Requests, questions, etc.

[Tytti, The Head Honcho]

Here you can ask questions or recommendations and make topic requests.

You can also start a thread yourself about a Finnish book or a book related to Finland.

[Adrn]

I can`t speak Finnish, but I`m really interested on its culture, I find it so interesting. So I would like to get recommendations of great Finnish writers that I could read in English.

It doesn`t matter if they are classics or contemporary.

[Tytti, The Head Honcho]

Oh, hi, hello!

What kind of novels are you interested about? More realistic, maybe historical, or maybe speculative fiction which is pretty popular now? There are not that many classic Finnish authors whose work has been translated to English (and I don't remember any female authors) and many novels are quite realistic, like those by Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldiers and Under the North Star trilogy, and of course Seven Brothers by Aleksis Kivi, because it IS the first novel published in Finnish, and maybe The Railroad by Juhani Aho. Mika Waltari was another great author but I think only his historical novels, which are not set in Finland, have been translated to English, not his then contemporary novels set here.

From the current ones, there is Sofi Oksanen, of course, though two of her novels are set in Estonia, and Johanna Sinisalo who writes speculative fiction but they are kind of set here. Leena Lehtolainen's Maria Kallio series My First Murder is contemporary crime fiction. Then there is Jääskeläinen's The Rabbit Back Literature Society, which is again "Finnish Weird", and pretty weird. But now I can't think of contemporary male authors who write realistic fiction and have been translated... Well there is Kjell Westö and his The Wednesday Club which is historical fiction set in 1938 and also Arto Paasilinna who has written many books, like The Year of the Hare.

Maybe those will help. I see you that live in Mexico? If you speak Spanish there actually might be more novels translated to Spanish but we probably don't know them that well...

[Adrn]

Tytti wrote: "Oh, hi, hello!

What kind of novels are you interested about? More realistic, maybe historical, or maybe speculative fiction which is pretty popular now? There are not that many classic Finnish aut..."

Kiitos!
Thank you so much for taking your time to answer.

Yes, I`m from Mexico.
I tried to search all the books and I only found "Seven Brothers", Paasilinna`s and Oksanen`s books. I guess I might start with "Seven brothers" as I find it Iconic from your culture. I was also interested on the other ones, but I will try to find them on the internet.

What kind of novels am interested in?
Well, I have been reading realistic books recently but I`m also interested on fiction and essays. Historical books call my attention as well.

I am going to buy the books and I will let you know my impressions of them. Thanks!

[Tytti, The Head Honcho]

If you find and start reading some book, you are welcome to start a new thread about it, or you can ask me to do it. I already made one for Seven Brothers.

And thanks, it is helpful to know a bit what kind of books you are looking for. Btw, what do you mean by just "fiction", do you have a special definition for it in Spanish? Because I assumed you were looking for fictional novels, not nonfiction. Though I guess you didn't actually rule that out, either. Not that I know many nonfiction books that have been translated, so...

Also I just remembered Collected Fiction by Hannu Rajaniemi. He is a scifi author who actually writes in English but I have understood that he uses stuff about Finnish culture and mythology in his novels, so that might be interesting, at least after you are more familiar with them. I didn't mention The Kalevala earlier because it seems to be the one thing most people know about Finnish literature but not that many Finns have actually read it because it is in verse and that makes it also difficult to translate.