Novel
Urwind
Bo Carpelan · 1993
Synopsis
Fifty-three letters from Daniel Urwind, an ageing bookseller in Helsinki, to his wife, who has gone for an indefinite period to study and live more freely in the United States. In them he describes his daily rituals, the shop window that needs redoing, the housework, and these small things come close to the marvellous: memories of his wife, daydreams, bad dreams, dialogues with the living and the dead. In the attic of the building of his childhood sleep the relics of the past and the memory of the neighbours, and the wind from outside blows there.
Context
Published in 1993 by Schildt in Helsinki and Bonnier in Stockholm, it extends its author's experiments with the form of the diary. The hero's name plays on the original attic and the cosmic wind, and the book teems with allusions, to Schwitters's Merzbau, to Cézanne, to Kafka. It was translated into French by Gallimard in 1997, under the title Le Vent des origines, and into English by David McDuff. Rolf Holmström devoted a study to it in 1999, and eight scholars reread it in 2020 in the light of Bakhtin.
Who it is for
A novel of about two hundred and fifty pages, in Swedish, available in French and English; everything happens within, in a poet's prose.
Prizes and reception
Finlandia Prize 1993, the first of the two that made its author the first writer to be crowned twice.