White Hunger by Aki Ollikainen
Translated from the Finnish by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
Peirene Press, Feb 2015
136 pages, review copy kindly provided by the publisher
Hunger is the kitten Willow-Lauri put in a sack, which scratches away with its small claws, causing searing pain, then more scratching, then more, until the kitten is exhausted and falls to the bottom of the sack, weighing heavily there, before gathering its strength and starting a fresh struggle. You want to lift the animal out, but it scratches so hard you dare not reach inside. You have no option but to carry the bundle to the lake and throw it into the hole in the ice.
White Hunger is my first translated read of this year, and what a chilling, unrelenting, horrifying, extraordinary book it was. Its 136 pages are understated but powerful and punch well above their weight; the comparison with Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic The Road in the publisher's note at the front is well made. I loved McCarthy's book - insofar as you can love anything so bleak - and am on my way to loving this one too.
The title gives the tone away: lyrically bleak. Set during the Finnish famine of 1866-1868, in the north of the country where small rural communities are desperately vulnerable to poor harvests, it watches over the destruction of a hungry family. Juhani and Marja and their two young children, Mataleena and Juho, live a marginal life at the best of times; even in the summer of 1867 they survive on skinny pike and bread made of ground bark. In the opening scene of the book they masturbate together in fear of starting another mouth to feed. By October Juhani, who has fed his wife and children instead of himself, is dying of starvation. The snow is drifting against the door and 'ice flowers cover the pane, ugly, mocking a summer meadow: blooms of death. Frost spreads weedlike through the window frames along the timber joints across the wall.' A mother before anything else Marja makes an impossible decision, and determines to save her children from certain death by leading them out into the snow. She leaves her husband with a hunk of straw bread and a pan of snow and walks out, leaving him to die.
There is literally no where to go. The roads are full of starving beggars, each as skinny as the next. Staggering from farmstead to almshouse to barn - encountering kindness and brutality and fellow suffering in equal measure - Marja, Mataleena and Juho are three more scraps of life cast into the wind. Marja dreams of reaching St. Petersburg (at the time northern Finland was part of Russia) where she will be able to buy bread made with real flour not bark or bones or straw, and she will raise her children amidst glittering spires. In reality, barely two days from her home, she has no idea of where she is. The villages she passes through are nameless, the landscape featureless, the people strangers.
Marja's story is interwoven with glimpses of the very different lives of brothers Teo and Lars, a doctor and government accountant, living lives of relative ease, warmth and comfort in town. They witness the crushing poverty around them at a remove, occasionally guilty but never properly touched by it. They are both tangentally implicated in the acts of the shadowy Senator, whose long-sighted political decisions have led to the immediate suffering of people like Marja and her children.
Where is God, the novel asks, while all this is happening? Marja is dismissive. Just before she leaves him to die Juhani pants a plea in the name of Jesus. '"You're always going on about Jesus"' she responds, as if this is a pointless exercise. Teo is also very clear. Asked if he believes in God, he replies '"No, I don't believe that this distress and misery have any purpose. That's what you're really asking."' He says this understanding the implication: if God does not cause suffering for a purpose, then chance is at the root of it and men - specifically men like him, with power and agency - make it better or worse. Each man decides which he will choose.
The characters may doubt God, but the novel still rings with biblical influence and symbolism. The structure of the chapters are patterned by an Old Testament rhythm: The Book of Mataleena, the Book of Marja, the Book of Juho. Teo and a friend argue about the parable of Job: if this suffering is a test, who is it aimed at? The Senator, whose socio-economic engineering have contributed to this crisis? The beggars? Teo's brother Lars and his wife Raakel are childless, but a chance encounter brings a child to them. Crosses and churches puncture the landscape. As spring comes in 1868, as the snow melts:
In the Old Church cemetery, crosses are uncovered. They peer round to see if it is yet time to emerge and remind man of his transience in the face of the cycle of the seasons.
Rather too late, one might argue, for the reminder, since the receding snow also uncovers the many bodies frozen on the winter roads. The beautiful and gut-wrenching epilogue perhaps confronts us again with the figure of Job. God may have abandoned the people of Finland, but he hasn't quite given up on this story.
White Hunger is as sceptical about money as it is about God. It is a terrible irony that a famine caused to some extent by expensive government schemes has made currency almost worthless. In one of the book's most powerful exchanges Teo generously offers a farmer a banknote, only to be met with mild scorn. The man takes down three other notes from a hiding place. You eat yours, he says, while I eat mine. Then the farmer's wife brings Teo a bowl of gruel and put the notes safely away.
Marja has no money to pay for the food and shelter she seeks on the road, and no one ever asks for it. Everywhere though she is a met with wary suspiscion and fear. Not because of any danger in her person, but because of the danger she represents. It is easy to be kind and generous if there is a single starving woman with her children on your doorstep, but what if she is only one of thousands and you have barely enough for yourself? What if some of those thousands have typhus and other diseases? The novel repeatedly enacts a horrible moment of tension at a farmstead door, where self-preservation and sympathy struggle against one another. Time and again it is the women - often mothers themselves - who offer food and a bed for the night, to the conflicted disapproval of their husbands. Every episode of charity takes the givers a step closer to being beggars themselves.
Some men take it upon themselves to extract 'payment' from Marja's body through rape, leading to the lowest and most shocking ebbs of the book. It makes difficult reading. Marja is not the only woman to be treated as currency in this way: Teo also takes 'payment' in sex from prostitutes in return for regular checks for venereal disease. There are very few instances of love and gentleness between adult men and women in this crushing environment. The most tender moment is probably when an elderly woman rolls her dying husband onto his side and curls up beside him, apparently oblivious to his weeping sores.
As you've probably guessed by now, White Hunger is not for the faint-hearted but is absolutely worth the tears and anguish. The experience of reading it takes me back to last January, when I read and raved about The Dig by Cynan Jones. I absorbed both in single sittings on winter afternoons, when the world outside was bare and white and cold, but I was warm. And both choked and haunted me with sadness, and brought me up close to despair, so that I could look the complexity of human suffering in the face. These are the kind of books that make you a better person.
Peirene Press specialise in perfectly formed translated novellas that can be read in a couple of hours, usually books that have been much lauded in their native languages. In Finland White Hunger has won a raft of debut prizes, as well as the Finnish Book Bloggers' Best Book award (2012)* and deserves every single one. Yet I can't imagine it would have been translated into English and published in the UK without Meike and her team at Peirene. Thank them by getting your mittens on and grabbing a copy.
~~Victoria~~
* I think this sounds like a great idea. We should have a UK Book Bloggers' Best Book award!