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Waiting to exhale
By Liesl Schillinger |
May 17, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
CERTAIN events belong not just to the country in which they occur but to the wider world, not only in imagination but in repercussion, and not only politically but on a personal level. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was one such event, the bombing of Hiroshima another, the My Lai massacre still another.
In our own era, the September 11 attacks have been felt throughout the world. We know this to be true but it's with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you understand, as you read "When I Forgot," a first novel by the Finnish journalist Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 "happened" in Finland too.
Finland - that trout-shaped squiggle of a landmass between Sweden and Russia, birthplace of Sibelius and the Saarinens, of the Nokia cellphone and Marimekko - is 6,437 kilometers from New York. And yet, ask the Finns, "where were you on September 11, 2001?" and chances are you'll get a precise answer. They were aware of our crisis; they felt implicated.
For Anna Louhiniitty, the narrator of Hirvonen's novel, 9/11 was the day her psychologically disturbed older brother, Joona, whom she'd hoped was getting better, called her in a panic. The night before, she'd helped him write an online personal ad, hoping that, now he was taking medication that "didn't make his face swell up and didn't slur his speech," some woman might fall for her brother "as for any other man." That morning, Anna had cheered herself with the image of "a Joona who got out of bed, went to the shop, and took the tram without sweating and making other passengers decide to sit somewhere else."
But as America's morning caught up with Finland's afternoon, Joona watched as the planes crashed into the distant towers, harmed himself in disturbed reaction, then phoned his sister for help. "A sentence came to me as if I had heard it on the radio," she recalls, sitting beside Joona in a taxi on the way to the hospital, registering his unshaven face, unbrushed teeth, unwashed body, bandaged and bleeding hand. "Her brother is mentally ill. I pressed my forehead to the cab window. She's taking her brother to the mental hospital. She. I."
"That September day," Anna remembers, "in that taxicab hurtling across Helsinki toward the hospital on the other side of the park, I stopped seeing Joona as a little boy whom adulthood and the future awaited somewhere. That day I saw him for the first time as a man with a dirty beard and skin that smelled of illness."
Hirvonen doesn't begin Anna's story on that charged date. We meet her more than a year and a half later, in the first weeks of the war with Iraq, as Anna, now a reporter, sits in a Helsinki cafe, mentally shuffling images of her distant and recent past: the brother she worshiped as a child, with his "golden hair and ringing voice," and that same brother grown up, accosting her at an anti-Iraq-war protest in a "flapping bathrobe and hospital slippers," standing in wet snow.
Anna has come to the cafe to read Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours," seeking refuge from her thoughts in this other "world I am allowed to enter," with its account of one day in the lives of three different women in three different eras, inspired by Virginia Woolf and her character Mrs Dalloway. But as hard as she tries, Anna can't concentrate on the story. While she broods about Joona, frets over a deadline and fields worried calls from her boyfriend and her mother, she tries to look like the "kind of woman who sits in a cafe in the afternoon eating salad and losing myself in a good book" - in other words, tries to "imagine I'm someone else."
So many conflicts darken the brew of Anna's quiet cup of coffee in that peaceful Helsinki cafe, it's no wonder she can't focus on her book. The wonder is that she would even try. "My time is a coffee stain dried on the table, mascara on my cheek, a battery bar that has disappeared from the display on my mobile phone," she thinks. "I've lost control of time and have not accomplished a single thing all day. Maybe I'll never accomplish anything ever again."
All that most people can hope to make sense of, wherever and whenever they live, Hirvonen suggests, is their understanding of themselves and of their own capabilities. Such insights are hard to come by when you're alone. Before she met a writing teacher, now her boyfriend - an American named Ian Brown - Anna had sought relationships with men who were dangerously weak and needed her help - "junkies who'd run out on rehab, car thieves awaiting prison sentences and alcoholics dreaming of revolution" who made it easy for her to feel comparatively stable. "The more bedraggled the man sleeping in my bed was, the more clarity I felt."
In opening herself up to Ian, a kindred spirit from abroad who bears news of another kindred spirit - a novelist from another century - Anna learns that she can receive help as well as give it. Potent, fragile and tender, "When I Forgot" is really the story of "When I Remembered," of a woman summoning the courage to unlock her memories and share them, and feeling the relief of exhaling a breath held too long.
In our own era, the September 11 attacks have been felt throughout the world. We know this to be true but it's with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you understand, as you read "When I Forgot," a first novel by the Finnish journalist Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 "happened" in Finland too.
Finland - that trout-shaped squiggle of a landmass between Sweden and Russia, birthplace of Sibelius and the Saarinens, of the Nokia cellphone and Marimekko - is 6,437 kilometers from New York. And yet, ask the Finns, "where were you on September 11, 2001?" and chances are you'll get a precise answer. They were aware of our crisis; they felt implicated.
For Anna Louhiniitty, the narrator of Hirvonen's novel, 9/11 was the day her psychologically disturbed older brother, Joona, whom she'd hoped was getting better, called her in a panic. The night before, she'd helped him write an online personal ad, hoping that, now he was taking medication that "didn't make his face swell up and didn't slur his speech," some woman might fall for her brother "as for any other man." That morning, Anna had cheered herself with the image of "a Joona who got out of bed, went to the shop, and took the tram without sweating and making other passengers decide to sit somewhere else."
But as America's morning caught up with Finland's afternoon, Joona watched as the planes crashed into the distant towers, harmed himself in disturbed reaction, then phoned his sister for help. "A sentence came to me as if I had heard it on the radio," she recalls, sitting beside Joona in a taxi on the way to the hospital, registering his unshaven face, unbrushed teeth, unwashed body, bandaged and bleeding hand. "Her brother is mentally ill. I pressed my forehead to the cab window. She's taking her brother to the mental hospital. She. I."
"That September day," Anna remembers, "in that taxicab hurtling across Helsinki toward the hospital on the other side of the park, I stopped seeing Joona as a little boy whom adulthood and the future awaited somewhere. That day I saw him for the first time as a man with a dirty beard and skin that smelled of illness."
Hirvonen doesn't begin Anna's story on that charged date. We meet her more than a year and a half later, in the first weeks of the war with Iraq, as Anna, now a reporter, sits in a Helsinki cafe, mentally shuffling images of her distant and recent past: the brother she worshiped as a child, with his "golden hair and ringing voice," and that same brother grown up, accosting her at an anti-Iraq-war protest in a "flapping bathrobe and hospital slippers," standing in wet snow.
Anna has come to the cafe to read Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours," seeking refuge from her thoughts in this other "world I am allowed to enter," with its account of one day in the lives of three different women in three different eras, inspired by Virginia Woolf and her character Mrs Dalloway. But as hard as she tries, Anna can't concentrate on the story. While she broods about Joona, frets over a deadline and fields worried calls from her boyfriend and her mother, she tries to look like the "kind of woman who sits in a cafe in the afternoon eating salad and losing myself in a good book" - in other words, tries to "imagine I'm someone else."
So many conflicts darken the brew of Anna's quiet cup of coffee in that peaceful Helsinki cafe, it's no wonder she can't focus on her book. The wonder is that she would even try. "My time is a coffee stain dried on the table, mascara on my cheek, a battery bar that has disappeared from the display on my mobile phone," she thinks. "I've lost control of time and have not accomplished a single thing all day. Maybe I'll never accomplish anything ever again."
All that most people can hope to make sense of, wherever and whenever they live, Hirvonen suggests, is their understanding of themselves and of their own capabilities. Such insights are hard to come by when you're alone. Before she met a writing teacher, now her boyfriend - an American named Ian Brown - Anna had sought relationships with men who were dangerously weak and needed her help - "junkies who'd run out on rehab, car thieves awaiting prison sentences and alcoholics dreaming of revolution" who made it easy for her to feel comparatively stable. "The more bedraggled the man sleeping in my bed was, the more clarity I felt."
In opening herself up to Ian, a kindred spirit from abroad who bears news of another kindred spirit - a novelist from another century - Anna learns that she can receive help as well as give it. Potent, fragile and tender, "When I Forgot" is really the story of "When I Remembered," of a woman summoning the courage to unlock her memories and share them, and feeling the relief of exhaling a breath held too long.
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