Fool's Paradise

by Anita Konkka, Agatha Dillard Haun (Translator), Owen Witesman (Translator)

“Marriage kills love. That’s why people get married.” The unmarried and unemployed narrator of A Fool’s Paradise is seeing a married man and must, because of her social security, apply and interview for jobs she does not want. Her life is founded on unsustainable contradictions. As her lover considers recommitting to his wife and as her poverty becomes increasingly dire, she confronts the temptations and contradictions of conventional success, but she is also overcome by jealousy and dissatisfaction. She travels to Russia and spies on her lover’s wife. She takes a job that she hates. This precise and intensely personal novel describes the narrator’s growing sense that freedom becomes, itself, a kind of routine, and shows her burgeoning desire to break out of it.

Genres: Finnish Literature

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Each page offers a thread. These fleeting links to the core of this woman's tortured soul grow revealing and rather gripping. My sole concern is the brevity; I felt these intriguing characters deserved more, their stories, while polluted, needed some fleshing.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A testament for the disenfranchized, the marginalized, the other, that is woman.

[Sam Price · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dreamy dreamsong, one-sitting sized book. Full of ruminations on love or, rather, relationships and the perils of mismatched desire that I hope to return to one day.

[Pin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I danced all night with a bunch of confused 19 year olds... ended up reading this in the morning, there's no point in sleeping when you can just dream.

[Fredrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ch.1
I’ve listened to many stones, but I’ve never heard anything. Stones used to be different. They knew how to talk.

Ch. 2
It puzzles me a little that people who claim to remember their past were so often kings and queens.

Ch. 3
His worst quality is that he’s married.

Ch. 4
Civilized people don’t reveal their feelings even to themselves — they consider these too common.

Ch. 5
Your head clears up when you notice that you’re insane.

Ch. 6
A blue bus stops at the base of the pine tree. On the side of the bus it says, “Here goes a can of Finns(TM).”

Ch. 7
There are people who prefer to read beautiful writers, but I’m not choosy when it comes to external appearances.

Ch. 8
There’s a natural explanation for everything, and if there isn’t, someone invents one.

Ch. 9
Life is straightforward.

Ch. 10
When you grow old there’s less and less to wonder about. It doesn’t seem surprising anymore that the moon doesn’t fall from the sky like a pancake, even though stars are falling all the time.

Ch. 11
Five days a week I’m unemployed, but on weekends I have two days off.

Ch. 12
When autumn comes, I always have this desire to leave the country.

Ch 13
For some reason I feel revulsion toward the past.

Ch. 14
When I was young, adults got annoyed with me easily.

Ch. 15
Taste and smell were first in my world. Then came color.

Ch. 16
It often happens that a person appears first in your thoughts and then calls. In Lapland it’s called a false arrival.

Ch. 17
A person has the right to choose what she does. I’d rather become a tube of toothpaste than a civil servant.

Ch. 18
My heart is knotted up and things fall out of my hands all day.

Ch. 19
And sometimes lovebirds start to mimic each other, but because they don’t do it with any evil intent, it isn’t witchcraft, just enchantment, and it probably happens everywhere in the world.

Ch. 20
Then she went to school and learned to lie and disguise her feelings. You had to learn those skills if you wanted to succeed and live long in the world.

Ch. 21
The world has been saved again.

Ch. 22
Today is like a heavy train car that I have to start moving with nothing but brute force.

Ch. 23.
Since then, I’ve thought of suicide as a practical activity, and practicality isn’t for me.

Ch. 24
I’ll never forget his affection; he brooded over me like an egg and was shocked when a creature emerged from the egg that had legs and wanted to flee his love.

Ch. 25
Someone slams a car door shut in the yard. I looked to see if it was Santa Claus, but it wasn’t.

Ch. 26
I like everything that can be touched with the hand, heard with the ear, seen with the eye, and tasted with the tongue.

Ch. 27
Luckily the invisible person doesn’t speak; otherwise I’d think I was going insane.

Ch. 28
He said that it’s a small paper; there are only six million readers.

Ch. 29
She doesn’t dare talk to me because I’m old and experienced. I have half a lifetime of horrors behind me; for her they’re still ahead.

Ch. 30
I fell from heaven to hell; people live here too, but I’m suffocating with longing, and it isn’t any vague longing.

Ch. 31
It snows every day.

Ch. 32
I’ve stopped having dreams. I’ve lost hope. It’s easier to live without it; the longing seems less oppressive.

[Markus Pietilä · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tavoitteena lukea kaikki Finlandia-palkintoehdokkaat:
(1984-1987: 38/38)
1988: 5/10
(1989: 4/10)
(1990: 1/8)
(1991: 2/8)
1984-2022: 50/262

4/5. Ohut kirja, joka jakaantuu vain muutaman sivun mittaisiin kappaleisiin. Lisäksi lause on lyhyttä ja helppolukuista. Romaani onkin nopeasti luettu. Poukkoilee – tai pikemminkin liukuu – sujuvasti asiasta toiseen. Kirjan ytimen muodostaa kuitenkin kolmiodraama, jossa kertojahahmo on yhtenä osapuolena. Näennäisessä helppoudessaan kirja on kuitenkin viisas ja paikoin hauskakin.

[Kacie]

It was alright. Not super great, but it was kind of interesting.

[Zoonanism]

Some of the dream sequences are really neat