Novel
Putkinotko
Not translated into English
Joel Lehtonen · 1920
Opening lines
Savon eteläosassa, lähellä Karjalan heimon asuinseutujen rajaa, on kaunis ja karu paikkakunta.
In the southern part of Savo, near the border of the lands where the Karelian people live, there is a beautiful and barren district.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A scorching late-summer day in southern Savonia, on the Putkinotko farm. Juutas Käkriäinen, a lazy tenant farmer and moonshine distiller, holds it on lease from the bookseller Aapeli Muttinen and hopes that it will eventually come to him; his wife Rosina, by sheer willpower, keeps the house, the ten children and the animals going. In the evening Muttinen, a pessimistic philosopher, arrives at his villa with his mistress to see his tenants, and the two men clash over their agreement.
Context
It appeared first in two parts, in 1919 and 1920, then in the latter year in a single volume subtitled “portrait of a lazy home distiller and of a nasty gentleman”. It closes a trilogy opened by a novel of 1917 and a story collection of 1918. The model for the farm was the house at Inha, which Lehtonen had bought to house his mother and his half-brother: Juutas is drawn from this half-brother, Muttinen from the author himself. It has also been read as a study of the causes of the conflict of 1918, and it has often been staged.
Who it is for
A long novel, nearly six hundred pages in the modern edition, in Finnish, with no continuous plot: one day, two men, a great deal of conversation.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as its author's masterpiece, and, together with a novel by Volter Kilpi, the best known of the one-day novels of Finnish literature.