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Distances from the events of his time was sought by Mika Waltari in his youth an admirer of machine and city culture in the subjects he chose for his novels. His Sinuhe egyptil inen (I, Sinuhe, 1945) gave melancholy voice

and resigned wisdom to the uncertainty and feelings of emptiness of the generation that had experienced the war. Of the depictions of the war itself, the most significant were V in Linna s Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier, 1954), Olavi Paavolainen s Synkk yksinpuhelu ( Sombre monologue , 1946), which takes the form of a diary, and Veijo Meri s Manillak ysi ( The manila rope , 1957). In Meri s work, absurdist humour and the randomness of events often lead to chaos. Linna revised the Finnish view of history with his three-part novel T ll Pohjant hden alla ( Here beneath the North Star , 1959-62), in which the life of a small rural community is dominated by both the increasingly pointed class differences of the civil war and the struggle with nature.

International influences transform the novel

During recent decades, the image of literature has emphasised the novel more than poetry. The representatives of modernism have remained vital, and no new transition has occurred in poetry. Rather, greater self-assuredness has been gained in relation to international movements, for example in the poetry of Pentti Holappa (born 1927). Many contemporary poets are also translators, often from distant languages, such as Pertti Nieminen and Kai Nieminen from Chinese and Japanese.

In novels, contacts with international developments are clearly visible. The generation that is now in middle age has seen national traumas in wartime, traumas that cast a long shadow into the future in human relations and world-views, as Antti Tuuri has demonstrated in his Pohjanmaa ( Ostrobothnia ) series. There problems have been handled with macabre humour by Veikko Huovinen, whose social criticism is directed at the bureaucratic nannyishness of the welfare state and sees as salvation the attempt to regain the old, wise everyday reality, often outside society, as in the novel Lampaansy j t ( The mutton-eaters , 1970), or as an insignificant side-character in nature in the work Puukansan tarina ( Tale of the wood-folk , 1984).

Psychological description sometimes has its origin in the writer s own circles, but also in cultural and historical contacts. Bo Carpelan s Axel (1986) describes the life and creative struggle of Jean Sibelius through the eyes of an apparently humble onlooker whose friendship, however, is all-enduring, while Hannu M kel s Mestari ( The master , 1995) draws a new fictive chart of the earthly wanderings of the great poet Eino Leino.

Alpo Ruuth s work follows in the tradition of broad depictions of working-class life, but for example in K mpp ( Digs , 1969) and Kotimaa ( Homeland , 1974), a story about unemployment, it frees itself from the earlier pathos of the genre to become more ironic and at the same time more understanding. A new identity free of all embellishment has been sketched by Hannu Salama who, in the 1960s, horrified the moral majority with his depiction of the grotesque drunkenness of the Finnish midsummer night s dream in his novel Juhannustanssit ( Midsummer dance , 1964). Siin n kij miss tekij ( No crime without a witness , 1972) is, with its political analysis seen from different angles, an important indicator of the acceptable and forbidden solutions of wartime.

Powerlessness and anxiety often appear as main themes in the new Finnish novel. In Olli Jalonen s novels, security systems people build for themselves become threatening and ominous. Behind a public life that follows conventional forms live shame and violence, as in the novel Hotelli el ville ( A hotel for the living , 1983). With its changing narrators, Kenen kuvasta kerrot ( Whose image are you talking about , 1996) shows that uncertainty and surprises also include the agreement between the book and its reader. In his latest, highly successful work Yksityiset t htitaivaat (’Private heavens’) Jalonen builds an extensive family tale full of surprises based on three of his earlier works. Its events unfold through the 1990s and on into the new millennium. Jalonen creates his characters from the inside, from dreams and fears, from the inexplicable logic of life and from memories of nightmares. Out of the relationship between nature, history and man grows both oblivion and order. Society has a strong metaphysical dimension.

An easily recognisable picture of modern times is formed in the novels of Juha Sepp l , Kari Hotakainen and Jari Tervo. Their style is often irony tinged with bitterness, in the light of which they examine the absurd and cruel traits of human chaos. Their literary style and worldview have earned them sobriquet ‘Meri’s sons’. Few rays of light strike their manly reality, at most a curl, mysteriously thrilling, from their own children’s hair.

The world of interdictions and liberties is also the territory of Arto Paasilinna. In his novels, however, he has produced a completely different image of the reality of everyman s Weltschmerz, his encounters with rules and tyranny and his cheerful liberation from the guardianship of society. Paasilinna has also reached large readerships abroad. A large, faithful readership has also claimed Laila Hietamies and Kalle P talo as its own. Both write novels whose

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