Sounds of Silence

I was going to start a series of posts on my favourite British comedy series (it being the 40th anniversary of Monty Python’s Flying Circus), but in the light of recent events I’ll postpone that for a while, and dedicate this one to Veikko Huovinen, one of my favourite writers – and now sadly departed from our midst.

If you’re Finnish, you’re probably aware that Huovinen shuffled off this mortal coil last Sunday. He was 82, but the news was still quite unexpected: he was never one for selling his life to the tabloids, and therefore no news of his illness reached the media. He has been branded something of a recluse, and this may be true; I spent my first 18 years living in the same town as he, and only saw him once during that time (and twice after that).

My first encounter with Huovinen’s work came through the TV versions of his books and short stories. Lentsu was probably the first of these (the scene in which the feverish lorry driver crashes into the wall of his own house will always stay with me). When I was around ten, I found Veitikka in my grandfather’s bookshelf and read it – and remained puzzled throughout as I couldn’t quite decide whether I was dealing with a genuine biography of Hitler, or something completely different. Later, of course, I realised that “something completely different” doesn’t cover the sheer subversive brilliance of the book.

In school we were force-fed some "contemporary" Finnish lit – Havukka-ahon ajattelija and Koirankynnen leikkaaja among them. I enjoyed both, and began to make my slow way through the bulk of Huovinen’s repertoire – which, I was to discover, is amazingly wide. He’s mainly known for his gently philosophical descriptions of the weird folk of Kainuu (in itself an inexhaustible well of material), but although that stuff is excellent, too, there’s much more to him than Konsta Pylkkänen and his ilk. Not only did Huovinen write pseudo-biographical books about dictators (Hitler, Stalin and Peter the Great), he tackled dystopian themes in Lemmikkieläin, flu pandemics in Lentsu – and life, the universe and everything in his short stories.

My favourite collection of short stories (from any writer, come to think of it), is probably Lyhyet erikoiset (on which I blogged a couple of months ago) – although Matikanopettaja is a close runner-up (with its title story about a teacher – not of maths, but of fish). Over the weekend I amused Otter and T. by reading aloud from Lyhyet erikoiset and marvelling at the inventiveness of Huovinen’s style. Who else would compare the taste of Hungarian pickles to “a mullah’s song from the roof of a minaret”?

Well, no one will. One of the greats has passed on.