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A review by xterminal
Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto by Maile Chapman
3.0
Maile Chapman, Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto (Graywolf Press, 2010)
I have always had a thing for difficult novels. I count among my favorite books of all time both Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West and Wendy Walker's The Secret Service, two books that no one in their right mind would ever take to the beach. But the rewards for struggling through archaic language or crazy diction are well worth the effort of reading such books when the writer is a true craftsman. Which brings me to the difference between difficult and ponderous—a distinction which Maile Chapman has not quite mastered yet.
Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto takes place in rural Finland (Suvanto, loosely translated, means “backwater”) between the wars. Sunny Taylor, an American nurse, is fleeing from her old life, and taking a job in the middle of nowhere seems to be the way to start anew. Suvanto, a women's hospital, is a blend of actual hospital for the local population and rest-home-cum-hotel for the “up-patients”, foreign wives of logging executives and the like who stay on the third floor, some with real complaints, others not. Sunny comes in as the head nurse for the third floor, as much a melting pot as anything was in the twenties; her patients are a mix of Finns, Swedes, Danes, and the occasional woman from an English-speaking country. Things are going along as usual before two events shake up the complacency of patients and staff alike. First, as the novel opens, is the arrival of Julia Dey, a Dane who used to teach ballroom dancing, but is now retired thanks to what we'll call female problems (you can't be too explicit on Amazon, now). Julia, in no small part because of the pain she's in, is irascible and moody, and her favorite hobby is pushing buttons in the patients and staff alike. Sunny, however, feels an odd attachment for the woman, and resolves to break through her shell. Then, halfway through the book, is another arrival, that of Dr. Peter Weber (whose sister-in-law, Pearl, is a longtime on-and-off resident of the third floor). Weber, an obstetrician by trade, is experimenting with ways to make caesarian sections safer, but underlying his seeming concern for the health of his patients is the deepest sort of inhumanity; he sees the women at Suvanto as test subjects rather than human beings, and this is a disruption that can only be tolerated for so long before something snaps...
When you think about the awkwardness of the title—and it is an awkward one—you'll get a sense of the language of the book. It's not archaic, exactly, but the rhythm isn't quite what you're used to. This is the same trick McCarthy pulls in his novels, but McCarthy balances it by going over the top in other areas. On the other side of that coin, it's impressive that Chapman, an American writer, has internalized the reserve of Scandinavian thriller writers as well as she has, but when you combine the two, that's when you start getting into the realm of ponderous. (As a baseline, by the way, one of the few dozen books I have never been able to make myself finish is Smilla's Sense of Snow; there are enough similarities in the pacing that I can say “if you liked that one...”.) This is especially troubling, to me, in a book that runs just two hundred thirty-six pages; one would expect a sharper sense of pace in a shorter novel, and it never appears here.
My other problem with the book is the characterization, which is all over the map. Peter Weber, for example, is a main character in that he is an agent of change, but he's not introduced until halfway through the book, and then we get almost nothing at all about him. This could be explained away by the fact that much of the book revolves around Sunny, Pearl, and Julia, but there are a few times when the third-person omniscient breaks away. By the time Peter Weber was introduced, the rhythm of the book's perspective shifts had me expecting we'd drop in on him occasionally. And right when I expected it to happen, we did, in fact, drop in on Peter Weber, in the midst of a huge gaffe changing his landscaping. And then... nothing. For the rest of the book, we get Weber through Sunny's eyes and Sunny's eyes only. It's a good way to restrict information about a main character, but once you've set the reader's expectations that something else will happen, it feels kind of like cheating to use it, you know?
Underneath all this is an intelligent mystery that's well-plotted, but you've got to get through the book's flaws to see it. Whether the payoff is worth it will be up to the individual reader to decide, but I am fond of mysteries with the kind of ending this one has (to say what that is would be a spoiler, so I will refrain), so I ended up being able to forgive a lot. Your mileage may vary. ** ½
I have always had a thing for difficult novels. I count among my favorite books of all time both Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West and Wendy Walker's The Secret Service, two books that no one in their right mind would ever take to the beach. But the rewards for struggling through archaic language or crazy diction are well worth the effort of reading such books when the writer is a true craftsman. Which brings me to the difference between difficult and ponderous—a distinction which Maile Chapman has not quite mastered yet.
Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto takes place in rural Finland (Suvanto, loosely translated, means “backwater”) between the wars. Sunny Taylor, an American nurse, is fleeing from her old life, and taking a job in the middle of nowhere seems to be the way to start anew. Suvanto, a women's hospital, is a blend of actual hospital for the local population and rest-home-cum-hotel for the “up-patients”, foreign wives of logging executives and the like who stay on the third floor, some with real complaints, others not. Sunny comes in as the head nurse for the third floor, as much a melting pot as anything was in the twenties; her patients are a mix of Finns, Swedes, Danes, and the occasional woman from an English-speaking country. Things are going along as usual before two events shake up the complacency of patients and staff alike. First, as the novel opens, is the arrival of Julia Dey, a Dane who used to teach ballroom dancing, but is now retired thanks to what we'll call female problems (you can't be too explicit on Amazon, now). Julia, in no small part because of the pain she's in, is irascible and moody, and her favorite hobby is pushing buttons in the patients and staff alike. Sunny, however, feels an odd attachment for the woman, and resolves to break through her shell. Then, halfway through the book, is another arrival, that of Dr. Peter Weber (whose sister-in-law, Pearl, is a longtime on-and-off resident of the third floor). Weber, an obstetrician by trade, is experimenting with ways to make caesarian sections safer, but underlying his seeming concern for the health of his patients is the deepest sort of inhumanity; he sees the women at Suvanto as test subjects rather than human beings, and this is a disruption that can only be tolerated for so long before something snaps...
When you think about the awkwardness of the title—and it is an awkward one—you'll get a sense of the language of the book. It's not archaic, exactly, but the rhythm isn't quite what you're used to. This is the same trick McCarthy pulls in his novels, but McCarthy balances it by going over the top in other areas. On the other side of that coin, it's impressive that Chapman, an American writer, has internalized the reserve of Scandinavian thriller writers as well as she has, but when you combine the two, that's when you start getting into the realm of ponderous. (As a baseline, by the way, one of the few dozen books I have never been able to make myself finish is Smilla's Sense of Snow; there are enough similarities in the pacing that I can say “if you liked that one...”.) This is especially troubling, to me, in a book that runs just two hundred thirty-six pages; one would expect a sharper sense of pace in a shorter novel, and it never appears here.
My other problem with the book is the characterization, which is all over the map. Peter Weber, for example, is a main character in that he is an agent of change, but he's not introduced until halfway through the book, and then we get almost nothing at all about him. This could be explained away by the fact that much of the book revolves around Sunny, Pearl, and Julia, but there are a few times when the third-person omniscient breaks away. By the time Peter Weber was introduced, the rhythm of the book's perspective shifts had me expecting we'd drop in on him occasionally. And right when I expected it to happen, we did, in fact, drop in on Peter Weber, in the midst of a huge gaffe changing his landscaping. And then... nothing. For the rest of the book, we get Weber through Sunny's eyes and Sunny's eyes only. It's a good way to restrict information about a main character, but once you've set the reader's expectations that something else will happen, it feels kind of like cheating to use it, you know?
Underneath all this is an intelligent mystery that's well-plotted, but you've got to get through the book's flaws to see it. Whether the payoff is worth it will be up to the individual reader to decide, but I am fond of mysteries with the kind of ending this one has (to say what that is would be a spoiler, so I will refrain), so I ended up being able to forgive a lot. Your mileage may vary. ** ½