Novel
Alastalon salissa
Not translated into English
Volter Kilpi · 1933
Synopsis
A Thursday in October in the 1860s, in the island parish of Kustavi. The big landowners gather in the drawing room of Herman Mattsson, master of Alastalo, who proposes that they build a large sailing ship, a barque, together. For six hours they weigh, calculate, remember and size one another up, and the book follows each of their thoughts. When a man crosses the room to take a pipe from the mantelpiece, the journey takes up more than seventy pages.
Context
Two volumes, more than nine hundred pages for six hours, and sentences that sometimes run to a whole page. It opens the archipelago cycle, which is completed by a collection of short stories from 1934 and a novel from 1937: the author returns in it to the Kustavi of his childhood, to its sailors and its captain-owners. It has been compared to Ulysses for its interior monologue, but Finnish critics find it closer to Proust. Elmer Diktonius wore himself out for fifteen years translating it into Swedish; Thomas Warburton's version appeared in 1997. There is no complete English translation.
Who it is for
Nine hundred pages in two volumes, in Finnish, in one of the slowest and most richly imagistic languages there is. One has to give up trying to move forward.
Prizes and reception
Often regarded as the best Finnish novel of all time, a rank given to it by a Helsingin Sanomat poll in 1992.