A Son of the Rock

The Parliament building in Helsinki is in the imposing, monolithic, institutional Art Deco style:-

The Rock Church (Temppeliaukio Church) is one of Helsinki’s attractions. We passed it on the way back from the Sibelius Monument but didn’t go in:-

It was a longish walk out from Helsinki city centre to this. Unfortunately we arrived just after three tour buses had disgorged loads of Chinese tourists, each of whom wanted a selfie in front of it. It took ages before I could get a people-free shot.

I must say that face reminded me of weel kent Scottish literary figure Hugh MacDiarmid.

From reverse:-

Some of the other tourists:-

So here’s a bit of Sibelius for you. Finlandia, Op 26:-

Rex Bio, an Art Deco/Moderne shop, Helsinki city centre:-

This building, complete with horizontals, verticals, curved wall and flat roofs was on the way out to the Sibelius Monument:-

Note window column:-

Decoration on flag pole seating:-

Next stop after St Petersburg was Helsinki, capital of Finland.

A lot of the buidings in the city centre are in the Art Nouveau style. These are the ones I photographed on the way to the Sibelius Monument.

The one in the centre here shades into Art Deco in the windows:-

Note the giraffe figures on the balcony here:-

I have absolutely no idea what these were about:-

This year’s Hugo winners (for stories published last year) were announced at the Worldcon in Helsinki.

BEST NOVEL: The Obelisk Gate, by N. K. Jemisin (Orbit Books)

BEST NOVELLA: Every Heart a Doorway, by Seanan McGuire (Tor.com publishing)

BEST NOVELETTE: The Tomato Thief, by Ursula Vernon (Apex Magazine, January 2016)

BEST SHORT STORY: Seasons of Glass and Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales, Saga Press)

I’m afraid I’ve read none of them. How much the balloting was affected by the Sad Puppies I don’t know and can’t tell.

From Locus via Geiorge R R Martin’s Not A Blog.

The winners will be announced at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki in August.

I’ve only read two of the nominees. (I take it most are USian.)

Best Novel

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan UK)
A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers (Hodder & Stoughton; Harper Voyager US)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris US; Solaris UK)
Death’s End, Cixin Liu (Tor; Head of Zeus)
Too Like the Lightning, Ada Palmer (Tor)

Best Novella

Penric and the Shaman, Lois McMaster Bujold (Spectrum Literary Agency)
The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, Kij Johnson (Tor.com Publishing)
The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle (Tor.com Publishing)
Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
This Census-Taker, China Miéville (Del Rey; Picador)
A Taste of Honey, Kai Ashante Wilson (Tor.com Publishing)

Best Novelette

“The Art of Space Travel”, Nina Allan (Tor.com 7/27/16)
“Touring with the Alien”, Carolyn Ives Gilman (Clarkesworld 4/16)
Alien Stripper Boned from Behind by the T-Rex, Stix Hiscock (self-published)
“The Tomato Thief”, Ursula Vernon (Apex 1/5/16)
The Jewel and Her Lapidary, Fran Wilde (Tor.com Publishing)
“You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay”, Alyssa Wong (Uncanny 5-6/16)

Best Short Story

“Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”, Brooke Bolander (Uncanny 11-12/16)
“Seasons of Glass and Iron”, Amal El-Mohtar (The Starlit Wood)
“The City Born Great”, N.K. Jemisin (Tor.com 9/28/16)
“That Game We Played During the War”, Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com 3/16/16)
“A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers”, Alyssa Wong (Tor.com 3/2/16)
“An Unimaginable Light”, John C. Wright (God, Robot)

Best Related Work

The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher (Blue Rider)
Women of Harry Potter series of posts, Sarah Gailey (Tor.com)
The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman (Morrow; Headline)
The Geek Feminist Revolution, Kameron Hurley (Tor)
Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000-2016, Ursula K. Le Guin (Small Beer)
Traveler of Worlds: Conversations with Robert Silverberg, Robert Silverberg & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro (Fairwood)

Best Graphic Story

Black Panther, Volume 1: A Nation Under Our Feet, Ta-Nehisi Coates, art by Brian Stelfreeze (Marvel)
The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man, Tom King, art by Gabriel Hernandez Walta (Marvel)
Monstress, Volume 1: Awakening, Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda (Image)
Paper Girls, Volume 1, Brian K. Vaughan, art by Cliff Chiang (Image)
Saga, Volume 6, Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples (Image)
Ms. Marvel, Volume 5: Super Famous, G. Willow Wilson, art by Takeshi Miyazawa, Adrian Alphona & Nico Leon (Marvel)

Best Dramatic Presentation — Long

Arrival
Deadpool
Ghostbusters
Hidden Figures
Rogue One
Stranger Things, Season One

Best Dramatic Presentation — Short

Black Mirror: “San Junipero”
Doctor Who: “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”
The Expanse: “Leviathan Wakes”
Game of Thrones: “Battle of the Bastards”
Game of Thrones: “The Door”
Splendor & Misery

Dedalus, 2012, 166 p. Translated from the Italian L’ultimo dei vostiachi by Judith Landry.

Marani wrote one of the best novels I read last year – any year – New Finnish Grammar. His interest in Finland and its language is again in evidence here. In many ways this novel is the one which the title of New Finnish Grammar promised it would be. It may in fact be unique in having a plot which depends on comparative philology for its motor.

The titular last of the Vostyachs is Ivan, survivor of a gulag in which, twenty years before, his father was killed trying to escape. For all those years, until the guards quit due to lack of pay and left the gates open for the inmates to wander off, Ivan did not speak. He is a misfit in the locality, communes with animals and believes the wolves are other Vostyachs who changed form to evade the world and cannot get back. Olga, a Russian linguist studying the Samoyedic languages thereabouts is asked to help understand what he says. She recognises his speech as Vostyach, the long thought extinct oldest language of the Proto-Uralic family, a kind of linguistic missing link between Eskimo-Aleut and Finno-Ugric.

Trusting to his scientific curiosity, she writes to tell Professor Jarmo Aurtova, organiser of an imminent Finno-Ugric conference in Helsinki, of her discovery, making great play of Ivan’s velar fricatives and retroflex palatals, his use of the fricative lateral and labiovelar appendix. (Somewhat improbably, given the time scale involved, she suggests to Aurtova, “Perhaps your ancestors included some Sioux chief who fought at Little Big Horn!”) She tells him Ivan has problems with the modern world, does not like aeroplanes in particular, so while she attends a meeting in St Petersburg she will despatch him by train to Helsinki, and asks Aurtova to meet him at the station.

Aurtova has a portrait of Finnish wartime leader Marshal Mannerheim on his wall and thinks Finland and Finnish the pinnacle of human development, that Finns were the first Europeans, connected to neither Mongols nor Eskimos. As a result he does not take kindly to the prospect of a living rebuke to his beliefs. The scene is set for a tragedy, played out in the coldest night in Helsinki for fifty years and involving the release of animals from Helsinki zoo.

This may seem forbidding but the novel flows extremely smoothly and, despite the instances of linguistic vocabulary, is very easy to read. Marani creates compelling characters, can structure and tell a story and the translation (with a couple of exceptions*) serves him very well.

Marani has Olga express the preciousness of a language. During their encounter within the book she tells Aurtova that Vostyach has a word, powakaluta, for “something grey glimpsed vaguely running through the snow,” a word which will vanish if Vostyach does – though the thing it describes will not. And that disappearance would be terrible. She also reminds him that Finnish doesn’t have a future tense. (Something which is apparently common. English hasn’t, but can utilise an auxiliary verb to enable one.)

If I have any criticisms it is that the book may be romanticising slightly both Ivan’s relationship with nature and that of native North Americans and that Aurtova’s actions are perhaps a little unbelievable.

The Last of the Vostyachs was a delight to read just the same.

*The issues with the translation were firstly that ice hockey isn’t played on a pitch and its scoring system does not have points, “a few points short of victory,” plus the sentence, “One of the six thousand languages still spoken on this earth die out every two weeks.” Dies, surely? In a book dealing with philology, it’s perhaps as well to nail down the grammar. And that “ancestors” isn’t the correct word; “many times removed cousin” is nearer the mark.

Dedalus, 2012, 378p. Translated from the Italian, Nuova Grammaticae Finlandese, by Judith Landry.

To someone like me – obliged to learn Latin at school, but nevertheless enjoyed it, then dabbled very slightly in German and who subsequently learned the Finnish noun has umpteen cases (I remembered it as nineteen but it’s only fifteen) the attraction of a novel entitled New Finnish Grammar was irresistible. The fact that it was written by an Italian made it even more interesting. Diego Marani has himself invented an international auxiliary language, Europanto, perhaps partly as a joke.

Notwithstanding that, this is a very good book by any standard. It manages to overcome the disadvantage of a substantial lack of dialogue. Dialogue is normally a leavening and character revealing aspect of a piece of fiction, diluting the thickness of the prose. To restrict it is a brave decision for a novelist.

Pietri Friari, an exiled Finn working as a doctor for the German army in Trieste in 1941 has brought to him an injured sailor who has the name tag Sampo Karjalainen sewn on to his jacket and a handkerchief with the initials S K embroidered on it in his pocket. The sailor’s wounds have affected his memory and he does not know who he is nor even his nationality. Doctor Friari assumes his patient must be Finnish and sets out to teach him the rudiments of that language. The framing device has Friari find in Helsinki in 1946 the notebook where Sampo had written down his experiences since his time in Trieste. The main body of the text contains these reminiscences – edited for clarity: occasional sections in italics relate Friari’s thoughts and comments on them.

Throughout the early part of the book the thought kept nagging; in what language does Sampo think and why doesn’t Friari ask him? This would be a large clue to Sampo’s origins but the question is never asked in the novel. This is a minor quibble, though. Sampo’s predicament is intriguing enough to see us through.

I wasn’t expecting the book to be about Finnish grammar but in many ways it is, aspects of the language are mentioned frequently. It is also a short history of Finland in the mid-twentieth century and a primer on Finnish myths/legends. Arguably this is necessarily so, as anyone learning to be a Finn, as Sampo is, would need that backgrounding. The translator has had to cope with this too. She does it admirably but at one point puzzlingly used the German term panzer for a Russian tank.

While eschewing love and sex – two of the three perennial literary concerns; the third is death – New Finnish Grammar deals with another important aspect of humanity, belonging – or in this case not belonging, struggling to fit in. As such it is not merely about being Finnish but about being human.

Perhaps oddly for a novel whose driving force is memory loss this may be the most memorable book I’ll read all year.