The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

White Hunger
by Aki Ollikainen
translated from the Finish by Emily Jeremiah & Fleur Jeremiah
Finland


Available in the U.K. and, on Kindle, in the U.S. from Peirene Press

1867: a year of devastating famine in Finland. Marja, a farmer’s wife from the north, sets off on foot through the snow with her two young children. Their goal: St Petersburg, where people say there is bread. Others are also heading south, just as desperate to survive. Ruuni, a boy she meets, seems trustworthy. But can anyone really help? This extraordinary Finnish novella questions what it takes to survive.

Despite his remarkable facility for empathy, the author occasionally succumbs to his alter-ego-photographer’s ideal of objective depiction. As a result, several moments of acute grief are unfortunately stunted, moments when the potential for expressing psychological trauma or turmoil has not been fully seized upon. There is, however, a fine line between this being a fault and a virtue: one of the powers of the narrative is that it cauterizes sentiment as frostbite does to the exposed parts of the body. In many ways I was glad that it didn’t deviate too emotionally from the people’s own arduous physicality.
~Ben Paynter in The Los Angeles Review of Books

It’s a short book that feels more substantial, because Ollikainen (who lives in the north of the country, and so presumably has some personal investment in its history) shows us the white expanses, and follows the trudging figures with pitiless fidelity, as they slowly move from one starving, hovel-ridden village to the next.
~Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian

Liked this one more than I expected to. The prose is very spare and understated but that was a welcome contrast to some of the more overblown novels on the list.

The main weakness to me was that the political angle to the famine, seen via the figure of the Senator and the two brothers Lars and Teo, was underexplored. Or perhaps more accurately, it required the reader to get allusions to characters and places may make sense to a Finnish reader, but less so to a British one. Indeed I only really appreciated some points when reading another Discussion group on the book.

Can see this squeezing on to my personal shortlist.

Over at my site I just posted Chris Phillips's positive review of White Hunger.

Trevor wrote: "Over at my site I just posted Chris Phillips's positive review of White Hunger."

Good review - pretty much echoes my views but far more eloquently that I could set them out.