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A review by wmorrow
New Finnish Grammar by Judith Landry, Diego Marani
5.0
Crushingly sad, in the way that makes you want to roll it around you like a blanket and lie in it, let the sorrow wash over you and fill all the empty spaces inside you with more emptiness. Beautiful prose. Credit both to Marani's amazing writing and Landry's stunning translation.
This book is not meant for plot but for the ultimate character study, for what it means to be someone, what it is to have an identity or feel lost, to lack an identity. It is a look into the mind of a man who has lost his past and must start fresh, but in this way it reveals the struggle we all face: the struggle against our pasts, with our futures, to discover some unifying identity, some self in which to cling. We are all Sampo Karjalainen. If only he had known.
"What others remember of us is in fact nothing more than the effect that we have had on them. We spend our lives brushing up against our fellow humans without ever really knowing them. Even the knowledge we build up of those people and things which are dearest to us is purely matter-of-fact; we know them as the entomologist knows the butterflies he has pinned onto a sheet of balsa wood. We can describe the colour of their eyes or hair, we know them from a distance as they walk through a crowd, their features are instantly recognizable, as is their characteristic smell, or voice. Their absence makes us feel as though some part of us is missing. Yet they are never truly ours: Our wish to possess them in fact destroys them, denies them a life of their own. In our vain desire to soften the mystery of death, we seek to possess, to soak up as much love as we can, without realizing that in this way we are killing all that we think we love."
This book is not meant for plot but for the ultimate character study, for what it means to be someone, what it is to have an identity or feel lost, to lack an identity. It is a look into the mind of a man who has lost his past and must start fresh, but in this way it reveals the struggle we all face: the struggle against our pasts, with our futures, to discover some unifying identity, some self in which to cling. We are all Sampo Karjalainen. If only he had known.
"What others remember of us is in fact nothing more than the effect that we have had on them. We spend our lives brushing up against our fellow humans without ever really knowing them. Even the knowledge we build up of those people and things which are dearest to us is purely matter-of-fact; we know them as the entomologist knows the butterflies he has pinned onto a sheet of balsa wood. We can describe the colour of their eyes or hair, we know them from a distance as they walk through a crowd, their features are instantly recognizable, as is their characteristic smell, or voice. Their absence makes us feel as though some part of us is missing. Yet they are never truly ours: Our wish to possess them in fact destroys them, denies them a life of their own. In our vain desire to soften the mystery of death, we seek to possess, to soak up as much love as we can, without realizing that in this way we are killing all that we think we love."