Nodes of Contemporary Finnish Literature

Front matter

THE FINNISH LITERATURE SOCIETY (SKS) was founded in 1831 and has, from the very beginning, engaged in publishing operations. It nowadays publishes literature in the fields of ethnology and folkloristics, linguistics, literary research and cultural history.

The first volume of the Studia Fennica series appeared in 1933. Since 1992, the series has been divided into three thematic subseries: Ethnologica, Folkloristica and Linguistica. Two additional subseries were formed in 2002, Historica and Litteraria. The subseries Anthropologica was formed in 2007.

In addition to its publishing activities, the Finnish Literature Society maintains research activities and infrastructures, an archive containing folklore and literary collections, a research library and promotes Finnish literature abroad.

Table of Contents

Foreword 7

LEENA KIRSTINÄ Introduction 9

PIRJO LYYTIKÄINEN Allegories of our World Strange Encounters with Leena Krohn 24

Foreword

Nx of Contemporary Finnish Literature is the sixth volume of the series of Studia Fennica Litteraria published by the Finnish Literary Society since 2003. It is a subseries of Studia Fennica, which was established in 1933. The series includes six thematic subseries: Anthropologica, Ethnologica, Folkloristica, Historica, Linguistica and Litteraria.

The goal of Studia Fennica Litteraria is to offer an internationally refereed English-language publication for studies on Finnish literature. The scope of the series is comparative and international. It aims to create a dialogue between Finnish and European literatures.

The volumes previously published in Studia Fennica Litteraria are as follows:

e Changing Scenes. Encounters between European and Finnish Fin de Siecle (Ed. Pirjo Lyytikäinen 2003)

e Women's Voices. Female Authors and Feminist Criticism in the Finnish Literary Tradition (Ed. Lea Rojola & Päivi Lappalainen 2007)

e Metaliterary Layers in Finnish Literature (Ed. Samuli Hägg, Erkki Sevánen & Risto Turunen 2008)

. The Emergence of Finnish Book and Reading Culture in the 1700s (Ed. Cecilia af Forselles & Tuija Laine 2011)

e Aino Kallas. Negotiations with Modernity (Ed. Leena Kurvet-Käosaar & Lea Rojola 2011)

Nodes of Contemporary Finnish Literature has a dual aim. On the one hand, its purpose is present to the reader some phenomena of recent Finnish literature and sketch some possible directions for future literary history; on the other hand, it also brings to the fore some young Finnish scholars in literature. The anthology could be a manual for students learning the Finnish language or studying Finnish culture at universities; in addition, it could make these literary phenomena accessible to others who are interested in these issues.

This anthology owes much to the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation and to the Finnish Literature Exchange (FILI) which have granted funds

Foreword for English translations and language checking. Thanks also to the Finnish Literary Society and its publication council for accepting it to the series of Studia Fennica Litteraria and for publishing it. The greatest of thanks to the authors of the articles, and to those who have helped with the English language revision and translation: Ph.D. Marlene Broemer; M.A. Michael Dutton; M.A. Susanne Kalajaiye; M.A. Pamela Kaskinen; M.A. Anne Langendorfer; M.A. Jennifer Nelson; B.A. Susanna Siitoin; Ph.D. Maija Kalin, the former director and M.A. Sirpa Vehviläinen, the assistant of the Language Centre of the University of Jyväskylä.

In Helsinki 9.2.2012 Leena Kirstinä

LEENA KIRSTINÄ

T? write any historical presentations of contemporary phenomena is a challenging, if not impossible, task. The perspective might be too short to understand them and their true relationships. However, the risk has been taken, thanks to Brian McHale, who introduced his and Randall Stevenson’s inspiring literary history project to the participants of the summer course at the University of Tampere in 2005. Its results have been published in the magnificent work titled The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English (2006). It represents a new way of thinking about literary history that has been undergoing changes since the Second World War.

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English does not survey the decades, literary movements, or national literatures; rather it presents a ‘spatial’ literary history, mapping ‘hot spots’ — crossroads in space and time - around which the works and movements of literature can be seen to arrange themselves.

The traditional positivist paradigm of literary history has been criticised during the last half of the 20" century, because ofits epistemological problems. The critics targeted literary histories, written in the spirit of nationalism and favouring canonised authors. They did not meet with approval, because they were normative and not historical; literature was separated from historical processes and connected with genial authors and their influence on others. Proponents of the New Criticism demanded competent literary analysis and interpretation.

New Criticism itself was interested in autonomous works, not in history. The premises of writing literary history needed then to be scrutinized, i.e. reception aesthetics paid attention to that literary reception and production should be taken into account. Structuralism promoted the idea to reflect on relations and to stop the flux of time in simultaneous moments. Post-structuralism found the way back to history via intertextuality, with the help of the chains of ideas, figures and tropes, used in literatures, that can be followed between times and places. This is where we are now.

Literatures as a network of relationships and communication seem to be traffic centres or smaller crossroads. Some works act like magnetic fields or form nodes. With the help of soft statistical data and by observing reception, one can try to locate such hot spots in literature. Obviously, every literary year has its own characteristics; some topics or matters attract more attention than others do, and some genre or stylistic traits rise to the fore. Literary prizes, based on the evaluations of expert readers, are signs that illustrate these trends. It is clear that the perspective from which literature is viewed by the observer influences her/his interpretations of the findings.

In this anthology, we study the situation in Finnish literature from the 1980s to the first decade of the new millennium. We want to observe the trends in Finnish or Finnish-Swedish language written prose, poetry or childrens literature. Obviously, our volume offers a highly limited view of the subject. There are initial observations; we must be satisfied, if we can form a valid hypothesis of some current nodes in contemporary literature.

During the chosen period, there were many turning points in global political history. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the two worldwide economic crises, and the bombing of the WTC towers in New York, 11.9.2001, have all influenced Finnish literature. There were also changes that were important to Finland itself, such as accession to the European Union in 1995. We are also aware of huge nuclear catastrophes (Chernobyl, Fukushima), and the earthquakes and tsunamis in Thailand and Japan, although we do not take them as starting points for our articles. The determination of the first junction year that we consider - 1985 - is not due to Mikhail Gorbachev's reform politics, but to the outstanding literary phenomena, which took place simultaneously at that time.

We will focus on the period from the 1980s onwards, because the 1980s was the decade when the modern really met the postmodern in Finland in different ways. There were ruptures and mixtures of modernism and postmodernism. There are sparkling bubbles in style and rebellious themes that led to new kinds of writing. Their connection with postmodernism was much discussed, especially after 1987, when Markku Eskelinen and Jyrki Lehtola published their pamphlet, Jülkisanat: Sianhoito-opas (Epilogue: Guide to Raising Pigs). These young men argued fiercely that Finnish literature and its research were out-of-date because of a continued fascination with and appreciation of mimetic realism. The debate was refreshing; however, their accusations were only partly correct, as the poetics of late realism and the modernism of the fifties were in the process of being renewed (see Anna Helle 2009).

As a sign that something new was coming, the most precious prize for literature, the first Finlandia Prize, was bestowed on Erno Paasilinna, a satirist, whose genre is one of the most weakly developed prose forms in the Finnish language. His satirical work Yksindisyys ja uhma (Solitude and Obstinacy) beat out the competition from established modernists in poetry, Bo Carpelan and Paavo Haavikko, and the new realists in prose, Veronica Pimenoff and Joni Skiftesvik.

1985 — the Crisis of Mimesis

The year 1985 points to changes even more clearly, when the following novels appeared: Leena Krohn's Tainaron. Postia toisesta kaupungista (Tainaron. Mail from Another City); Jórn Donner's Far och son (Father and Son); Matti Pulkkinen's Romaanihenkilón kuolema. Tarua ja totta eli ihmisen kuvaus (The Death of the Character. Legend and Truth or the Description of a Human Being), and Rosa Liksom's collection of short stories, Yhden yön pysäkki (One Night Stands). Krohn, Pulkkinen and Donner were also candidates for the Finlandia Prize. One common trait in these works is the epistemological guestions that were raised: what is true in fiction, what relation does fiction have with reality and what is fiction's reality? The guestion of representation has an important influence on their narrative strategies, and structures. The reader takes the subject position of the I-narrator, her/his identity and selfhood. The writing and speaking I-person conguered the central station in the above-mentioned prose works. They also share the world-view of disillusionment.

Leena Krohn abandoned everyday kitchen realism at the beginning of her career when writing childrens literature, which allows the use of fantasy (Vihreä vallankumous, 1970, The Green Revolution; Tyttö joka kasvoi ja muita kertomuksia, 1973, The Girl who Grew and Other Stories). She started to unify ontologically and epistemologically different materials, both fact and fiction, to her narratives. Her novels came to resemble collections of short stories, like her Pereat mundus. Romaani, eräänlainen (1998, Pereat mundus. One kind of novel) in which every separate episode features a character named Häkan, although he is always different. The Swedish name, Häkan has a connotation of a harmless but stupid person. Similarly, Krohn used the phrase, Pereat mundus which refers to a Latin phrase "Fiat justitia, et pereat mundus” and to its famous user Immanuel Kant. Kant paraphrases itas Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it”. This intertextual device creates peculiar humour in this apocalyptic novel where everyone is frightened and waiting for the end of the world.

Tainaron was Krohn's breakthrough in prose. It is a travel book and epistolary novel; it consists of extraordinary letters, sent to an unknown recipient by a female traveller when visiting the world ofthe insects. Tainaron connects — as is typical in Krohn’s work - the visible and invisible, the real and imaginary, and the human and Nature. She does not write science fiction, but philosophical allegories similar to those written by Italo Calvino. Thanks to Leena Krohn, fantasy in the broad sense of the word, has become accepted as an important part ofthe contemporary literary canon in Finland, and science fiction has risen in value because of the ecological themes with which Krohn has dealt in several works. She has, then, successors in writing postmodern allegory, such as Maarit Verronen and Risto Isomáki, who writes speculative prose.

Krohn very often examines in her oeuvre the ephemeral nature of selfhood and the continuous metamorphosis ofidentity. Identity is also problematized by Jórn Donner in Far och son; he especially focuses on the Finnish-Swedish identity of a solid I, which is represented to be weaker than before. The title ofthe novel suggests that there is a bond between the father and the son, and it is just that bond for which the son is longing, because he has not known his father who has died before his birth. The main person who resembles the real author is seeking himself in trying to write a novel in which he represents himself by another name as a fictive character of the manuscript. The Finnish-Swedish identity seems to have become postmodern, an empty place without a centre. In the next two decades, the so-called “cyclope novel” with its monologue style of narration was sidelined by the new generation of Finland-Swedish writing prose authors, such as Monika Fagerholm, Pirkko Lindberg, Fredrik Läng, and Lars Sund, to name a few, who learned to use metafictional and self-reflective strategies.

Continuing the change from realism in Finnish language literature of the 1980s, Matti Pulkkinen’s novel, Romaanihenkilön kuolema was labelled as postmodern. The authorial voice in the text itself describes the novel as “literarily bankrupt" and an “unfinished draft of an autobiographical antinovel”. At the beginning of the novel, the reader learns that this author, much like Pulkkinen himself, has published a book called The Power of the Word, which has received the literary prize granted by the Nordic Council. During the celebrations in Stockholm, Finland has suddenly been occupied by the Soviet Union, and the author determines that he will not return to his country. The frame of the novel is mere fantasy and suggests the genre of dystopic utopia. What the reader is reading are fragments, unbound pages and notebooks left behind in Finland on the bench of a small town park, that were found, edited and commented upon by a literary researcher who represents himself as "Makkonen" an old friend of the author, a fact confirmed by the manuscript itself.

Romaanihenkilón kuolema is a self-reflective metafiction that kills at the end all of its central figures, the author and the reader, in spite of the fact that they are paradoxically immortal on the pages, which is quite the opposite of the real reader's situation, as “Makkonen” is mocking. The novel contains essay-like passages and aphorisms on writing and reading. In its poetics, it tries to apply real politics to the novel form, as the author says. It is partly a book about travel to Berlin and Africa; its illustrations come from the journey to Germany. The newspaper pictures represent tragic events when people were trying to cross the wall (die Mauer) from the east to the west. In a sense, the novel is a political essay that criticises especially Soviet politics, the Finns' overly sympathetic attitude toward the Soviet Union (die Finlandisierung) and their naive belief in development aid to Africans. The I-figure, the narrator, by means of whom “the world is written itself’, continually exceeds the borders of reality and fiction speaking of living and dead artists, politicians and authors. Pulkkinens novel is a genre-blending type of fiction; according to the narrator, the novel as a genre is omnivorous like a pig. To this poetical definition, the young writers, Eskelinen and Lehtola, showed their admiration in the subtitle of their polemical book A Guide to Raising Pigs.

Contrary to the important critics’ expectations, Romaanihenkilön kuolema was not awarded the Finlandia Prize that year; rather, it was granted to Donner's anti-autobiography Far och son. After that, the prize was given only to poetry, until 1990 when the novel was again rewarded. In 1992 Leena Krohn' fantasy (Matemaattisia olioita tai jaettuja unia, Mathemathical Beings and Shared Dreams received it); then the rules of the competition were changed, so that only novels could be considered. The Union of Finnish Publishers, which finances the prize, wanted to promote the novel, the bestselling and most popular genre.

Krohn, Donner and Pulkkinen represent subjective I-narration and play with the relationship between language and reality, each having their own purpose and method. The post-structuralist idea of language, denying the transparency of language or its ability to evoke reality, was worked through in many forms of I-narration during the following decades. In 1985, Rosa Liksom guestioned even the reality of authorial identity by using a pseudonym. Her coming to the literary stage was a performative act: there were ten young women wearing uniforms and fur hats, among them the author, when the announcement of her first book was made. The author was not dead, as Roland Barthes would put it, but hiding, which of course, increased the medias interest in her. It was some years before her real identity was revealed to the public: Anni Ylávaara (b. 1958) in Ylitornio, Lapland, Finland, studied anthropology at the University of Helsinki, lived in, among other places, the free city of Kristiania in Copenhagen. Her pseudonym comes from that time. She is named Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg, the German revolutionary from the beginning of the twentieth century. The Swedish word liksom means both ‘like’ and as if’ in English. She used it when she was searching for the right word in Swedish.

Rosa Liksom created in Yhden yön pysäkki and in the following collection of novels Unohdettu vartti (1986, The Forgotten Quarter), a new kind of poetics, with her shortcuts. The intrigue is structured in episodic screens as in comic strips. Her stories depict without illusion young people who are trying to find some place to stay overnight, in the railway station in Helsinki or in other halls of European cities or in Lapland. The sections of her shortcuts are geographically indicated by the term, “67 northern latitude”. Those who come from the north are allowed to use their own colourful dialect, due to Liksom’s sometimes grotesque humour. They tell their unembellished life stories openly as if to a microphone, held out by an anthropologist. Her first novel, Kreisland (1995, Graceland), is also written as if it had been recorded by an interviewer. Mythical figures by their miraculous birth, Impi Agafina and Juho Gabriel as well as the seer, Mikri Vuoma, relate Lapland's historical development and at the same time Finland’s history as they have experienced it from the creation of the northern hemisphere to the time of the Russians’ space flights. Kreisland is a Lappish epic and at the same time an indirect parody, not only of Elias Lónnrots Kalevala (1849), but also of the whole genre of national epics. Liksom's special ability is to parody cultural-ideological discourses - religious, communist, capitalist - which the northern people, living between the west and the east, have been obliged to learn over the centuries in order to "develop themselves"; the word is put between parenthesis by the ironic novel itself.

Rosa Liksom vivifies a new orality in fiction, a phenomenon that was born paradoxically at the same time as electronic media developed (see Walter Ong 1988.) New oral narration pretends to be like narration around the campfire. Good examples of it are talk shows and other kinds of direct radio programs carried out by telephone conversations between the journalist and listeners. Big Brother-type TV programmes, which have also increased in Finland from the 1990s onwards, are another example of a creation that mimics campfire speech. Imitating spoken language in fiction is known everywhere in late-modern, Western prose (see, Monika Fludernik 1996), but it was very new and that is why it is still astonishing in Finland. Written Finnish is a somewhat new phenomenon. It was developed very quickly in the 19" century when Finnish had become the official language in 1863 and when it began to be taught at school on all levels. The use of dialect was allowed only in private communication. It did not belong to civilised speech manners, but the vocabulary of dialects gave its rich resources to be used properly in literature itself, but in written, not oral transcription. Liksom delivered dialect from purism’s oppression, and later on, dialects have also been approved in serious poetry (Heli Laaksonen). Highly canonised works like Kalevala and parts of the Bible were translated into some dialects; Matti Pulkkinen expressed himself in public interviews using his North-Carelian home dialect.

Some kind of new orality can also be seen in the changing narrator voices that seem like tracks side by side on a recording or a montage of different narrators' stories which resembles TV viewers changing channels with a remote. The father of this currently very popular technique is Hannu Raittila, who has written many radio plays. He has succeeded in giving to every person his/her own idiolect so that the reader can recognise when an old minister, a Hell's Angel, a car or sausage seller, an administrator of a sound reinforcement system, a member of a devout religious family or an academic researcher is speaking in his novel, Ei minulta mitään puutu (1998, I Lack Nothing).

1998 — Identity Discussion

The year, 1985, was a time of problematizing the poetics of realism, the codes of author, narrator, character, action and reader. The roles of author, narrator and reader are nearly interchangeable when writing or speaking alone takes the place of action and when nothing is happening outside the text. In the following decade, the primus motor in narratives does not really change; such concepts as identity, subjectivity and selfhood are still dominant. However, in 1998, there is a change in female writing, and social, national or international issues in literature.

The period from 1980-2000 meant first the explosion of individuality and subjectivity, the rebirth of individualism; Finnish cultural homogeneity was understood to be illusionary. Finland started to become a multicultural society because of the increasing number of immigrants coming, first from such African countries as Somalia. The resurrection of I meant that the omniscient narrator and objective observer were obliged to leave their positions in narration, or the author-like person was mixed with the story, as we have already seen. This meant that biographies, autobiographies, autofiction types of prose, memoirs, dairies, collections of letters, epistolary forms of novel, even e-mail novels were the most prominent genres. Some of them followed the rules of real biographies, in that the name ofthe author and the main figure was the same; some imitated the autobiographical genre and autofiction. Some authors such as Kari Hotakainen began to mock the publisher who wants the author to write intimate confessions, even though he has nothing to tell. He plays with the conventions of autobiography in his metafictional novel, Klassikko. Omaelämäkerrallinen romaani autoilevasta ja avoimesta kansasta (1997, The Classic, An Autobiographical Novel about a Driving and Open Nation). Inside, there is another book, which is the writer's dairy from his early career as a poet, titled “Tt was nice to live, but difficult to keep silent”.

The subjective focalisation of narration had also a function to empower the search for new strategies to express such social issues as womanhood, womens human rights and female biological and physical existence. First-person narration signalled the rise of a new kind of feminism. The first hot spot of I-writing was Sonja O. kävi täällä (1981, Sonja O. Was Here), a description of student bohemians of the 1970s, by Anja Kauranen (from 1997 onwards Anja Snellman). It was a critical and commercial success; its innovative feature is that the writer and the principal character is a young woman who had appropriated the old freedoms of men, as George C. Schoolfield (1998) put it. The novel has in its title already a reference to Pauline Reage's pornographic novel The History of O (Histoire d'O 1954), the sadomasochistic situation of which Kauranen turns upside down. Sonja O., confessions of Donna Juan, paints the Strindbergian fight between the heterosexual man and woman. Sonja O. kävi täällä was a turning point toward more courageous and, strictly speaking, female writing.

The doctrine of the eighties - the personal is political - was realised in an anarchic-feminist way by Anja Kauranen in her novel, Pelon maantiede (1995, The Geography of Fear). In order to defend women’s human rights against masculine hegemony, an academic group of assaulted women from the Department of Womens Studies begins to plan aggressive acts of revenge against men and to conquer for themselves the frightening places of city space. Pirkko Lindberg, writing in Swedish, made visible the inequality of the sexes in culture and society by rewriting Voltaires famous novel, Candide. As its predecessor, her Candida (1997) is a many-sided pamphlet of its time. The heroine of the novel is a young girl beginning her life as a servant in a 20" century, upper-class family. In many works, Anna-Leena Härkönen has described difficulties in female sexuality in Akvaariorakkaus (1991, Love in an Aquarium) and in motherhood in Heikosti positiivinen (2001, Slightly Positive). Maria Peura made her breakthrough by handling paedophilia in her first novel, On rakkautes ääretön (2001, Your Infinite Love) at the same time as everywhere in the world there was sensational news about child abuse.

The year, 1998, then means a change in Finnish feminist literature, although a similar tone as before persisted. It was understood that it is not an easy task for both sexes to grow up, because both of them must become accustomed to their physical existence and the outside world with its demands. Positive models or figures to deal with these issues were needed. Monika Fagerholm and Sirpa Káhkónen present feminist thinking without hostile attitudes to men. Fagerholms Diva (1998) empowers a young girl in her identity project by means of magical realism. Described in Naturalism the fate of a poor country maid was to be spoiled in the city. Kähkönen saves her life in her Mustat morsiamet (1998, The Black Brides). Black brides - a peasant womans wedding dress was earlier black — are not ruined; the seductive city life does not crush their hopes totally, because the city gives them opportunities to reach full citizenship, when they can earn their own living, and become the managers of their own lives. They have courage enough to express themselves in their own language, in this case in the eastern Finnish dialect. Kähkönen has written a sequel to her micro-history of Mustat morsiamet, now five volumes, in which she shows how women have endured the wartime difficulties thanks to their mutual solidarity.

In the overflow of female voices, it was first impossible to separate men's objections. Men write back! In 1999, manhood became a central theme in several collections of short stories such as Juha Seppäläs Suuret kertomukset (Ihe Great Narratives); Hannu Raittilas Miesvahvuus (Men Strength); and Jyrki Vainonens Tutkimusmatkailija ja muita tarinoita (Ihe Explorer and Other Stories). Novels like Kauko Róyhká's Ocean City and Markku Karpio's Naisten mies, (Ihe Ladies Man), are other examples. The main question was, how to be a man, not how to become a man. As a prime example of this discussion, is Kari Hotakainen's successful novel, Juoksuhaudantie (2002, The Trench Battle Road), which was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize. It makes visible what a mans life is after the womens fight for freedom and shows how a Finnish man fights for his own identity on two fronts: at home and in the society of the market economy.

The humour of Hotakainens novel, Juoksuhaudantie, is signalled by its title, which refers to a street in a Helsinki suburb, constructed by ex-service men after the Second World War and the main characters definition of himself as a home-service man. He is now the Home Angel, submitted to serve his wife. In this position, he makes a big mistake, when he once hits his wife. This thoughtless act ruins his personality. The novel describes in a tragi-comic way his desperate campaign to get back his family, especially his daughter, by means of a single-family home, which he begins to seek. His situation is hopeless, because his wife and the entire social system seem to be against him.

In the Finland-Swedish novel, Den finska mannens sorg (The Finnish Man's Sorrow 1996), Fredrik Lang lets the fellow sufferer of Hotakainen's hero speak, also in the first person, about his suffering from the female emancipation in Strindbergian self-pity; for him his wifes longing for her own space is like a form of adultery. The coherence of the Male ego has been broken into pieces; they are remembering, experiencing, hoping, dreaming, and hating narrators who cannot collect themselves in spite of their eagerness to tell their stories. Kristina Carlson's novel, Maan ääreen (1999, To the Edge of the World) explains why it is so. Her hero is the forefather of the man who relates the tale, but is unwilling to tell the truth, because of self-deception. He is Lennart Falk from the nineteenth century, seeking his Fortune from Siberian coal fields, by any means, and with the help of women. This man of modernisation understands, at last, that narratives do not unify his selfhood, because no one is one, but many, and different stories are told according to who is listening. One can shape one’s identity in general or to oneself, because human nature is not a clearly pre-determined unity, but one should be aware of ones own motives.

Did Community Disappear When the Individual Stepped Forth?

The foregrounding of the individual raised the question, if literature still had a common agenda in society. There are no more social classes or class struggle, it was said; communities consist of heterogeneous groups; even the poor and the rich include culturally different people. The detective genre was called a type of postmodern social novel, because social issues were found in this type of writing. Its popularity was increasing all over the world. Finnish crime literature by Leena Lehtolainen and Matti Rónkkó was successful in the wake of the famous Swedish authors like Henning Mankell and Liza Marklund. However, some authors such as the Finnish- Swedish author Kjell Westó believed, that it was possible to open the door from private experiences to general moral and social reflection and even to consolation (see Joni Pyysalo 2000).

Westó realized his ideas in Drakarna óver Helsingfors (Kites Above Helsinki), which describes the social development in the Finnish society from the sixties to the economic crises of the nineties from the point of view of the Bexar family's sons. He also fulfilled the long-lasting wish of the Finnish-Swedish minority to have an identity saga like the one that Väinö Linna had given to the Finnish-speaking majority in the trilogy, Täällä Pohjantähden alla (1958-1962, Here Under the North Star). That was Vädan av att vara Skrake (1999, 'The Misfortune of Being Skrake) and its sequel (2006, Där vi en gäng gátt, Where Once We Walked). These novels give a century's historical perspective on the language minority that was born from peasants and fishermen on the western coast of Finland and immigrants from Sweden, Germany, Scotland, Russia and other European countries. During the nineteenth century, this part of the population took part in forming Finland as a nation. Westó proves that the Swedish-speaking minority does not differ too much from the majority in their mentality. This difference can be expressed by comparing the family name Skrake with the Finnish name Koskelo which one member of the family has taken as his name because he has married a Finnish-speaking woman. Both words refer to a water bird, merganser, but in Finnish the name sounds softer than in Swedish. Westö's mission is also to convince the public that not all Swedish-speaking Finns belong to "bättre folk” (better people) as isa common misconception.