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OUR READINGS
AUTHOR: ARTO PAASILINNA
“The fresh wind of the Great North”
Among humour, escapism and surrealism, the magic and bittersweet world of Arto Paasilinna.
Finnish with a fervid imagination and the brilliant pen, Arto Paasilinna without any doubt deserves our attention.
Ex forester, ex journalist, ex poet, today the 66 years old Lappish author with chubby face and lively eye, begin his dazzling career as a writer in 1975.
His storyline so wild as original, his characters always a bit crazy and out of the ordinary, the bold mix of ancient myths and modern social satire have secured him a place of excellence in the literary landscape of his native Finland, there where it is at all facts a cult-author (every book usually exceeds the 100,000 copies).
But Paasilinna don’t surprise and rape only his countrymen. The smile in a halfway between amused and bitter, the irreverent style and the tragically irony with which treats the most painful issues than have now secured him a place very solid in the heart of the European public, coming to conquer the Italian one in 1994 after the publication of "The year of the hare."
At the center of the plot the exhilarating and extravagant vicissitudes of Vatanen, forty-year-old journalist hopelessly oppressed by the greyness of its existence until the day in which invests a hare and decided to throw himself the to pursuit to heal her. With the hare skipping faithful to his side, the man begin a new life, a nomadic experience that leads him to experiment a wide variety of jobs across Finland and knowing and loving that hostile nature that both fascinates him and makes him free from every convention. And it is exact when the contact with wild and unlenient nature of North that the protagonist learns how much everyone is really the one and only maker of his own destiny: "We don’t have to let live ourselves, but live inside the life."
We can find the theme of evasion in "The forest of foxes," there where is a nice foxy to become the involuntary witness of the escaping from "civil" society of three weird and unsuffering "outsiders": a cynic and unscrupulous gangster ownder of a large booty; an alcoholist, an Army Major in voluntary leave of the armed forces; a lively octogenarian escaped with his cat from the loving cares of a nursing home. Vain forsee the final, but imagine the improvised group trying to deal with the micro-society they created, whose rules of good living - expected out of line - born spontaneously and are enriched day by day.
Nifty creator of novels that contains itself, as bizarre, always a critic to bad things of the society in which we live, Paasilinna evidence of particular genius and skills in "Sweet Linnea’s poisons."A title, a program" we might say. And so it is. This time the protagonist of the history is Linnea Ravaska, octogenarian widow of a war hero Colonel, opposed to his inept and criminal nephew and his friends, his equal and compare. The group of the three drunkard plagues the lovable grandma first predate her deserved retirement, then trying tout court to kill her to get their hands on the inheritance. But at that point the fighting Linnea, discovering in her a kind of criminal enterprise, armed with a flowery hat, a sleeve and some deadly mixtures, will have the opportunity to rise against the three rebel doers. In the unfold of history, hanging the balance between noir and humorous novel, you’ll have to discover that even in the heart of the good ones always live a bit of perfidy .. watch out to tantalize her!
On closer look, or well-readed, in Paasilinna’s books we laugh for don’t cry, because there isn’t so much what we can save from the superficiality of the world that surround us. Maybe only the nature, which seems still an immaculate beauty and is uncontaminated in his Finland. Yet his books have the honour to involve and to make us think, even if the reflection is often very bitter.
Happy reading!
Girlpoison ( translated by Dan[616 Version] )
Planned and developed by MRS.LINDSTROM with the help of NAILEDTOACROSS,
LEGOLAS_DI_MIRKWOOD and MAIA.
Editor in Chief: Mrs Lindstrom, Graphic Project: Shikaia590 & Maia
