Troll: A Love Story (original 2000; edition 2004)

It was a very strange read, this book. It was okay though. I liked it mostly because of the way it was written, the chapters where we, readers, see things through the eyes of the character that is the storyteller and sometimes the scene is repeated by the other 'participant' in the scene.

I have difficulties with the fact that this book is types as scfi-fi. Or, maybe I don't understand the type of book that is since, like a few other readers here, do not read or like the genre much.
For me it was in general too normal (every day) to say it is sci-fi. At first I did not recognize Angel as a male character, since Angel is also a female name. Well, a book full of surprises. I'm happy to have read it, and I'm happy that I'm done. ( )

Urban fantasy, folklore, poetry, news clippings, quasi-changeling-myth, gay erotica. What more could you really ask from a novel?

This is a story told from many people's perspectives, and while their voices aren't terribly distinct, it still works, possibly because the chapters are so short. The weakest part of the writing was the news clippings, and I'm chalking that up to translation.

I never really felt hugely connected to the characters, but it's engrossing all the same. One of the best books I've read in some time. ( )

Finland.

Troll is an enjoyable fantasy novel in pastiche form. Sinisalo weaves together mythology, invented news reports and research works, and short sections from multiple narrators' perspectives to tell a psychological tale that is definitely homoerotic, possibly bestial, and definitely not for children. In some regards, this could be pleasingly paired with Donohue's The Stolen Child and Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. ( )

Why did I read it? It came up a few times on recommended lists and a book which featured a troll by a Finnish writer seemed like an interesting read, even when the synopsis hinted at sexual themes.

What's it about? Mikael is returning from a gay club one evening and intercepts a gang intent on beating a cornered animal. Upon seeing the victim, it becomes clear to Mikael it is a young troll and, intoxicated by liquor and the beauty of the troll itself, he takes it home with him. Mikael attempts to restore the troll to health by reading all sorts of materials, but never seems aware of the intoxicating pheromones the troll exudes, and which come to mingle with his own scent.

What did I like? It's a different kind of fantasy I suppose. The chapters were short, making it a quick read and, once again, the ending isn't neatly tied up. I was a little interested in the fate of the troll, and some of the snippets of information inserted between chapters were intriguing.

The portrayal of the futility of attempting to tame an animal which thrives in the wild was quite well done. The story also highlights the increasing urbanisation of previously wild environments which is forcing many an animal/creature to adapt and survive on our terms, and how much mankind/humans are adverse to this encroachment by "wild things" on what they consider their turf.

What didn't I like? "Not Before Sundown" as it's also known, just didn't grab me. I stopped caring about Mikael, or what fate awaited him fairly early in the story, when his tiresome selfish/self-centered personality was revealed. Eventually, the factual accounts, snippets of folklore and various bits of information regarding trolls which was inserted between chapters also became tedious. Thus, the book dragged itself, limping, to it's conclusion[?].

Certain sexual aspects of Mikael's behaviour were also very off-putting; more particularly, his feelings towards Pessi, the troll.

Would I recommend it? I can't say I would, mostly because I cannot think of anyone who should enjoy reading it; certainly no-one of my acquaintance. ( )

Accepting the premise that trolls really do exist, although they are rarely sighted, and little is known for sure about them, Johanna Sinisalo has created a beautiful love story, as the title suggests. The story is set in Finland one winter through to the spring.
Mikael, a successful freelance photographer affectionately and descriptively known as Angel, for he is very handsome with his head of fair hair, rescues an abandoned and frightened young troll from the attack of a group of loutish drunken teenagers. With no other options, for as we all know an abandoned troll cannot be re-united with its parents; Angel takes the young troll home to care for it. He then embarks on a course of investigation and discovery as he secretly tries to raise the troll, which he names Pessi. At the same time Angel tries to juggle his relationships with his gay lovers: Dr Spiderman, a vet; Martes who is also his business partner and Ecke who absolutely adores the gorgeous Angel. While Dr Spiderman provides some advice, Angel’s only other support comes from Palomita, the Filipino bride of the abusive brute who lives in the apartment below him.
The story is told progressively by the various participants, but predominately Angel, and the narration is regularly interspersed with facts, information, and myths and tales, poetry and literature about trolls, sourced from various publications and the internet.
It is truly a lovely story, the relationship that develops between Angel and Pessi is most heart warming as the young troll becomes submissive towards and fiercely and jealously protective of his newfound master. More mysteriously there is something else to the connection between Pessi and Angel, as it appears the young troll exerts a powerful influence that perhaps only a man who loves other men is susceptible to, it certainly has a physical affect on Angel.
Events necessarily come to a climax as Pessi’s existence inevitable becomes know to the authorities, but that is not to say that it is any way predicable, far from it. The conclusion of the tale is both moving and satisfying.

NOTE REGARDING CONCLUSION added in repsonse to a question (do not read if you do not want to know the ending)

I too wondered about Angel’s outcome, especially as he was escorted at gun point to the trolls' lair; but then if the large male troll intended to dispose of him, why take him back to their cave? Then there is that almost tender moment when one of the welcoming trolls extracts the lighter from Angel’s pocket, if its intent were malicious surely such a powerful creature would simply rip the lighter out of Angel’s trousers.
When the large mature troll found Angel and Pressi, Pessi was clearly delighted to meet his own kind, going “berserk with joy” and leaping up at the male troll. But Pessi is devoted to Angel; he has proved that by being so fiercely protective of him, he obviously does not see this large male troll as a threat. Pessi surely would not allow anything untoward to happen to Angel; the move he makes at the very last as he goes to Angel’s side and takes his hand as they enter the cave seems to confirm this.
There is also the idea revealed in the beliefs and myths surrounding trolls that they can live in harmony with and even marry humans; and have been known to take in young humans (pp29-30, 99 in my copy).
In my mind I am quite confident that the trolls take in and care for Angel, and this seems morally correct (from the trolls’ point of view), for Angel is a wanted man, wanted for a crime Pessi committed; the trolls have a duty to protect Angel. (And what alternative does Angel have, if he returns to his world it is undoubtedly to face trial for murder?)
Of course one wonders why the need for the gun, but would Angel have gone with the mature male troll without the ‘incentive’, would he perhaps have just left Pessi knowing he was back with his kind?
I wonder at Angel’s life with the troll’s, but it must have its advantages; he probably lives in a state of near permanent sexual arousal (and satisfaction) resulting for the pheromones exuded by the trolls! ( )

Capsule review: A good book for readers of serious speculative fiction.

Knowing this was a Tiptree winner, I tried to read this when it first came out and couldn't get into it. That was because every Tiptree jury sees "gender bending" in a different way, and it's not necessarily a way that makes sense to me. So I started this book with certain expectations in mind and was very disappointed.

When my book club decided to read it, I gave it another try. Approaching it without preconceived ideas certainly helped. I especially enjoyed the ending which turns the entire book on its head and makes you reinterpret much of what you thought had happened.

That said, I did find the middle part a slog, especially the excerpts from Finnish biological and mythological literature. The biological literature is presumably made up, so she really has no excuse for using them to tell us any more than she needs us to know. The mythological excerpts are from real books; clearly, she just got lost in all the research she did. I didn't lose anything by skipping some of the shorter ones.

Additionally the end lacks closure. While it is a tour-de-force, turning the whole book on its head, she really doesn't tell you what happens to the characters after the climax. This, ironically, made it a good book group book because we discussed our own made-up endings for all the characters for a while. However, we had to come down to the fact that we really didn't know, because the author hadn't told us. I'm old fashioned enough to want fully realized ending.

A partial list of her real sources is here: http://www.librarything.com/list/324/all/Books-Mentioned-in-Troll-A-Love-Story ( )

A brilliantly original book set in a Finland where trolls are confirmed to exist, much as wolverines or bears. When the main character finds a juvenile troll he decides on impulse to look after it, and much of the rest of the book concerns their relationship and how it affects Angel's other relationships. Angel has to find out about trolls through books and the internet, and excerpts (real and fictional) are interspersed regularly with the narrative for the reader to gradually build up their acquaintence too.

Whilst the book may be seen as controversial for touching on bestiality, it is rich in other themes -- man and nature, imprisonment, sexual attraction, control, folklore, religion, etc. Ignore the quotes on the cover that may make you assume this is mere genre fiction -- at least SF, fantasy and gay fiction -- it may be so, but it also a finely crafted, thought provoking, and original novel. ( )

Excellent, well plotted book. Really liked the first person narrative style that switched between the main characters and the fictional articles about the history of trolls that were interspersed throughout. Cannot recommend enough! ( )

The first person perspective was a slightly confusing here. It was actually page 23 before I realized Angel was a guy! (should have read the back cover to refresh my memory before I started reading it) I loved the inserts of folklore stories, academic reports, and such; they made understanding the world where trolls are real and accepted at fact easier to slip into. I felt the ending was rather abrupt, though; there was a lot of build up and then it was over in only a few pages. I would have liked to read more about the aftermath among the humans like how much the police are able to figure out, and what happens to Angel and Pessi. ( )

Angel, a photographer, finds a gang of yobs beating someone up near his home. He chases them away, and then finds that what they were beating up was, in fact, a young troll. He takes the beast home to nurse it back to health, but becomes mesmerised by its wild grace.

The story is told in short bursts from several different points of view, interleaved with folkloric and zoologic texts on trolls which Angel researches. The reader is dropped into the story quickly, and it's absorbing. The interleaved texts hint at parallels - themes for example of fear and prejudice (Angel is gay), and human beastliness.

At this point, the book was reminding me of Elizabeth Knox's excellent The Vintner's Luck, in which a young man falls in love with a (male) angel. However, although Angel becomes increasingly obsessed by the troll, every time he feels aroused he rushes off to find someone human to have sex with. Tension builds between Angel and three friends - the person he's having sex with, who knows that Angel is thinking of someone else; a old flame, who dumped Angel but is miffed that Angel has stopped moping around him; and a vet who grows increasingly suspicious by Angel's questions about 'large predators'.

All this is great reading, but unfortunately, having set the situation up, I felt that Sinisalo wasted it. You can't say that the story fizzled out, because dramatic things happen - but it still felt like an anticlimax to me.

There was also a subplot about a mail-order bride in the flat below which I couldn't see the point of at all.

Sample: His golden head bends closer to me, so I catch the scent of his aftershave. It's a new one on me, woodlandish and metallic, strangely arousing. ( )

Wow. This was not at all what I was expecting. I'm not sure what I was expecting at first. Though at one point, I'd gotten a glimpse inside the book and it looked like poetry. I thought I was going to be reading an English translation of a Finnish poem. Not at all my usual fare! But it's nothing like that at all. It's very readable to my American brain. And it's not chock full of poetry.The main character takes in a young wild troll. The troll is sick and first needs to be nursed back to health. Can a troll be domesticated? Tamed?And, well, it's so much more than that, but I kind of don't want to spoil anyone's first reading of it by saying more.While it doesn't completely disrupt the reader's thoughts of gender, it does have a few things to say about the subject between the lines. I can see why it made the Tiptree list. ( )

I read this book for a RL book group. I had already picked it up because it had such hype when it came out. I let it sit for a couple of years, and then read it for my group. I really wanted to like it more, but it was rather meh, disjointed and even a bit beyond the pale in some connections its makes.

The story is of a young man who is full of himself. He is a photographer, gay, and personally and professionally hot. He is called Angel, but his real name is Michael. Those in his circle hang out at this cafe and their interactions are like soap operas. He loves someone, who is leading him on and then saying he is not gay; he is loved by others, whom he doesn't even recognize as existing.

One night he is going home and he finds some thuggish teens trying to beat up a small young troll. In this story, though set in modern day Finland, trolls are real. They live in the woods and usually keep away from humans.

Angel adopts the troll, and takes him into his home, and eventually his heart. He names him Pessi. The story follows Angel as he tries to save the troll who is sick at first and then to teach him how to live with humans and in an apartment rather than the wild. Angel becomes strangely attached to him, and plans to keep him, rather than returning him to the forest. Eventually Angel uses him as a model in a photographic spread that becomes wildly successful. The success has a dramatic impact on Angel's human relationships. Pessi and Angel's relationship wanders into forbidden territory and leads to bloodshed.

The writing was fine. Often a translation has issues, but I don't think the problems can be blamed on the translator.

First the story was broken up with little insets of information about trolls. There was religious, historical, folkloric, even scientific information. It was helpful and interesting, but it made the story choppy and lacking in cohesion. Towards the end of the story the insets become newspaper stories about crimes and gun killings of humans in and around the forest.

Second, I really didn't get the characters, and certainly didn't care anything about them. It didn't help that some were referred to by more than one name, so you weren't really sure who was who. They were really self-absorbed and rather flat, not like real people. The guys were all playing games.

The one woman, a downstairs neighbor and mail order Filipina bride, was barely able to communicate. She was also beaten, downtrodden, and living in fear of her abusive husband. She had a strange fantasy relationship with Angel, mistaking his kindness for interest. I really have no idea why she is even in the story at all. Perhaps to show a human who is living and being treated like an animal, with Pessi an animal, living and being treated like a person. In any event she is the only developed character to me.

Pessi doesn't really have a personality to me, and he is ill-defined, perhaps deliberately. The informational insets clearly call him an animal, but the folkloric ones say that at time the Fins treat trolls as people. Angel begins to have a strong emotional attachment, that hints at a physical relationship.

The connections of having a gay character flirt with bestiality as though its no big deal, I find troubling. Even worse is the way Pessi is portrayed as being able to pass as a young boy. So now we have connected gay, bestiality, and pedophilia, as though they are all different aspects of the same thing. Perhaps that wasn't the author's intent, but that was the impression I got as I read the book. The racist 'Black Man' comment is also not cool, but perhaps the author is unaware of the implications of calling an animal a black man.

The ending was just odd, and wandered into fantasy. it did leave you wondering though.

I just didn't really enjoy the book all that much. ( )

This was a really odd book. The style of multiple narrators including excerpts from "other works" is not new (Dracula?) but it's unusual enough to make it interesting to read. Each section is also extremely short making it easy to slip into "one more chapter" mode and finish the book extremely quickly. By utilising this device to represent the main character's research into Trolls, Sinisalo ensures that we, as readers, are about as aware as the characters about the truth of Trolls in their world.

I really enjoyed this book.

Note for UK Readers - This is released as Not Before Sundown in the UK. ( )

i really liked this book. it sorta reminded me of a web comic that i used to read way back when called 'boy meets boy' by k. sandra fuhr. don't know why...it's just how it felt. the themes in troll are bold and static. i like the way sinisalo tells what is untold her story indirectly through the use of articles and excerpts from fake[ ? :) ] sources. what was lacking, unfortunately, was the care factor. i just found myself not caring about a protagonist who sleeps around and gets aroused by a troll while leading on other guys to get what he needs. he's a bit of an anti-hero. ok, just kidding. really, i wanted it to be longer tho. i really want to read sanisalo's other stuff, but so far nothing else is translated to english. finnish is hard to learn, but maybe i'll try. :( ( )

Bara sedan solen sjunkit (Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi; Not Before Sundown), Sinisalo, Johanna, Månpocket, Stockholm, 2003 (2000). Finished: 2005-01-25.

This is an English review of a Finnish novel that I read in Swedish translation. Not Before Sundown is the winner of the Finlandia Book Prize, and a speculative fiction masterpiece to boot.

I'd urge as many people as possible to read this.

It is profoundly touching, intricate, devastating and beautiful. The Swedish paperback cover is classy, but I don't think it does the novel justice. Sure, I can see the symbolism: a little dose of Finnish darkness - clever and classy, I give it that. But this book is so much more than just clever and classy, although it is that too. Some say the translation doesn't do it justice. Since I don't speak Finnish I can't really be a judge of that. But what I can say is that the sheer force of the story carries across nevertheless, the compelling question where animal ends and human begins, with what rights we make our divisions and how we have and will look upon the precarious concept of evil. It also incorporates the theme of the oppressed's rebellion, doubly exposed in the trolls and in Palomita, and even in Mikael's relation to Martes. It is eerie and entangling with a flurry of sexual attraction that can hardly leave any reader untouched. I have just finished it as I write this [January 2005] and my whole being is a knot just below my breastbone, churning and exhilared. It's been so long since I had a reading experience like this, though I can remember each one of them like precious gems of my existence. It is a passionated reading, like falling in love. It is falling in love. ( )

Troll A love story by Johanna Sinisalo is a twisted folk tale.

Angel stops an act of bullying and rescues the victim who turns out to be a young troll. Though mythic, in this reality, Finnish trolls have been identified and classified by zoologists. Trolls are rare in the wild and almost never known in captivity. Angel keeps the troll and Johanna Sinisalo includes folktales and animal research as some of the resources that Angel taps to find how to feed and care for the troll.

The story is disturbing, to me, in its sexuality. The sexual tension in Angel clangs alarms to me not only in that the troll is an animal but that the troll is immature. As Angel uses the troll for an advertisement photo campaign he is working on a parallel develops between his relationship (urg) with the troll and the abusive relationship of the couple downstairs.

Betrayal, taming of animals, human nature or animal nature....

Angel's interaction with the troll leads him to view many people and relationships in different ways...seeing humanity where before he had glanced past with disdain. ( )

I really enjoyed reading this and really liked some of the characters. Found some of it slightly too weird, and I am not entirely convinced by the title, not convinced that it's a love story as opposed to a lust story. Then again, I don't read Finnish, so for all I know the title was completely made up by the translator.

Speaking of the translator, the translation reads a bit clunky, particularly to start with, though one gets into it quickly enough.

Finally, I found Sinisalo's extensive use of stylistic devices, such as excerpts from "academic papers" and mythology, somewhat heavy-handed and excessive. ( )

http://www.lewism.org/2006/05/10/not-before-sundown-by-johanna-sinisalo/ ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2005/03/27-not-before-sundown-johanna-sinisalo.htm... ( )

Highly suspenseful and beautifully imagined, 'Troll' is a psychologically acute dark fantasy from Finland that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the last page and will haunt you long after you close the book. Highly recommended. ( )