Einstein's Tongue, The Journal of Whimsical Genius

Väinö Linna’s trilogy is almost universally read in his native Finland, where the volumes were first published between 1959 and 1962. By the time he died, in 1992, they had been translated into twenty-five languages, none of which was English. Thanks to translator Richard Impola and Borje Vahamaki, publisher of Aspasia Books and director of the Finnish Studies Program at the University of Toronto, that oversight has been corrected. The last volume of the three was released, in English, on May 22, 2003, to little fanfare, unless one happened to be at the reception at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C. that day. In the United States, the paperback editions of the books are available on Amazon.com, but remain otherwise difficult to find. On a recent search of the inter-library loan system, it appeared that less than five copies of each volume are held by participating circulating libraries in the U.S.

Linna is consistently artful as he weaves narrative threads of vastly differing scale into a seamless fabric. The first sentence of the first book, “In the beginning, there was the swamp, the hoe, and Jussi,” presents a single agent and the means of a simple act upon the land, as well as the land itself, in an act of creation that reflects God’s own act of Creation. Jussi Koskela is an orphan grown to hard-working manhood. As a boy, he arrived at the parsonage at Pentti’s Corners with his ailing mother — two beggars among the thousands of displaced and hungry people then wandering Finland. The minister’s wife invited them in from the road and his exhausted mother promptly died in the sitting room. Jussi grew up as a field servant for the parsonage. When we first see him, in the swamp with his hoe, he has been granted the opportunity to drain and clear the swamp and, perhaps, eventually, earn the ownership of the land. The separation of the water and the soil is his analog to God’s separation of the heavens and the earth, but Jussi rarely gets his day of rest. His family’s struggle bears a strong similarity to Finland’s tenuous independence, first as a Duchy then as a Republic, bordered by stronger powers. The inauspiciously founded Koskela dynasty shares, for the seventy years the trilogy covers, the country’s destiny and, like Finland, struggles to maintain its independence, its land, and its character, despite the loss of men to war.

It is also a story about intimacies and distances among people. Linna’s work, when it is mentioned at all, is often said to be that of a “lesser Tolstoy.” I was first drawn to read Under the North Star because of these comparisons. I have an affection for Tolstoy, not for the big, sweeping battle scenes and the echo of orchestral music that fills the reader’s head, but for the delicate, authentic gestures, and the nuanced thoughts and emotions of real women and real men, in small moments, in small rooms. Now, having read Linna, I am not persuaded of the “lesser” part of the claim. I believe he at least rivals Tolstoy as a master-observer of humanity and inhumanity. Linna is just as nuanced, but the society he describes, from intimate knowledge, is the one Tolstoy romanticizes: the rising peasant class. When Linna’s characters laugh, it is raw and real, and when they cry, they are thoroughly human, yet also imbued with some of the animal nature that comes of living as close to the land as they do to one another.

Each member of the four generations of the Koskela family and of a large cast of secondary characters is as painstakingly rendered as if he (or she, I hasten to add, as the women are brilliantly written) were a miniature painted with a tiny brush. Each has a place, however, on an enormous canvas of history, that includes wars and general strikes, huge upheavals in national leadership, the social order and cultural values. If it were a painting, it would be of the kind that can keep the viewer intrigued for weeks of pure observation.

I read Under the North Star at a friend’s suggestion and, while we should all have such friends, I am delighted to have this editorial opportunity to advance the cause of this work of literature, so well-loved in its own country and, so far, so comparatively neglected by readers in English.

It is not the only neglected gem, though. I have several other ideas for future Angela’s Picks, but if there is something I should consider for a future issue, please let me know by emailing submissions@einsteinstongue.com.

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Vol. I Issue #1 Spring 2008