age sixteen or older had to have an internal passport. In addition, a passport for travel abroad, often confusingly translated as "foreign passport" was required for travel abroad. There were several types of abroad passport: an ordinary one, known simply as "USSR zagranpasport", a civil service passport, a diplomatic passport, and a sailor's passport.

Internal passports were serviced by "passport offices" of local offices of the MVDs of Soviet republics. Abroad passports were handled by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the corresponding Soviet republic.

Internal passports were used in the Soviet Union for identification of persons for various purposes. In particular, passports were used to control and monitor the place of residence by means of propiska. Officially, propiska was introduced for statistical reasons: since in the planned economy of the Soviet Union the distribution of goods and services was centralized, the overall distribution of population was to be monitored. For example, a valid propiska was necessary to receive higher education or medical treatment.
Source: Soviet passport : Who, What, Where, When (http://www.servinghistory.com/topics/Soviet_passport)

*

See also:

http://www.nelegal.net/articles/propiska.htm

[learna]

Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism exists and this is a problem of the whole world.

[altai]

The biggest reason why travel around the world, and especially entry into the US+EU is restricted more and more is fear of economic immigration. If in XVIIth XIXth centuries millions and millions of poor hungry Europeans could freely go look for better life in the New World, now in order even to get a tourist visa to the US, a Russian citizen, for example has to fill in an enormous questionnaire and 50% of all applications are rejected. They don't even need to motivate the rejection.

As for the Soviet passports, I don't think you could find the source, unless you go and write yourself an article in Wiki :)
Because such things never existed. There were and still are two passports, one for inside like ID, one for travelling abroad. A very similar system exists in the US as far as I know, when one uses his/her ID card inside the states and applies for the passport only to go abroad.

[Eric]

I hope that the Russian contributors here don't crow for too long about the fact that I made a minor mistake about their complex passport & currency system whose principal aim it was, during Soviet times, to make it as difficult as possible for Soviet citizens to travel abroad.

Nowadays, most economic migrants to Western Europe come from Africa and the rest of the developing countries. If people also travel in large numbers from Russia, maybe the Russian economy isn't so good just yet, is still developing as you could say.

The U.S. passport control and customs is no doubt rather draconian, even chaotic during the recession. But the buildings blown up in Moscow by Islamic terrorists were not of the iconic nature of the Twin Towers. So maybe the Yanks feel they have to be extra careful. Nor does the USA, surely, want too many Anna Chapmans wandering around the suburbs...

What would Sofi Oksanen say about our little debate here?

[learna]

I just returned from a trip from the U.S. that entailed entering and leaving Switzerland and the Czech Republic. As usual, the greatest inconvenience was returning to the U.S. through O'Hare International Airport. There were thousands of visitors and residents waiting in line to pass through immigration, and it took about half an hour. Then the luggage conveyors were overflowing, and luggage had to be placed on the floor to make space. This is never the case for me anywhere else. Perhaps it's due to the design of Terminal 5. Whatever the causes, the U.S. always seems like a third world country where one comes to expect long queues due to lack of funding, disorganization and indifference.

Twin Towers tragedy was an awful and shocking not just for the Americans and it is understandable that the world took measures to travel safer. But it is a pity if people have inconvenience anyway.

[learna]

It's fine for 34% of Americans to become obese, place a burden on the health care system, and die prematurely, but heaven forbid that .001% of them should die in terrorist attacks. It's really quite absurd if you think about it.It is understandable that some people respond to terrorism more than to problems which they are used to. Unaccustomed problem which takes their attention and understandable enemy.

[Eric]

Back to Oksanen. I read in the Estonian press just now that since 2008 Sofi Oksanen's income is ten times as much as it was. In 2008 she earnt 47,000 euros, in 2009, according to the Estonian daily Postimees she earnt 477,396 euros. Some improvement. I'm glad for her. She deserves it.

Never mind the fat Yanks, see what this thinnish Finn has achieved. She was already on the right road when she had bulimia: puke it up and it won't fatten you. But now she is presumably living a normal life - and still writing about abnormal ones.

[hdw]

Guess how big Oksanen is in Reykjavik? Well, they haven't had such a turn-out for an author since David Attenborough last year. Now that's big!

Here's the article from the online version of Forlagi?, followed by my translation -

Harry


Stappfullt ? Norr?na h?sinu Forlagi? ? vefverslun (http://www.forlagid.is/?p=572078)

Full to bursting in Nordic House.

Fewer people than wanted to were able to squeeze into the writers' evening in Nordic House last night, when the Finnish-Estonian writer Sofi Oksanen sat through a question and answer session. People were sitting against all the walls and they were saying that such a large crowd of people had not been seen in the building since David Attenborough filled it to bursting last year. There was a good reception for Oksanen when she began the evening's programme by reading from the original text of her book "Purge". After this, actors from the National Theatre acted out short extracts from the book.

Silja A?alsteinsd?ttir, the head of [the publishing firm] M?l og menning, then talked to the author and asked wide-ranging questions about the genesis of the story and the future plans of this interesting author. The programme then concluded with a reading from the book by its translator Sigur? Karlsson.

May we remind you that Sofi will be signing [copies of] her books and chatting to readers in Eymundsson's bookshop in Sk?lav?r?ust?g at 5 p.m. today.

[Eric]

As Iceland and Estonia both have tiny populations, there is a certain symbolic link between them. They are both countries that shrugged off colonial domination, though of a different order of severity. Iceland was in fact the first country in the world to recognise the independence of Estonia back in 1991, and the Estonians renamed the square in front of what became the Foreign Ministry Islandi väljak - Iceland Square - after dismantling the statue of Lenin there and replacing him with beds of roses. So as Oksanen tells tales of Estonia, she will have aroused the curiosity of the Icelanders.

It was surely David Attenborough who described all the guerrillas, informers, and wild bears in his famous 1956 book "Zoo Quest to Estonia". Or was that perhaps another country...

[Stiffelio]

Sofi Oksanen's Purge has been awarded the prestigious French literary Prix Fémina for a foreign book.

http://www.english.rfi.fr/culture/20101102-novel-about-love-triangle-wins-prix-femina-french-literary-prize

[Eric]

Yes, Stiffelio, I too noticed this in some online newspaper or other. She seems to be going from strength to strength. Her only problem will be to come up with something as interesting in future. In various ways, Estonia and women's issues have now been the topic of three of her novels.

But as I've said several times, it is most paradoxical and interesting that a Finn writing about life in Soviet Estonia has become a bit of a cult figure in a world where Scandinavia is regarded as little more than a quarry from which to dig up endless gory crime novels, written by Communists for the most, leaving the rest of literature untranslated into English.

I hope that Oksanen's success will draw people's attention to serious literature written in both Scandinavia and the Baltics. That of, for instance, Latvia is sorely neglected in the English-speaking world. Finland too, until the arrival of Oksanen had become a kind of Paasilinna factory, whence variations on the theme of socially inept loners with a tendency to drink and roaming the countryside, which had become a bit of a cliché.

[Daniel del Real]

By any chance do you know who has the rights for Purge in Spanish language? Haven't seen the novel published already but I guess it's a question of time.

[Stiffelio]

Most probably it will be Anagrama. Herralde has always been a smart scout for foreign talent. I hope it's not thieves like Acantilado or Siruela!

[Stiffelio]

You are right about the difficulties these 'non-mainstream' countries have to go through to get their literature known (and arts in general, although it's been easier with cinema thanks to geniuses like Dreyer and Bergman). Then there's the pigeonholing and clicheing of whatever does get published in the 'anglo-saxon-gallic west'. But the problem is not restricted to just Scandinavia and the Baltic countries. The whole of Eastern Europe is virtually unexplored territory in terms of literature. How many Czech authors do we know other than Kundera, or Hungarians other than Marai or Kertesz?

[hdw]

How many Czech authors do we know other than Kundera, or Hungarians other than Marai or Kertesz?

Well, "we" on this forum know a few Czech authors apart from Kundera - you'll find posts here on Kafka and Hrabal and, I think, Josef Škvoreck´y, and all three are pretty well known to the literate reading public out there too. I have posted here in the past about Jan Neruda, but he is perhaps too quintessentially Mala Strana to have an impact beyond Prague.

Harry

[Eric]

Whether you know the names of East & Central European authors depends where you're coming from. I, with my focus on Estonia (translated a thousand words from a postmodernist novel today) am obviously curious about all the other big and little countries in that whole area, much of which was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well as that of Russian colonial domination (aka the Soviet Union and the satellites).

So with regard to Czechoslovakia as it once was, I had also heard of Škvorecký, plus Capek (can't do háceks on "c" with my keyboard) and Hašek and Hrabal and Seifert, not forgetting Václav Havel who was an avant garde playwright about 30 years ago. I don't think, however, I know the name, off the top of my head, of any Slovak author.

But where there's a will, there's a way. The West was always - and quite rightly - trying to save the Soviet Bloc from the Commies. But now they've escaped and are living a life of their own, not as Russian colonies, we in the English-speaking countries don't seem to be much more interested in their works of belles lettres than when we used to publish horror stories from the GULag and the other miseries of the former Soviet Bloc. It is now that East & Central Europe can open its mouth. And we still ignore them, or come up with a few names.

Poland is a bit known. But the literatures of Romania, Bulgaria, the Balkan fragments when Yugoslavia split up, Belarus, still a dictatorship, the Baltics, Hungary, the doubly traumatised GDR (Nazis, Commies), the Caucasus (bits borrowed back by Russia) and so on are just one big blank in the minds of many English-speakers. Even Finland, which fought its way out of Russia at the end of the Russian Revolution and could have ended up in Russia's grip again in 1945, is typecast, so we know Paasilinna, Södergran, and now Oksanen. Don't Anglo-speakers ever get curious about the other few scores of authors from Finland, writing in one of two languages? No, they don't. Hungary has had a little interest paid because of Kertész and Márai, maybe Nádas. But as the language is so difficult, and so little is translated into English, you draw a blank there too.

As long as East & Central Europe is used as a source of literature about the Holocaust (terrible business chaps, but we still hate Israel) and anti-Communist shockers (terrible business chaps, but we still love Russia), people are willing to listen. But East & Central European literature is worth more than just being used by the sensationalist money-makers and politicians. Each country has a core of serious authors, even ones that don't always write about murdering Jews and Communist atrocities.

It's about time that these countries were read for their literature, not only for their suffering.

[Lola]

The Spanish publisher of Puhdistus (Purge) is Salamandra. There's a list of all the foreign rights owners on the Salomonssom Agency web site (http://www.salomonssonagency.se/php/book.php?lang=en&bookid=130).

[Daniel del Real]

Thanks Lola.
Well, not those thieves of Siruela or Acantilado, but the thieves from Salamandra, damn it! Don't like those publishers at all. You can't trust to have a completely serious edition with the publishing group that brings Harry Potter to the Spanish market.

However I'm happy the Mexican edition is with Almadía. This is a quite recent publishing group, right now celebrating his 5th anniversary with success. Despite it's very hard to compete against the huge monsters of Spanish groups, they have managed to bring excellent writers such as Goncalo Tavares, Sergio Pitol, Rodrigo Rey Rosa and J.M.G Le Clezio with affordable prices. Sure will get my copy whenever this book comes out

[Eric]

Copied from the periodical "Books From Finland" that promotes the literature of Finland abroad:


On stage in New York

28 May 2010 | In the news
http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/oksanen_sofi_uusi.jpg (http://www.booksfromfinland.fi/2010/05/on-stage-in-new-york/oksanen_sofi_uusi/) Sofi Oksanen. Photo:


Puhdistus (2007), a play by Sofi Oksanen that also became a award-winning novel (2008), will be produced at the prestigious La MaMa theatre in New York in February 2011 under the title Purge. The director is Zishan Ugurlu, La MaMa’s Artistic Director.

*

So we can be expecting the staged version next year. I saw a reminder of this fact in the Finnish tabloid "Ilta-Sanomat" the other day. One of the roles will be played by the Finnish-American actor Peter Franzén (related to Johathan?).

[Eric]

A question for Lola: is either "Baby Jane" or "Stalinin lehmät" likely to appear in English within the next few years?

[Eric]

As there are things that both DWM and myself want to say about Sofi Oksanen beyond her novel "Purge", I thought we could shift the discussion to this thread, which is about her in general.

Annoyingly, my computer is so old that I can't yet access her Danish interview, which I would much like to. I'll have to wait till I go round to see a friend. But there are one or two things that she has said that she has said elsewhere are worth discussing:

- Any visitor to Finland will soon see that Finnish men are often far less able and willing to communicate in what could be termed an average European-style conversation than Finnish women.

- Estonians don't tend to talk about feminism in the same terms as Western women, because the older generation of women are still are still damaged by the hypocritical Soviet brand of feminism where women did much of the work and were treated condescendingly to one day a year, 8th March, when men had to be nice to them. Then everything was back to normal. Feminism in the West has often been a kind of luxury ritual, perpetrated by well-off middle-class women. (As with that loony Gudrun Schyman here in Sweden, who burnt 10,000 euros' worth of paper money publicly in order to make her point about women's hostels and harassment.) It is a shame that the brand "feminism" has been so damaged in the ex-Soviet countries in all its forms, because it would be a healthy discussion in those countries. Elo Viiding's story (which I translated) shows very clearly the understanding gap between Western feminists and ex-Soviet ones. It would be very healthy if feminism in Western Europe were discussed vis-à-vis Muslim women as it is among indigenous ones.

- It would be interesting to know the different attitudes to weapons,their use and possession, between Sweden and Finland.

- I cannot see that there is anything controversial about saying that Finland has kowtowed to the Russians for decades. The fact that the Tiitinen List has not been made public speaks volumes. That was about spies working for the GDR, but the GDR was really the extended arm of Russian communism and the KGB. The Finnish press adopted a policy of self-censorhip for decades. Oksanen has broken one taboo by openly suggesting that the Baltics were occupied and that there was crime and prostitution in the Soviet Union. Privately, everyone in Finland, left or right, knew already how things stood, but there was never any public debate about such things.

- Why should Sofi Oksanen be an "ambassador to her country"? That is perhaps a British Council way of thinking, where all those writers invited to speak to foreigners in their various countries are meant to promote Britain in some way. Why shouldn't a writer slag off certain aspects of their Fatherland?

I do get the impression that journalists sometimes ask Oksanen rather dumb questions that lead nowhere. Obviously, with her Goth garb she tries to provoke and draw attention to herself, but that isn't the whole story regarding her writings.

I think that Oksanen has got the balance right between theatre and life. It isn't a recipe for everyone, and I hope that Martin Amis, Björn Ranelid, A.S. Byatt, Elfriede Jelinek, or Jonathan Coe don't dress up in Goth garb for interviews. But Oksanen can't be faulted for flaunting her feminine aspect, her weird dress, and a few other things if, by so doing, she can draw the attention of readers to more serious aspects of life. She breaks through the cliché that anyone with feminist leanings must be a butch or androgynous fundamentalist with no make-up.

*

Separate from this, but generated by the "Purge" thread, is my question to DWM: in what way is Europe "slowly dying"? This is a dramatic, apocalyptic vision for a whole continent. Is there any proof of this, because a few European novelists are now, at last, being published in the USA and get interviewed there?

[DWM]

I already replied to this in the other thread (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/29229-Sofi-Oksanen-Purge?p=80419#post80419).

Seriously, Eric, borrow a computer and go and watch Sofi Oksanen in the YouTube interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9e5JqHzATM).

DWM

http://nordicvoices.blogspot.com
http://nordicvoices.xtreemhost.com

[Eric]

Unseriously, Comrade Oksanen is going from strength to strength, unlike her stalker, the chubby Lenin lookalike Johan Bäckman:

http://www.hs.fi/kuvat/pieni_webkuva/1135262981557.jpeg

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:_kS8Ti_Wkhv-xM:http://static.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/backman2604MZ_uu.jpg (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/backman2604MZ_uu.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.iltalehti.fi/uutiset/200904269478966_uu.shtml&usg=__UpT-AIjwX4ytkOjGQ7gDkdJgDP4=&h=487&w=410&sz=11&hl=sv&start=4&zoom=1&tbnid=_kS8Ti_Wkhv-xM:&tbnh=129&tbnw=109&ei=vg0wTfnNL4SCswaupsiDCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3DJohan%2Bb%25C3%25A4ckman%26hl%3Dsv%26 lr%3D%26newwindow%3D1%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DX%26as_q dr%3Dall%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1)

One of these pictures is a caricature. I'm not saying which.

[DWM]

Did you watch the video interview with Sofi Oksanen yet, Eric? I'd be interested to know what you think of it.

[Eric]

No, I have not seen the interview. I agree that seeing a person speak reveals more than merely reading. But I am at the last checking stage of my translation of Vastutuulelaev, whereafter I will get a new computer. In the meantime, I'll pop round to a friend. I believe she has a husky voice.

In the meantime, here's another picture of Sofi's Stalker:

http://fifi.voima.fi/images/content_pictures/2009/3/kuva-3225-articlerun.jpg

It does not take a genius to guess who the Sofi is in the A4 he is holding up, and to which system and country he is comparing her proclivities. "Sofin valinta" means "Sofi's choice"; this wouldn't happen to be a pun on the Styron novel or the film with Streep, now would it?(Clue for those who do not know Europe well: Eesti is the Estonian for Estonia. Why the esses are so funny I really do not know...) Here he is with his minder:

http://s.ohtuleht.ee/multimedia/images/000103/d78490fe-1520-4f1a-8c7b-5ffabf0c1e3e.jpg

His book has, most unfortunately, not sold as many copies as that of his idol Oksanen.

[Eric]

And here is Teppo Järvi's caricature of Sofi Oksanen, the latter of whom has be awarded the most caricatured Finn of the year award, whatever that implies:

http://www.kouvolansanomat.fi/files/panorama_Kosa_10327734.jpg (http://www.kouvolansanomat.fi/Online/2011/01/11/Sofi+Oksanen+on+vuoden+2010+karikatyyppi/2011210327731/4#)

The red-as-red-can-be lips, her sharp and curved schnozzle, along with the washed-out powdered look have now become her trademarks. Source:

http://www.kansanuutiset.fi/kulttuuri/kulttuuriuutiset/2436966/sofi-oksasesta-vuoden-2010-karikatyyppi

The word "karikatyyppi" is a portmanteau word that presumably also exists in English in some shape or form. Though I've never heard anyone use "caricatype". Another caricatype is Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb, whose teeth are his main asset for cartoonists.

[DWM]

Do watch the interview when you get your new computer - even though the YouTube video is only an excerpt, it is quite illuminating, I think.

[Eric]

DWM, you are being very cryptic about what it is that makes the interview interesting. As you know, I'm not going to be getting a new computer at the drop of a mouse. So do give the rest of us some pointers, sharper than the Oksanen nose.

What do you think about Bäckman's astoundingly brilliant pun?

Humour is disarming. No wonder some leaders are so nasty.Take Mr Big Hat, for example. I wonder how Oksanen would diminish his stature. By sending him to Coventry, no doubt. But would Coventry welcome him with open arms? I don't mean weapons, but bras as the French call them.

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:8jrjGbfvXVT6mM:http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ck30ZT-6gJs/RrbO8jfZ5eI/AAAAAAAAA0E/D_BYSJFajaA/s320/Al_lukashenko.jpg (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ck30ZT-6gJs/RrbO8jfZ5eI/AAAAAAAAA0E/D_BYSJFajaA/s320/Al_lukashenko.jpg&imgrefurl=http://authoritarianism.blogspot.com/2007/08/lukashenko-wants-to-bleach-internet.html&usg=__sPB5Ld6aIeE9BYptOd0LhAWcv7s=&h=200&w=266&sz=16&hl=sv&start=3&zoom=1&tbnid=8jrjGbfvXVT6mM:&tbnh=85&tbnw=113&ei=upIwTZmuDpOGswanrL2MCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLukashenko%2Bphoto%26hl%3Dsv%26lr%3D% 26newwindow%3D1%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3DX%26as_qdr%3Da ll%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1)

http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:n6iJG41j1adPdM:http://rt.com/files/news/belarus-irreplaceable-president-still-in-office-after-15-years/lukashenko.n.jpg (http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://rt.com/files/news/belarus-irreplaceable-president-still-in-office-after-15-years/lukashenko.n.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rt.com/news/belarus-irreplaceable-president-still-in-office-after-15-years/&usg=__b9z9X8ItJ9zfuzwu8af-s2KlXYA=&h=277&w=370&sz=67&hl=sv&start=233&zoom=1&tbnid=n6iJG41j1adPdM:&tbnh=91&tbnw=122&ei=YpMwTZfFEcmAswbBs_yDCg&prev=/images%3Fq%3DLukashenko%2Bphoto%26start%3D220%26hl %3Dsv%26lr%3D%26newwindow%3D1%26safe%3Doff%26sa%3D N%26as_qdr%3Dall%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1)