Rosa Liksom

The is the biography of a woman of northern Finland, born about 1915, who was taken very young by a much older colonel, went thru the Interwar period as a devotee of nazism, as was the colonel, lived the high life of a colonel's wife through most of WWII, then existed through a long post-war period in which their side had lost the war, finally freeing herself and taking on a new life. I found it compelling, deeply intrusive on my complacent middle class psyche, and riveting to the extent of mesmerizing.… (more)

I have read two Liksom novels in translation* and enjoyed both very much, but this slim book, which I picked up way back in 2010, kept being passed over for no good reason…until now.

This 1989 book is a collection of very short fiction, which might be called ‘flash fiction” these days. It’s 117 pages of short pieces varying in length from a half page to perhaps six pages (and the pages have fairly liberal margins top and bottom). But, those stories!

Liksom is a master of dark humor. Many of her first lines seem so subtle, so ordinary, to the reader, one hardly expects to be caught by it, but so we are. A few examples of first lines:

"I got out of the handcuffs on Friday morning",
"The sun was shining behind the factory"
"Every day I eat at least two bars of Marabou Chocolate"
"While the ‘soldiers at the military were putting on their leather suits and flying boots…"

So, yes, I was hooked.

*Compartment No. 6: and The Colonel's Wife… (more)

This is the classic set-up of two fundamentally incompatible people trapped together for an extended period and forced to learn to get along, but it's far from being a silly romantic comedy. We're in the dying Soviet Union in the uncertain weather of a mid-1980s spring, where the Finnish postgrad archaeology student Anna finds herself sharing a compartment on the seemingly endless train journey from Moscow to Ulan Bator with the rough-hewn construction worker Vadim Nikolaevich.

Vadim — whom the narrator only ever calls "the man" — soon reveals himself as unpleasant company in all sorts of ways. He's a violent misogynist who is proud of beating his wife only in private, frequents prostitutes, drinks far too much, seems to have killed a few people with his flick-knife, and is forever telling stories that are clearly designed to shock Anna, even if they aren't always strictly true. But he does have a very sure sense of how to survive in the complicated world of Soviet semi-legality through which they are travelling, and he seems to feel an obligation of hospitality towards Anna. She's travelling to get a breathing-space from a complicated situation in Moscow, and she seems to be almost grateful for his unwanted attentions as a distraction from all that she's left behind.

A wonderfully convincing portrait of Soviet Russia at a very specific moment in history, obviously observed in detail at first-hand, and performing the difficult trick of mixing a travel book with a novel without the joins ever becoming too obvious.… (more)

A young Finnish woman sets out on a long train journey across the Soviet Union, from Moscow to Ulan Baator, Mongolia. The person assigned to share her compartment is an older Russian man, often drunk, usually loud, sometimes unsafe. But also expansive and somewhat friendly. As the journey progresses, he talks, the Russian landscape scrolls past the windows and the trains stops in towns further and further from Moscow.

I'm not sure how to describe this book, except that it is about a place and a style of life that doesn't exist in the same way anymore, written about vividly and without judgement. The protagonist's words are omitted from the story, leaving only the place and the people, especially her travel companion, to speak for her. This is an extraordinary novel and one I'm so pleased to have read.… (more)