Mika Waltari

[altai]

He is one of my favourite writers, and my favourite Finnish writer, so different from his compatriots in that he managed to write such compelling powerful stories situated in ancient civilizations. His novels can be divided into two categories: social-realism depressive narratives about life in Helsinki or Finland in the 30s-40s and historical, (historical/fantastic) stories mostly from the ancient Egypt and Roman/Byzantine civilizations. His probably most famous book known abroad is Sinuhe. The Egyptian. It still is the most successful Finnish novel abroad. It's a colourful life story of an Egyptian doctor, which is told with such ease and at the same time the psychological and emotional complexity of great myths at the same time managing to stay true to the historical time and bring it to life. It can also be read as a story of his own deep disillusionment with life in the world post WWII world. Notoriously he wrote this novel in a couple of months in his summer cabin in after the end of the WWII. For me it was like a travel, the same euphoric engulfing feeling of immersion into a new world.

He always used tragic, crisis moments in his historical novels, times of great change and cataclysms and there is almost a Hemingwayan pathos in it, dignity in the face of certain defeat, deep pessimism gleaming through the passionate love of life.

There are also many historical parallels in Sinuhe with the world of Second World War period, and many of his scholars saw him depicting Hittites as a prototype of the Nazi Germany. He also addressed such themes as religion, the power of ideas, believes on human life, the search for truth.

[Eric]

I've not read "Sihuhe", but the first Finnish book I read as a teenager was an English translation was one of Waltari's more gloomy books about some loner or other. I don't remember the title, but I then went on to read the Swede Pär Lagerkvist (also in translation) and his short historical novels were equally gloomy. Yet I've lived for more than a decade in Scandinavia, all told, and it is luckily not as gloomy as those books, as Altai can also vouch for, I'm sure. Which is why I keep adding pieces of current reality to that thread called "The Dark Side of Sweden", where there is always a mixture of tragedy and comedy, but not permanent suicidal November gloom, as some more morbid souls would have it, usually people who have not lived in Scandinavia and have not experienced, for instance, scorching hot summers there.

I would like to read a few of Waltari's historical and contemporary novels; and this time I would hope to try to do so in Finnish, but the language is still tough going for me.

[altai]

It's true, most of Finnish literature is as dreary as the Finnish weather for nine months of the year. There is a lot of 'inhorealismi' or "disgust-realism", stories from the border regions of the eternal darkness (ikuisen pimeyden rajamailta), so against the backdrop of such bleak landcape Waltari's Mediterranean colourful stories look particularly bright and intoxicating. He was a really good story teller. Maybe he wasn't a genious writer, or an innovator a la Joyce. But he could tell interesting stories and his characters are very believable and human. In fact, they are much more human than most of the fragmented obscurities of the modernist canon. I did enjoy a lot of his historical novels, partly because I am interested in history and Waltari could bring ancient history to life like few historical genre writers. I even liked his historico-mystical "Turms Kuolematon" which came out in English as "Etruscan", I guess, which is situated in the world of Greek wars with Persia, known to the wide public nowadays, perhaps, through the comic 300, it has the beginnings of Rome from the cradle of Etruscan civilization.

"Ihmiskunnan viholliset" or " The Roman" is an interesting take on the birth of the Christianity in the early Rome. I was quite surprised by the maturity of his approach to religions, as he reconstructs the atmosphere of 'post-religious' Rome, where somewhat like now there was a freedom of religion and a lot of relativism where the traditional Greek pantheism couldn't satisfy people's need for divine so they embraced one rcult after another looking to make sense of their lives. Pretty much like now in the West. Except that in stead of religions people fall for all kinds of New Age spirituality. If one goes to India, for example, one can see the majority of the thousands of Westerners there dressed in their ali baba pants are on some kind of spiritual quest, quite a field for the anthropological research.

"Johannes Angelos" or "The dark angel" is a novel in a diary form about the last days of Constantinople before its fall to the Ottomans, the darkest of his historical fiction that I've read. A stoic story of the doomed life and doomed love, dignity in the face of the certain defeat and the pathos of the last stand.

But still "Sinuhe" (The Egyptian) is still my favourite novel of his, it deals with the Egypt of around 1300 BC during the realm of Akhenaten, very curious period in its own right where all of a sudden among the pantheon of Egyptian gods a delirious pharaoh, obsessed with an idea of one god, breaks with the Egyptian religious tradition and forces monotheism on its subjects. A book on obsessive political ideas and how they shape the destinies of nations, it has some of the most lively round human characters.

[Eric]

The problem is that Waltari wrote a long time ago. When it comes to contemporary gloom, you could equally well say that Russian literature consists of endless moaning about Czarist and Communist injustices and atrocities, and forget the things being written now.

I don't think that modern Finnish literature, whether written in Finnish or Swedish, is as miserablist as you make out, Altai. It's just that the big publishers with their somewhat macho agit-prop machines try to sell Finnish literature abroad by branding it gloomy. That was the trap that DWM fell into with Sweden, when he started a rather absurdly named thread called "The Dark Side of Sweden" to which I gleefully continue to contribute, adding bits of genuine gloom, but also things that prove that Scandinavian suicidal all-year-round Novemberish melancholy is something of a mythical construct.

For instance, if we stick to Finland, Tove Jansson's stories for adults (i.e. not her Moomin stuff) are charming and don't fit the bill. I am gradually discovering authors writing Finnish too that are not just backwoods self-knifing-in-the-sauna-and-blood-dripping-in-the-snow tales. Especially the women authors writing in Finnish write novels and poems with more breadth, e.g. Krohn, Manner, Siekkinen, Saisio, and so on. But there are plenty too writing in Swedish, such as Tikkanen, von Schoulz, and others.

It is the Finnish literary brand that needs changing and refocusing. No more ice on lips, thank-you. What about the sea, the sun, the summer?