Joyce Carol Oates: Snygg [Sexy]

From: A sale in Akateeminen Kirjakauppa
When: Two or three years ago
Verdict: Extremely good approach to complex topic, beautiful economy in the telling.
Fate: To be given to someone who will appreciate it.
Read: In one sitting on 19 Aug 2008.

This book is in English. I read it in Swedish.

I was reading this book just after Michael Phelps had pulled off his Olympic miracle and was interested to find him appearing in the book. Not in person, but the main character is a high school swimmer whose life was once changed by the 18-year-old Phelps bursting onto the scene.

There are other things going on in this kid's life too, problems relating to the fact that he is a little bit too hot for his own good. A male teacher takes an interest, and although nothing untoward happens (not even groping of the History Boys kind) there is still the fact that it could have. There is also the fact of the leniency of US educational institutions when it comes to the academic performance of top-performing athletes.* And the fact that this teacher disapproves of that practice.
And finally there are some pictures of boys and swimming trunks and even naked, an a quite possibly homosexual man in a small-minded middle-class environment of the kind homosexual men tend to leave as fast as they can, and with an inspiring economy of words Oates brews of these ingredients a local disaster. The topic is heavy and complicated, but she doesn't chicken out or simplify, even at the end.

I remember reading Joyce Carol Oates' YA novel Foxfire as a teenager and not liking it at ALL, but I always felt I should give her a real shot. She is, after all, a heavy Nobel contender whose chances are hampered by her prolific interest in stuff that I myself find fascinating – boxing, Marilyn Monroe, Young Adult readers. This novel ended up in my shopping hamper because it was on sale and looked like a quick read, and proved very good indeed. I almost wrote just now that I'm now ready to graduate to her real novels. What I meant, obviously, was her long novels.

*read more about this phenomenon in Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons

Snygg seems to be out of print. You can buy Sexy in English on Amazon.

Sari Peltoniemi: Kummat

From: Borrowed from my friend Mike Pohjola
When: Over a year ago
Verdict: Not half bad!
Fate: Returned with thanks

This novel is in Finnish.

As my friend Mike was finishing his well-received first novel, which for all its orginality is technically fantasy and technically for the YA market, I asked him whether he actually reads any YA lit himself. He immediately game me two answers, the one being along the lines of "Nuh" and the other along the lines of "Sure", and handed me this book, written by a friend of his. I took this as "not so much, but here's a recent example", and borrowed it, very curious about what YA authors in my neck of the woods are up to these days.

Kummat – "the strange ones" – are a group of high school kids who suddenly grow tails. They become a bit more animal in other ways as well, the many females turning into a kind of harem for the one, dominant male (who is endowed with looks, humour, the power of making them feel special, and a sexuality which is not as it turns out limited to females, with or without tails).

The whole thing is a bit uncomfortable for everyone involved, and for lack of anything better to do the kids decide to become erotic dancers at seedy nightclubs in their dreary Finnish town. While this may seem a bit out of left field when I write it down like this, it makes a bit more sense in the novel, which will almost certainly never be translated for the American market.

The main body of the narrative is interspersed with short narrative sequences offering potential and conflicting explanations for the tails (they are caused by aliens; hey are a curse; they are an evolutionary remnant; they are familiar from folklore). None of these explanations is given more credence than any of the others, and their status relative to the main narrative is not clarified apart from some suggestion that the kids research their predicament on the internet and that the sequences could perhaps be dreams or fantasies. (A similarly unresolved relation between different textual layers in a novel occurs in Mike's debut, for which I assume this may have been an inspiration).

Peltonemi writes convincingly about identity and peer pressure, and the novel opens up for discussions about gender, difference and status without preaching about any of these things. Thrown together with a random sample of classmates normally belonging to different cliques, the main character comes face to face with her own prejudices, and so of course must the reader, which is interesting when our prejudices are the same (and less so when they are not).

I sometimes find speculative fiction of this basically realist type difficult to read because I am not certain what importance to give different or conflicting generic signals. Reading Kummat, I enjoyed it vaguely but did not know what to make of it – a "head or tail" pun is called for but I can't think of one – and it is only upon reflection that I find it quite intelligent. The imagery that has stayed with me now feels appealing; on reading I found some of the milieus realistically but perhaps unecessarily depressing.

Ultimately the girls' cruise ship trip to Sweden, a Finnish coming-of-age ritual documented too rarely in fiction of any genre, brings home the point that the novel is not about tails specifically - what sets them apart and unites them could be anything. While this begs the followup "then why tails", the conceit works. And Peltoniemi's treatment of sexuality in high school-students is certainly more complex and thought-provoking than, for instance, Stephanie Meyer's.

Buy Kummat at Suurikuu.

Josefine Adolfsson: Kårnulf Was Here

From: The publisher on a visit to his office
When: Summer 2004
Verdict: Worth Consuming
Fate: Given to ex-stepdaughter.

This book is Swedish. I read it in Swedish.

Why does it feel like I've come across so many autobiographical novels lately? This little book – it's small physically as well as attempting to, I think, keep its greater ambitions under the radar by pretending to be a romp as well as a tragedy – is apparently just that, although Adolfsson chooses to call it a "documentary novel".

Kårnulf was here is a simple first person narrative abut two teenage girls who are best friends, drink too much, take quite a lot of drugs and go to Berlin on terrifying adventures. Adolfsson is five years older than me, and I hardly ever broke any rules as a kid anyway, but in its description of a Scandinavian society in the late eighties and early nineties the world she writes is just close enough to my experience for me to feel that it is all true. Not even metaphorically: I felt when I read this book, even though it doesn't reference its sources and many section are written in a very free and disorganized style, that every word in it is literally true. There are, obviously, no guarantees that this is the case (nor does it matter if it's not). It is just as possible that the end, especially, represents a version of what might have happened, or what the author wuld have preferred to some even more depressing outcome.

Moa, the narrator, never quite loses her hold on reality and stays in school, gets on the education track and eventually becomes a journalist and a writer. Anna, her friend, makes a tentative truce with addiction but does not leave the environment which enables her abuse. Anna's little sister Ida and some other friends and acquaintances go so far to hell that society basically gives up on them.

Reading about kids on drugs is obviously pretty horrifying for anyone considering a family, but the bits about institutional attitudes to the young female addicts are the worst by far. Access to the Moa character, who is later mostly sober and educated and can sometimes interfere, sometimes alleviates the characters' struggles momentarily – one can't help thinking of those who have no such friend. Getting help, getting care and getting sober is difficult at best, and the educational, medical, legal and psychological institutions, it seems, are not convinced that the girls are not in these situations out of their own free will.

Adolfsson intersperses the text with quotes from historical official reports on maladjusted or delinquent girls. The novel is programmatic, and it seems to have two points: 1) that these kids are just that, kids, and what ever evil or selfishness or thoughtlessness or self-destructiveness they display is a side effect of qualities that in other teens lead to much milder forms of rebellion with typically less lethal and better-tolerated consequences, and 2) that given how little changed during the first 80 years of the last century in the understanding of this issue it is utopian to assume that the situation would have been significantly improved in the last twenty.

I don't think Adolfsson has written a sequel, but I would very much like to read more about her anger, about how someone who's made this journey to a completely different world, to art school and mainstream media and literary success, deals with her new network living completely unawares of the squalor to which so many of their countrymen are reduced. Kårnulf was here touches on the topic, but I am curious about how, say, another ten years will have altered Adolfsson's perspective, if at all.

I decided to send my copy to my ex step-daughter. She gets so many of my pink frothy hand-offs that I worry I've completely corrupted her literary taste. Also, there aren't that many books around with real stories about real young girls. Of course, Sara is 18 now; I probably would not have given the book to anyone under 15 years of age.

I realize reading this back that I never wrote that the book is funny and moving as well as depressing and anger-provoking. It is, all those things.

Buy Kårnulf was here on AdLibris.