2008 Finlandia Prize Shortlist

The six titles making up the shortlist for the 2008 Finlandia Prize were announced yesterday. A couple of which sound really interesting. Full descriptions of the books (although no samples, unfortunately) can be found at the FILI website.

• 14 Knots to Greenwich by Olli Jalonen

14 Knots to Greenwich is the story of a race around the world along the zero meridian. . . . Borrowing the disguise of the TV format, the story is not just a tale of an incomparable journey, but also a description of human attachments, love, and the limits of commitment.

• The Cosmonaut by Katri Lipson

Set in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, The Cosmonaut tells story of a young man, nearly made a national hero, who dreams of a career as a cosmonaut, and his music teacher’s unrequieted love. . . . The Cosmonaut is a controlled novel, similar in its perfection to the Soviet Union’s hockey team in the 1980s. [Ed. Note: ???!!!]

• Marie by Arne Nevanlinna: Marie

A novel of a single day; a hundred years of solitude. Born in Strasbourg, Marie lives through the last day of the 20th century in an old age home, but her memories and the present overlap and interlock in her mind, one melting into the other. Marie is an ironic tour-de-force and the perceptive story of a woman who begins in the fetters of Juliette’s balcony and ends with a helpless hundred-year valse triste.

• The Purge by Sofi Oksanen

The year is 1992: Zara is an escaped prostitute who flees her abuser to go to Western Estonia, to the house of a relative, and her aunt Aliide is made to face the shameful betrayal she committed in the 1940s. . . . The Purge is a story of shame, its anatomy and origins. The novel shows how the private is public and the personal political.

• Immoderation by Pirkko Saisio

The narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s novel, a youngish journalist, is “the other man,” who devotes himself to being an assistant to a charismatic “him” who aspires to celebrity. . . . Immoderation tells a story of social climbing and the volatilty of celebrity. Why “the other man” is blinded and left to be abused by a narcissist is left unexplained; there are various patterns of dependency and attachment. Liquor and sex, politics and publicity, money and lust for power bubble up in this raucous satire.

• The Devil’s Fork by Juha Seppälä

Juha Seppälä’s The Devil’s Fork is a harsh and merciless novel, a voice yelling in your ear, a sermon on the state of the world and people without qualities. The novel turns its back on conventional aesthetics. Its apparent formlessness is in fact form, however, and the language is expressive and clear. The Devil’s Fork refers to an optical illusion. It describes both the world of the novel and its narrative level – the subordinate structures among its characters – a treasurer, a film director, a network producer, and a sociologist. Through the character of a clockmaker, time in all its eclecticness, comes to the fore. But the feeling of the continuity of history is a luxury that those who have been displaced can’t afford. [Ed. Note: Without having read a single word, this is the book I would vote for.]