Myöhempien aikojen pyhiä by Juha Itkonen

"Surely you must be homesick, at least a little," said Kalevi's wife. "How are you doing, a young man so far away from his mother?"
I didn't reply. Not sure if I would have had the opportunity; Mark didn't allow it.
"David has no family," Mark said, in a sympathetic voice meant to convey an unfortunate fact. Blind have no eyes, deaf have no ears, crippled have no limbs, and Mark has no heart. Mark's heart is beating dead air. Dear God, please forgive me. 

Back in Finland, my friend and I had a chat with a Mormon missionary who had been lucky enough to be sent to a small town not too far from the Russian border. This young Mormon wasn't even trying to convert anyone at this point: Finland was both too secular and culturally Lutheran. But if we'd just come to one of these parties she (yes, she!) was organizing at the local Mormon church she'd be happy. It really didn't sound like a ploy; she seemed genuinely lonely. I think my friend ended up going.

I cannot vouch for the accuracy of Itkonen's Latter Day Saints--the fictional alienation and soul-searching of a young Mormon man sent to a small Finnish town--but that one encounter I had does not refute it, either.

In this story, David is sent to Finland with another, more passionate Mormon, Mark. While Mark furiously corresponds with Gabriel, an anonymous doubting Thomas online, David has doubts of his own--what kind of a god would lead him to temptation, kill his parents, or make him fall in love when it so obviously was a sin in his case. Among the quiet Finns David can keep his secrets safe, but only until his refusal to express the anguish he obviously carries begins to cause worry even among the most solemn of natives.

Sometimes I read Finnish books just to be reminded what it is like to be in a Finnish mindset: the way paragraphs are constructed, or the way a story is told, is often enough to transport me there even if the topic at hand is not restricted to Finnish culture.

In Latter Day Saints Itkonen reverses this: while his storytelling methods do not appear exclusively Finnish, he has delightfully hidden Finnish customs behind a shroud of mystery, experienced for the first time by two Americans and told through their view point. Like an in-joke, I could decipher these mysteries that the protagonists couldn't, yet at the same time I understood why they'd seem strange to people who weren't born and raised in the country.

In addition to enjoying a beautifully written story it's good to look into yourself every now and then through someone else's eyes.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

This book is not approved by animals

I'm very fond of my old brass alarm clock. Once I tied a wasp to the striking-surface of each of the copper-coloured bells on the top, where the little hammer would hit them in the morning when the alarm went off.
I always wake up before the alarm goes, so I got to watch.

Because I brought this up in my 10 Favorite Books post and then saw it for mere five dollars at Elliot Bay Bookstore, I had to reread this monster.

I was interested in seeing whether it was still as disturbing to me as it was when I first read it over a decade ago: I had watched a lot of horror movies as a kid and read a large portion of Stephen King's catalog by the end of my teens, but nothing had quite prepared me for the nausea and terror when I read The Wasp Factory. It is true: I did have to put it down every few pages to read some Hitchhiker's Galaxy to remind myself that happy thoughts still existed in this world. I had completely forgotten how short this book was because in my memories it took me way longer to finish it; it was just all the breaks I had to take and how intense this book is. The paperback version I have now is mere 184 pages.

This time I read The Wasp Factory in two days during commutes. Apparently it had made me such an impression that the reading experience was barely any different than ten years ago: I wasn't quite as disturbed because I already knew everything, but it didn't make reading the story much easier. This time, though, I didn't not need Douglas Adams as my crutch.

I'm partial to Banks's writing style, and even in this horrifying story he's in his element with descriptions that are surprisingly vivid in their brevity without ever going for the clichés. It's actually quite amazing how he can write so well about things so deplorable, which is probably why I like this book so much: there's such craft involved in knowing what is truly unsettling to people without resorting to a gorge fest. There is hardly any blood in this story.

The Wasp Factory is the story of Frank, a teenager living in a remote island off Scotland with his father. Right off the bat we know he's not quite there: his everyday life is filled with superstitious rituals that usually involve slaughtering small wild animals in order to foretell the future. When he finds out that his older brother Chris has broken out of a sanitarium and is on his way back to the family in a wake of burning buildings and dogs he must consult the dead beings. While Frank waits for his brother's arrival he tells us about all the murder and mayhem surrounding his family; a paint-by-numbers picture that is slowly filled in before our eyes, making us understand faster than Frank himself does the reasons for his actions.

Just pick up this book if you are intrigued; do not read anything about it because it's one of those books where your reading experience will be ruined if you know all the plot twists. There are moments in the story that now, upon second reading, I should have really seen coming from the deliciously placed foreshadowing elements, but then again... the story is so enthralling in its grossness and weirdness that I would have needed not to be completely taken by it to coolly analyze its content while reading. And that would not have been fun. Just let this book happen to you. That is, if you like to be horrified every now and then.

Hyperbole & A Half. Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh

Once upon a time, someone linked me to a web comic/blog about Allie wondering whether her sweet, sweet dog was actually mentally challenged. I was immediately hooked with Hyperbole and A Half, Allie's blog. Although her drawings are definitely on the simple side, she manages to capture expressions and body language perfectly. In that dog story, the Simple Dog's confusion in trying to understand Allie's IQ tests is palpable in just a few strokes. You may also know Allie from this one image from her web comic that quickly became popular on the intarwebz.

Then, Hyperbole and A Half stopped updating, causing concern among the readers. A lot later, Allie came back with a new comic, which was part one of how she was battling with depression. It was scary: this person who was so damned funny was suffering, and we didn't know!

Adventures in Depression and Depression Part 2 are amazing: Allie explains with humor and insight what being depressed feels like, and why someone telling you to take up yoga to cheer yourself up won't work. One comparison that stuck with me was her cartoon self holding dead fish as a metaphor to her feelings, trying to tell people they are dead; instead of knowing what to do with this information, people would try to help Allie look for her fish (they're not lost--they're dead!), or they'd suggest that Allie try feeding them (too late--they're dead!), or take bees as pets instead (how does that help with the dead fish?). If anyone needs to explain depression to others, this should be used as reference material.

You can read her for free online, so why buy this book? For me it was a no-brainer: Allie Brosh has delighted my everyday for so long that I will be happy to support her in the hopes that she'll keep on writing and drawing. It's selfish of me, I know.

Also, the book contains the hilarious story "Parrot," which I either had managed to skip online or it just does not exist anywhere else. In it, Allie and her sister are given a toy parrot that repeats words back to them, which is probably the stupidest gift to give children (unless, as Allie suspects, the gift came from someone who hated her parents). The kids begin to terrorize the household with this toy robot immediately. Just the way that robot parrot is drawn, expressionless, recording gurgling sounds from the garbage disposal in the sink had me in stitches. The cheer-ups this book provides are worth the price.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

goodreads.com

Light vacation reading by the pool! Vacation was a month ago, deadlines have since taken my typing life over, but better late than never, right?

Random Acts of Senseless Violence is a fictional diary written by Lola, a 12-year-old girl in a sometime-near-future New York. She writes about her posh private school, her concerns when her teacher and screenwriter parents aren't getting enough work, nonchalantly mention the city burning and presidents being assassinated, one after the other. Civil unrest and the consequent police and army response are closing in on the family's apartment while Lola's little sister becomes slowly unresponsive, and both parents battle with their own demons.

Because Lola is twelve, she does not get into the political and economic reasons why the country is burning and terrorized, and why her aunt begs her mother to let the kids join her in her gated community for safety--it's all left for the reader's imagination, which makes it all the more horrifying. The more Lola needs to spend her daily energy on mere survival, the more her writing style deteriorates into street slang, devoid of prescriptivist punctuation rules. She slowly becomes the young people she and all the friends she once had used to loathe.

With all of its disturbing violence and unsettling feel of dread, RASV is a remarkable teacher of empathy. Which is, quite honestly, why I like a lot of science fiction: the stories remove us from our reality, make us read about people and their plight and understand where they are coming from, only to realize that we have in fact been reading about our neighbors all along. Although the novel cannot conclusively explain why people engage in seemingly random acts of senseless violence, we learn about a scenario or two where this could happen: when people need to protect their loved ones; when people are oppressed enough. It is only us, watching it all unfold from our high castles, who think it is random and senseless.

League of Denial. The NFL, Concussions and the Battle for Truth by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru

Image from amazon.com -
read as a digital loan
 from the library

...[T]he momentum transferred in [fully armored players colliding] is still the equivalent of being hit in the head by a 10-pound cannonball traveling at 30 miles an hour.

League of Denial tracks the efforts of medical professionals to prove that suicides and Alzheimer's-like behavior from mere 50-year-olds after a career in NFL weren't just because of steroid use (something NFL attempted to claim) or because the players just happened to have a multitude of mental problems anyway. For over a decade, the NFL denied any connection between football and brain injury in the players, while at the same time secretly paying disability for brain damaged players.

The brain damage we are talking about is not about just seeing stars after a collision: this is an otherwise healthy athlete suddenly waking up at a bus station in a completely different city, not knowing how he got there; looking down at his kid and forgetting who he is looking at; writing letters upon letters in Flowers for Algernon style to anyone who might listen to him, in type and words that are slowly deteriorating into nonsense while the writer himself acknowledges that he can't make sense of words anymore. And then there were the suicides and the violence, brain damage causing players to make rash, illogical decisions.

Once the news about brain studies on football players spread, at least two players who committed suicide did so by shooting themselves in the heart to prevent damaging the brain, leaving behind notes requesting that their brains be donated to the studies to expose the dangers in football and to improve players' conditions and rights.

This book isn't set out to change football fans to haters: I still enjoy watching football after reading it. Now I just know what people have gone through in the history of the game, and how we have gotten here with plenty of rules that should prevent people from getting hurt so badly on the field. Yet, concussions are still considered as meh, it happens. Or the answer to concerns is, Well, don't play football if you don't like it. I would not want to banish football, but we do need to take care of the people who are offering us multibillion buck entertainment and deep, primal feelings for human tribalism that can't really be easily evoked otherwise than through team sports.

The League of Denial appreciates football, but criticizes the approach NFL had toward all studies and evidence showing that their players were being brain damaged, and that something should be done to help them. The studies were planning on making the NFL a safer place for players, but were met with resistance in fears of losing a lucrative business in the process. If NFL admitted that playing football was causing severe brain damage, what parent would ever want to put their kids into training?

This was an easy read except around midway, where Big Tobacco and their denial of smoking having any relation to causing cancer becomes the focus as a lengthy analogy to the case against NFL. Sure, both parties were motivated by the same (money) and would come up with their own teams of scientists to disprove independent studies, but I ended up skimming through the tobacco business parts as there was a lot of it, I was familiar with the Big Tobacco case already, and I couldn't wait to get back to the topic at hand: football.

The authors are at their best when they describe the coroners at work and their personalities, and the everyday life of damaged football players and their families. Although the court room bits and spats between the NFL and scientists are interesting, it occasionally got a bit too detailed for me. Do I need to know that some guy almost threw up when he was giving a speech because he had food poisoning, as it wasn't really relevant to the said speech or event?

Kids are still playing football, but hopefully in an ever safer environment, where coaches, parents, and sponsors involved have better information about the potential dangers the sport may cause if safeguards are not in place. Breaking a leg or an arm seems to happen to almost any athlete, but I find it easier to reconcile limited motion than permanent damage to the way humans process their thoughts and communicate with others.

My favorites, or the Facebook meme of listing 10 books

I was tagged a few times on Facebook to List 10 of your favorite books and tag others!, but I had a hard time picking out my favorites. It's not like I read so much that I wasn't able to decide; I just first had to figure out what "favorite" even means to me.

mrblahg.com

In addition to that, listing favorite books comes with weird elements. I was just recently amused by this hilarious debate on Reddit about how David Foster Wallace's favorite books could not have been the genre books he lists because he's a smart guy. He never claimed that everyone should read these as brain-enhancing and enlightening classics; they were books he enjoyed. But there must be something else to it... He must be ironic! Or, or... he's trying to assimilate himself as the common man, so that we mere mortals won't be intimidated by his huge brain. That's it! Phew... Now back to secretly enjoying Janet Evanovich behind my carefully crafted, fake Paradise Lost covers. God forbid anyone enjoys bestsellers.

That debate helped me understand my own favorites. My favorite books are completely different from the ones I might list should people ask me, "What would you recommend?" When someone asks about my favorites, I think back to books I have read more than once; books that have become important to me for a variety of reasons. As an example, I will not recommend Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to a person who is not at all interested in silly sci-fi humor, although it's a book (series?) I grew up reading and re-reading, chatting with my old  friends about it and making new friends over it. Later in college, it became the please take me to a happy place book I had to read every ten or twenty pages of horror I was subjected to in the Wasp Factory. I have a hard copy of the collection, but I bought a Kindle edition as well in case I need a bit of cheering up on the road, wherever I am.

npr.com

Add to that the brain space the books I've read most recently are taking up: I was tempted to just list the ones that had impressed me in recent years, right about the time when my reading habits had dramatically shifted (this seems to happen to me every 5 years or so). And all these nonfiction books kept on wanting to creep in!

Anyway.

Here are mine, in no particular order, and while typing most of them I thought, "Man, I need to read that again..." Except LOTR. I've read it so many times that I do not have any immediate need to read it again.

1. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
3. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
5. Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson (although... the older I get, the more I like Cryptonomicon. It's like a Skywalker vs Solo kind of a thing)
6. The World According to Garp by John Irving
7. American Girl by Monika Fagerholm
8. Vihreä tukka by Aila Meriluoto
9. The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
10. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

The more I look at this list, the more doubtful I'm of some of them... Maybe I don't have "favorites" at all; just books I really like when I'm in a certain mood.

Riikka Pulkkinen's True and Peter Watts's Blindsight almost made it to the list: I loved every single sentence in these extremely different books and I can see rereading them both over and over--but it's too soon to call them favorites. I'll need to wait for the initial infatuation to die down.

Quite frankly, this is the main reason why almost all of the books I have listed aren't anything I've read within the past two years. I just finished that Steve-O biography and right now, I feel like it's among my favorite nonfiction books ever--but will I feel that way in two months? We'll see.

EDIT: I cannot believe I completely and utterly forgot the book that I always tell people is one of my favorites: The Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card. See!

Found in Translation. How Language Shapes our Lives and Transforms the World by Nataly Kelly and Jost Zetzsche

www.theclause.org

Although this title may sound grandiose, especially for people who may not use a second language, it's not as hyperbolic as you may think.

The authors of this nifty little book document well the variety of work translators perform, often undetected by the public at large. After all, being a translator is not unlike being an IT professional: when what you've done is done well, people do not even notice you exist. Mistranslate one word, and the world goes down in flames. Well, almost. It has been known to cause millions of dollars spent in rebranding an image or a moment of highly flammable situations at the UN council.

It's a great book for people who think of translators as working primarily on newspapers, novels or nonfiction books, but it's also a book for translators: it validates our work and made me feel gosh darned good!

Then again, I honestly had a slight moment of PTSD reading about the interpreter who helps 911 callers. The first (and consequently the last) time I have been in a situation like that was when I had to tell a patient about the options she had for the rest of her life--which were counted in mere minutes. My palms were sweating a good half hour after the call, and I retreated back to working with software manuals and chemical labeling. My hat's off to interpreters who make those phone calls.

Luckily, Kelly and Zetzsche are good at switching gears when the topic gets too heavy. As a counterweight to the medical, legal and political stories they cover how translators all over the world dealt with the anagram name Lord Voldemort in Harry Potter; how The Simpsons is translated and subtitled into Finnish and by whom; and why Ikea's bathroom furnishings rub the Danes the wrong way.

Some of my favorite stories about translation challenges in the book are about marketing, such as this iPod Shuffle's marketing image, which was the small device between two fingers and the words "small talk" underneath:

Just two basic words. Easy to translate, right? [...] If you had to describe the phrase small talk to someone who did not understand it, what words would you use? Chances are, you would discuss the importance of exchanging pleasantries. You might describe asking someone about the weather. Basically, you'd be describing something superficial, and perhaps unimportant. How would that translate exactly, and would your explanation of the concept reflect well on Apple? [...] In cases like Apple's, an entire atmosphere of content must be translated to support those customers who speak other languages and want to know how to use their products.

You'll need to read the book to find out the clever solutions!

The book also interviews simultaneous interpreters at the UN and their favorite gaffes, and talks to people taking part in automated translation campaigns that help relief organizations in receiving accurate and current information on disease outbreaks or natural catastrophes in hard to reach areas.

To put the gist of the book shortly, the device you are reading this entry from has either been localized into your language, or into another language, so that a person from another country can access the same information as you. Translation is about leveling the information play field, from ads selling rejuvenating creams and make-up to agreements between warring nations.

Professional Idiot. A Memoir by Steve "Steve-O" Glover

http://www.spl.org

Over the years, lots of people have said that my grammar and spelling are too good for it to actually be me writing the words I post. The fact is that I grew up attending super top-notch schools (I was the son of a corporate executive, who wasn't initially thrilled about my career path). My dad also gave me two choices the summer I turned 16: get a summer job, or go to secretary school to learn how to type. I skated to secretary school so fuckin fast it was incredible. In short, it's me, it's always me-- I think anybody who ever authorizes another person to communicate as them is a fucking moron. Love, Steve-O
From Steve-O's Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

Just a couple of entries ago I said I don't read biographies. Well, here's my second one in a short while!

If you are unfamiliar with Steve-O, please don't Google Image his name because... yeah, just don't. He is one of the guys in the hit MTV series Jackass, where guys kicked each other in the nuts, rode trikes off skating ramps, and made each other puke on camera. 

The reason why I even clicked on Steve-O's AMA was because of my guilty pleasure: I love watching Jackass, or even better, Wildboyz.

Wildboyz was a ridiculous show where Steve-O and Chris Pontius traveled the world in pseudo-David Attenborough nature documentary settings, only to get their rightful comeuppance from wild animals. So when I saw Steve-O's words above in the AMA--you know, the guy's who walks on stilts and gets coconut crabs to nip at his butt cheeks--I had to read this memoir that was mentioned in the AMA thread.

It is so good.

Now, you might expect it to be a high-fiving tale of becoming famous for doing stupid crap on TV while possibly high on a variety of drugs. Well, it is very much that, but it displays a level of humility I was not expecting at all. It's as if Steve-O sat in front of his computer to type up this memoir as an exercise in paying his dues to people he screwed over in the past because he was so selfish and out of control. It takes a lot to admit that you have behaved poorly, instead of blaming the behavior on anyone or anything else around you.

I guess that's what I found refreshing in this memoir. It's well written, extremely entertaining and funny, but it's also self-deprecating and honest. You can tell it's his story in his own words, expletives included when they are needed--once you get over him having a tone of voice that is not just raspy laughter. The man lived many of his formative years in London, so you even get a bit of British dry humor in the mix. Just as you think his attempts at being famous can't get any more absurd, there's a chapter titled OK, Who Wants to Hear Me Rap?

Although I had some good laughs, the bits toward the end are pretty rough to read: Steve-O has to largely quote other people, including his dad and sister, as he has barely any recollection of the time himself: he was constantly high on a cocktail of drugs, paranoid about voices and raving about other dimensions. Classic Philip K. Dick stuff. His former cast members had to arrange a fairly aggressive intervention and have him committed, which no doubt saved his life.

Professional Idiot is probably not the first book people would think of buying as a Christmas, birthday or Valentine's gift to anyone (the photos in it... sheesh!), but it's a great reflection on the desire to be the center of attention. In its core, it's about a kid who convinced himself early on he would just disappoint others around him with his actions, so why not go all the way and be the craziest person anyone could ever meet if that granted attention.

By the way, Steve-O is still goofing around and doing crazy stunts, so don't think that he regrets everything.

If you need a gateway to reading Steve-O, here is short HuffPo post about writing the memoir.

Also, a library plug: if you have an eReader and you do not venture to the library that often, check to see if your library has made eBook borrowing available. The paper copy of this memoir had multiple holds on it, so I downloaded it straight to my Kindle from the Seattle Public Library as an eBook loan. Perfect!

My Sister, My Love. The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike by Joyce Carol Oates

* The canny reader will note that there must be a reason for highlighting this eccentric individual who appears fleetingly in this chapter as both "kindly" and somewhat sinister. Keep the rubbery-lipped young man in mind! (If I were a literary writer, I could assume that readers were primed to read my prose with, well--reverence, and care. But I am not, and so I can't. But note that nothing in this document is extraneous.)

For those readers--potentially, millions!--with an avid interest in American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been waiting. 

Oates is mean.

This story pinches and needles the reader constantly by making very explicit jabs at people being obsessed with celebrities and gruesome high-profile crimes, or at snooty readers who would not give a book in this genre--essentially, true crime--typically the time of day.

The latter is the best kind of mean. Because the book is written from the view point of a heavily medicated older brother of a 6-year-old figure skater prodigy who was found murdered in their home, the supposed author Skyler Rampike fills the story with footnotes, notes to the editor, and sarcastic apologies if he is not writing the story of a murdered girl in as gripping a way as the audience might want or, alternatively, not as stereotypically as people obsessed with reading trashy true crime stories would like.

Many times Skyler stops his recounting of the story to say, ah-hah, you thought I would use cheap suspense here, didn't you? Well no fear, the person I'm talking about is just X, so you don't have to feel suspense anymore.

It's a frigging Brechtian opera, this story. Many times, Skyler throws in sarcastic cliffhangers insinuating that he will reveal the true nature of the murder in the next chapter, with a cliched "Read on, dear reader" at the end of it. You kind of feel bad about being a shitty person; interested in social porn, you know?

On the surface, this novel is a meandering memoir of a brother who has been silently accused in the media of murdering her own sister but in his medicated haze he is quite unable to write in a linear fashion about his experiences and the dreams and memories that are brought about by sudden triggers. He may write down something shocking and on the next page plead the reader to forget about it, because he is not sure where the heck that memory came from and whether it was even true. 

The same images are repeated over and over again: the description of footage from his sister's, Bliss Rampike's, skating competitions that similarly were repeated over and over again in news, talk shows and gossip shows after her death; the description of the final family portrait that the family took, which also was reprinted in tabloids multiple times and which Skyler cannot escape even ten years after the murder took place.

If you are wondering why this all sounds really familiar, it's because this all kind of happened in real life, which makes this book even... meaner? I just started looking into this old case, and my goodness: everything down to the ransom note and suspicions are echoed in this fictitious story. 

Oates is able to make the metafiction work, while still writing a pretty damned good thriller. There are a few genuinely chilling moments, where suddenly you remember a single word from a few chapters ago that now has become a clue to who the real murderer was. 

It's one of those stories where any reader can make it their own: you can read it as a narrative about obsessing over celebrities and trashy gossip without caring how someone's life can be ruined over it. It can also be read as criticism to medicating our youth instead of letting them feel real feelings: Skyler was medicated for a variety of issues even before his sister was murdered, whereas basically he was just angry about his parents' behavior and absence in his life. It definitely addresses parents who vigorously live through their children without listening to their actual needs. It can also be read just as a creepy whodunnit.

The previous Oates I read was very different: although it sort of concentrated on a crime and a family living through the crime as well, the mood was much more dreamlike and just sad. This one is raw, angry and, like I said, mean. It's a bully of a book. If Oates can adopt such different voices and styles this easily, I can't wait to read more from her, no matter how upsetting the stories are.

The Pact. A Love Story by Jodi Picoult

fictiondb.com

James stared into [his patient's] dilated, distorted eye. He nodded, suddenly drained of all his earlier enthusiasm. [...] The panel at the New England Journal of Medicine would rescind the award when they learned about his suicidal son, on trial for murder. Surely you did not pay homage to a vision specialist who had not seen this coming.

Romeo and Juliet is often referred to as a tale of undying, forever love. The Pact is a story about realistic love and what happens when teenagers are mesmerized by the romantic notion of undying love.

Don't let that cheesy cover fool you. Jodi Picoult is excellent at writing about terrible things happening to good people, who then have to make tough choices. Her stories do not have a finger-wagging morality about them but instead, they are introspective: she plants thoughts that hopefully will make us readers understand why someone would make a completely opposite choice from ours, even if we do not agree at all with that choice. The stories teach empathy.

The Pact begins with a death and one botched-up death: one of the teenagers in this young lovers' suicide pact actually survives to the relief and subsequent horror of the four parents, who had lived as neighbors and watched their kids grow together and eventually fall in love.

Saying that this is a modern day Romeo and Juliet would be too cliched, but I can't help it! This time, though, readers are left to deal with the aftermath of such a suicide pact when people frantically look for anyone to blame. Surely the blame lies in the finger that pulled the trigger? Friends? Society? The parents who had been oblivious to any problems their kids may have?

The story begins on the evening of the death, and moves forward in real time in chapters titled "Now" to look into the parents' survival strategies and the lies they tell themselves, and to whether this was not a suicide but a cold-blooded murder. "Now" is intermingled with chapters titled "Then," which begin from the day the teenagers' parents became neighbors. The stories move forward until the final day in court in present time, where the last "Then" chapter takes the place of the accused's turn at the witness stand, recounting the day of the death.

It was fascinating to read about how these characters broke down and what lengths they went to in order to either protect a mythology about their family or to attempt to live a normal life again. Some of it is absolutely horrific, and I wound up hating some of the characters for being so unreasonable and calculatingly evil. But I also understood why they ended up that way.

The ending is quite genius in its unsettling nature. I actually was surprised at how I did not foresee the ending (and I'm not referring to the decision at the trial--anyone has a 50/50 chance of guessing it right). The final pages felt like cruelty coming from the hands of the author who so lovingly wrote about the protagonists, but it made so much sense and I would not have wanted any other ending. Dangit, Picoult was able to make me empathize even with her decision to write the story the way she did! See how good she is?

The Art of Drew Struzan by Drew Struzan and David J. Schow

Before reading this highly personal art book I saw the documentary Drew: The Man Behind the Poster (available on Netflix). Although I was familiar with almost all of his movie-related work, I did not know who he was until then. For reference, he made these: original Star Wars. Back to the Future. Blade Runner. Harry Potter.

I went to the library to pick up his book to stare at details in his art up close, now that the documentary had educated me on what all was involved in producing the images. I did not expect the book to be more than a coffee table book on art, so it shocked me with its honesty and, quite frankly, justified bitterness.

See, Struzan was pretty much screwed over by a business partner for almost a decade. You'll learn about this in the documentary. In addition, although directors were flocking to him, begging him to paint a poster for their upcoming movies because they knew he's the only one who would get it right, the studio execs would usually say sorry, but we went with another poster instead because Struzan's work was "too artistic." Instead, you get quickly made movie posters that just show the main characters standing or sitting in line, probably against a white background. Or just closeups of the main actors' faces.

To give a specific example, Pan's Labyrinth was one that received the "too artistic" criticism: the art was requested by the director, Guillermo del Toro, and Struzan painted an image based on del Toro's sketch. Del Toro loved it; the studio decided to use this instead. It's not bad either, but it just has a different feel to it.

As Struzan describes his posters he delves into the background politics of each. It is quite upsetting to read about a man who is absolutely amazing at what he does, highly revered for his skills by others and even his subjects, but then swept aside for the purpose of dumbing down the content for the mass audiences--which the audience did not ask for.

The more I thought about his work the clearer it became why he was so sought after: his posters embody the feel of the movie you are going to watch, not just a Photoshopped head of the main character to tell you that yup, that guy's going to be in it. If I recall right, this also becomes evident in the documentary in the way people speak about his work. 

It is great to have an artist in the popular culture scene whose skills go way beyond just technique. Then again, it is unfortunate that he has been pushed aside to retirement, where he now focuses on creating other art on his spare time. Art is divided enough into popular and high art, as if those two should never mix--let there be Struzan, who bridges the gap. 

Orchid Fever. A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust, and Lunacy by Eric Hansen

There is something distinctive about the sight and sound of a human body falling from the rain forest canopy.

This is the first sentence in this quite funny and intriguing book about people who are orchid freaks, and the book just gets better from the first sentence onward.

Hansen follows orchid lovers around the world wide-eyed in a cloud of disbelief at what he is witnessing: he goes on clandestine orchid finding trips and interprets to the locals in the rain forest that yes, these silly men with their collapsible toilets and power bars have paid thousands of dollars just to take a picture of a flower instead of using it, say, for medicine. He also describes the erotic nature of orchid lovers' conventions, where he is surrounded in the darkness by silent fidgeting, heavy breathing and occasional gasping when new orchid hybrids are introduced to appreciative murmur. Although Hansen finds his subjects and obsession over a flower hilarious he slowly realizes that he has become obsessed himself: in hunting down all of the interesting characters who occupy the hall of fame in the world of orchid lovers.

Hansen not only makes gentle fun of his subjects when it is appropriate--when the levels of absurdity are just too high not to--but he also appreciates the passion with which these orchid lovers lead their lives. The book is less of a history of orchid lunacy and more of a picture of human obsession and where it can lead people, from punching a security official in the kisser at the airport and getting detained to finding out that people who make laws about importing and preserving orchids seem to have ulterior motives that serve only themselves (quelle surprise!).

Hansen's carefully placed dry humor is guffaw-inducing, yet I did not emerge from reading this as if orchid collectors and growers were a butt of a joke. On the contrary: while orchid obsession, as any obsession, can get quite ludicrous, under Hansen's guidance it all also makes sense.

I highly recommend Orchid Fever for anyone who is looking for an entertaining read about the absurdity of humans, even if you couldn't care less about flowers.

The Whistleblower by Kathryn Bolkovac with Cari Lynn

Jim [...] tromped straight to the beer, then splashed his way into the pool, all the while telling us that he had already been on one peacekeeping mission in Bosnia and had liked it so much he was signing on for another. Then, in the same sentence in which he described how scenic Bosnia was, he said, "And I know where you can get really nice twelve- to fifteen-year-olds."

This is what Kathryn Bolkovac heard before the police-force-for-hire group from the US had even left for a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, and it would only get worse once she landed and was made the head of trafficking investigation: she found that while UN and its contracted police force from the United States was supposed to help democratize Bosnia and keep its citizens safe, it was also actively protecting those contractors who just happened to be abusing a broken country by taking part in buying trafficked women and keeping them in their bedrooms, or denying that trafficking was happening at all.

Although she does win in court at the end for having been discharged from service for whistleblowing, it is extremely depressing to see the same people who were destroying or falsifying evidence or even engaging in these illegal activities being returned to their old posts, but in another country. The corrupt people from Bosnia were later sent to Afghanistan. Great.

The horrifying topic aside, it's a great nonfiction book that has an urgency about it. Bolkovac wrote it together with an author, which was a good call: I have read historical nonfiction by people involved in the events they write about, but if they are not writers themselves their message will fall to deaf ears due to terrible or boring writing. One book I read should have been absolutely fascinating, but the author kept on repeating the same phrases and jokes he apparently found hilarious and no editor had told him to cut them out, and he also meandered into details that weren't really relevant, making the whole book a weird mixture of random anecdotes with no head or tail. It became a jibber-jabber of a senile mind, to be frank. (I am not going to tell you which book this was).

Not so with this one: there is a good structure to this book, which begins with Bolkovac fearing for her life and being hidden by her colleagues as they have heard death threats being flown around in the office. It reads like a mystery thriller with the exception that it's all real. I'm sure Bolkovac had numerous anecdotes she could have added to illustrate her plight and the whole appalling situation, but instead of oversaturation she (or the author who helped her, Lynn) decided to focus on effectiveness of the message.

I read this 229 pager in 24 hours and it was hard to put down. Of course the topic itself is captivating: how can this be happening? But the writing definitely played a part, and I'm glad that Bolkovac's story got an appropriate outcome.

You can find out more about here on her website: http://www.bolkovac.com/

Kerjäläinen ja jänis by Tuomas Kyrö

Arto Paasilinna is possibly the best known Finnish author out there: his 1975 novel The Year of the Hare has been translated into 18 languages and I have met multiple French people who have praised him to me (one had come to Finland to take Finnish lessons just because he was madly in love with Paasilinna's novels). For a meek Finn, that equals great success. I read quite a lot of Paasilinna in my teens, but The Year of the Hare is the only one I have reread since.

Kerjäläinen ja jänis is not written by him, but before saying anything about the novel Paasilinna needs to be brought in, because this modern retelling/spoof of the classic novel gets meta like no other.

The Year of the Hare begins when a reporter called Vatanen runs over a hare on his way to an assignment, gets out of the car and then something snaps: the meaninglessness of his reporting job juxtaposed with the hurt animal who just lives in the moment inspires Vatanen to grab the hare and disappear into the forest right there and then. Introspective and humorous adventures ensue, when the reporter and the hare hide from Vatanen's past and future as best they can. Here is a link to the New York Times' review from 2002 about the novel and Paasilinna in general.

That was 1975. Here is Tuomas Kyrö in 2011 with his "The Beggar and the Hare." The title made me snort as I immediately knew what the contents would be about, and I giggled even more when I read the protagonist's name, Vatanescu. Kyrö is not even trying to be subtle.

Vatanescu is a Romanian man brought to Finland by a human trafficker to beg for money on the streets of Helsinki. He speaks a bit of English, has no ID and his only desire is to make enough money to go back home and buy his son soccer shoes. He is a complete outsider because he can barely communicate with others, least with Finns don't understand begging on the street, finding it revolting.[1]

One day Vatanescu escapes and saves an injured rabbit from the hands of ruffians who were trying to capture this menace to wildlife and sell it to the zoo for tiger fodder.[2] Unlike in Paasilinna's story where the hare shows Vatanen in its mute ways what life could really be like once you get off the rat race, Vatanescu sees himself in the rabbit: an unwanted outsider in Finnish society who has nowhere to go.

He begins to meander from place to place aimlessly with the rabbit in his pocket. He has no idea that he is slowly becoming a celebrity when cell phone snapshots of him and the rabbit begin to surface in social media and go viral.

While Paasilinna's Vatanen was fighting against society's pressures on the modern human, Vatanescu expects nothing and is trying to be nobody. He has no grand plan, no philosophical revelations. He has no say in it when Finns put him on a pedestal and make a mythical creature out of him, the cardboard stand-in for Finnishness that may not really exist. They want him to be the Vatanen Finns could never be.

I began reading Kerjäläinen ja jänis thinking that it is a modern retelling, written tongue in cheek. The further I got, the more the novel became a satire of Finns and our pining for mythical symbols to stand for ourselves when real life gets too real. All cultures have their mythologies that are retold to boost a national image that may or may not be true. Vatanescu is ironically what Finns want to be seen as, without actually being anything like him. He even becomes a pawn for populist politicians to appeal to voters.

Stylistically, Kyrö has Paasilinna's tropes down: the ridiculous names, laconic everyday philosophers, almost magical encounters when people connect with each other. I was first annoyed by some of the portrayals of foreigners in Kerjäläinen (I mean, "Ming Po" is supposedly a Vietnamese name? Come on...), but now I'm thinking that perhaps this was intentional, satirizing how Finns see foreigners in Finland.

I can imagine people having a knee-jerk reaction to this novel, thinking that The Year of the Hare is too sacred to be used as a framework for making gentle fun of modern Finns. I have enjoyed The Year of the Hare for its themes and its black humor--plus, it's a really tiny novel and a quick read (I should probably read it again). It's not the novel's fault that it has become larger than life for Finns. Kyrö does not make fun of the novel--he satirizes Finns who are in love with The Year of the Hare.

Reading Kyrö's version was a bit tough with its kill your darlings approach to the original, but at the same time I think it's a healthy approach culturally. There is nothing wrong with Finns making fun of themselves as a whole for a change, instead of poking fun at subcultures and foreigners while letting the reader identify with the protagonist; letting the reader remain safely in the in-group.


[1] In the mid-2000s, Romanians began to appear on the streets of Helsinki, begging for money. The only unwanted attention on the streets up until then were drunk Finns who might curse at you or people trying to enlist you to give money for some noble cause. That kind of begging was slightly tolerated, but when the Romanians came... who are these foreigners?

[2] A genuine problem in Helsinki: the hares are OK, but selfish people began to let pet rabbits loose in the parks because they got tired of petting them. They obviously bred like rabbits and became such a nuisance to the park and its flora that the rabbits had to be gotten rid of. A good real-life illustration of how Finns want to still be regarded as the great lovers of nature, but actually do silly things like these: letting pet rabbits wreak havoc in nature (while probably also making fun of any environmentalists for wanting to preserve natural landscape--those damned tree huggers!)

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Below is nothing but spoilers, because the reasons I found this story both infuriatingly annoying and genius cannot really be talked about without giving the story away. If you want to be surprised by this novel and plan on reading it, come back once you are done with it. I knew nothing about Atonement before I started reading it besides that it was highly acclaimed and it was made into a movie. Now I wonder how on Earth they made it into a movie...? Anyway!

***spoiler galore begins here****

I almost did not finish this novel, because stylistically it was annoying as hell with its prose that was so close to purple that I was wondering whether I'd been given the wrong book to read and not the praised Atonement. I understand taking liberties with punctuation for artistic reasons, but having multiple pages of text be paragraphs upon paragraphs of seemingly just one sentence, comma-spliced to hell was just a headache to read.

The twist at the end, however, is that that's how it was meant to be! Once I read the very last pages it dawned on me: it was crappy on purpose! So genius! But unfortunately, it's like making misogynist jokes ironically--you're still making misogynist jokes. Or growing a mustache ironically: you're still... You know what I mean.

The story of Atonement takes place in 1935 and focuses on a thirteen-year-old girl, who loves putting up plays and lives in a sort of a fantasy land of her own. She sees her sister have an encounter with a man they all grew up with; a servant's boy. The man gives this little kid a note to give her sister, but realizes that he had given her the one that was extremely inappropriate, written in crazed passion. Of course the little brat reads the note and begins to fantasize that this man they once knew is an animal who should be arrested for being too dangerous around women.

When some other kids disappear during a dinner party and another girl is raped, the brat claims to have seen the young man do it. The raped girl claims she saw nothing. The police come and take the young man away, professing his love to the brat's older sister.

Then, cue war time. Now, I admit: this is where I almost stopped reading the story, because it went from purple prose to the most boring thing I have ever read. I started looking for sentences that would have some substance in them, but everything was just blahdeblah. I felt like McEwan was just going through the motions and putting something on paper. And the cockney accents on paper, my god...

We follow the young man who has been imprisoned and now is part of the war effort, and we follow the brat who is now eighteen and a nurse, feeling a bit guilty about what she did.

Toward the end, the brat decides to contact her sister and tell her of an elaborate scheme to reveal who the real rapist was and clear the young man's name. Too bad this is years later and the whole family has been torn apart. The sister throws the brat out who swears that everything will be OK once she confesses.

Then, the story ends there with the brat's initials and the year 1997.

The next page is from her diary, or a letter--I can't remember--where as an old woman she reminisces about her childhood. She says that since the awful events of that day she has been writing and writing this story to get it published, to get the real culprit imprisoned and to be atoned (geddit???) for her sins. Unfortunately, her publishers have always turned her down, saying that she cannot use real names, or she cannot make the ending this or that because of libel, but finally now, as an 80-year-old, she has finished the version she wants to publish. The real rapist is still out there, an old man, but our former brat is dedicated to publishing her story once he dies. She also tells us that the real story was much sadder than her newest version, where the young lovers live happily ever after.

We also see letters from her publisher commenting on her writing style and her plot points.

So, you see? The novel begins the way the 13-year-old girl, full of fantastical thoughts, would have written a book: pompous style, pseudo-poetry with comma overload and imagery. The older and more ashamed of her actions she gets and the worse the real life events become, the more stilted is her writing, which eventually crescendos into an adult's fantasy of having everything be all right, and her getting absolution from her sister whom she has alienated and wronged with her stupidity as a kid.

And hey. The brat ended up being an unreliable narrator--my weakest of weak spots in literature. How could I not like it?

I thought that was genius, and I would now read it again seeing that it was all wonderfully on purpose. I almost started reading it again right away after finishing!

However... Is it enough that five pages at the very end reveal why the rest of it was annoyingly written? After all, what I still ended up doing was slog through prose that made me want to throw the book away in disgust.

Yes. It is the best worst book I have read in a while.

EDIT:

Oh my pete.

What if...

What if the last few pages were an atonement for the rest of the novel?

If that would be the case, this novel would be even more amazing!