The Unknown Soldier in Around the World in 80 Books

Dec 31, 2023 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, setting-europe, translated-fiction, adapted-for-film, war-ww2

This is one of the most popular and enduring works of Finnish fiction, and since I'm generally happy to read stuff about World War II, I finally tracked down a copy to check out. The author was conscripted into the Finnish Army in 1940 and served through the end of the "Continuation War" with the Soviet Union. He kept contemporaneous notes on his unit's experiences that he then burned, eventually returning to the subject matter a decade later with this account of a machine-gun company during the This is one of the most popular and enduring works of Finnish fiction, and since I'm generally happy to read stuff about World War II, I finally tracked down a copy to check out. The author was conscripted into the Finnish Army in 1940 and served through the end of the "Continuation War" with the Soviet Union. He kept contemporaneous notes on his unit's experiences that he then burned, eventually returning to the subject matter a decade later with this account of a machine-gun company during the war.

The book is written for a Finnish audience and so there's no background on why they are allied with the Germans and fighting the Soviets, beyond the general objective of reclaiming parts of Karelia that the Soviets took in the brief 1940 "Winter War." At the start of WW2, Finland was very young as a nation and the political and economic context of the relationship with Russia was pretty complex, as was the linguistic makeup of the country (which is why the different regional dialects are so central to the book). Throughout the book, the soldiers mock the rituals of nationalistic songs, slogans, and symbols, and the most die-hard nationalists are shown to be deluded.

All that said, the book is a fairly straightforward documentary description of the lives of front-line ground troops. We follow the company's soldiers and NCOs as they gear up, advance, sit around, scrounge for food, fight pitched actions, freeze in terror, kill time, slog through swamps, take and abandon positions to no visible end, and of course, die. At least a dozen characters pass through the pages, with new ones stepping in as others die. There are some set pieces that feel quite typical of the genre, such as a comic caper to steal the gear to brew some alcohol, along with some terrifyingly realistic combat scenes. (If you read a number of reviews, the book gets high praise from combat veterans for its realism.)

The author cited "All Quiet on the Western Front" as a key influence on the book, and it's all right there in plain sight. Like the war itself, the book is a bit of a longish and somewhat exhausting slog and might have benefited from some trimming. While it doesn't do anything you haven't seen before in a war novel, it does it well and from a lesser-known perspective.

This edition ends with a several page translator's note that is well worth reading, as it gets at the challenges of rendering the different voices and dialects, and explains some of the choices that were made. Most notable is the folksy American drawl of the book's comic relief (and conscience), Anti Rokka, which was made to match the apparently almost intelligible Karelian dialect of the character. The book was adapted for film in 1955, 1985, and 2017 and I'll probably track down the latter at some point. ...more

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