Edgar Allan Poe from Norway

This book is probably not out in English, but it's likely it will be, since it's been getting lots of favourable reviews and the Finnish translation came out quickly, so the author's agents are doing their work very well. Nikolaj Frobenius (who scripted the original Insomnia) is a Norwegian author and one of his earlier novels was about Marquis de Sade's servant who can't feel pain. His newest novel, Jeg skal vise dere frykten (I Will Show You Fear, if I know my Norwegian well enough), called Pelon kasvot / The Face of Fear, in Finnish, is about Edgar Allan Poe and his battle with anthologist Rufus Griswold, and also about his battle with a mysterious serial killer who seems to duplicate Poe's tales, especially "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (that's the story we all want to duplicate, right?).

The book hovers somewhere between a gimmicky serial novel and a serious literary novel, not making up its mind which it wants to be. There are several good moments in the book and Frobenius has Poe's moods down well. He has also done his homework on Poe and even his lesser-known writings, such as Eureka, and especially on obscure American authors of the 1840s. Still Jeg skal vise dere frykten feels only like a gimmicky serial killer novel. If it winds up translated in English and you're a fan of Poe, try it. It's not a bad novel in any way.

The financial crisis: nothing new

As I said earlier, I was reading Peter Ackroyd's new biography of Poe (highly recommended, solidly written and short and seems to contain everything one needs to know about Poe, if one's not a scholar) and I noticed that there were at least two grave financial crises during Poe's lifetime - which was short, only 40 years, as all the readers surely know. And the both crises seemed to fasten Poe's demise.

Now there's another financial crisis on. As I was reading Ackroyd's book, I said to Elina that why everyone still thinks capitalism is a good way to handle economy when it seems that the tendency to break down and go into a crisis is inherently built into it. I don't think there were any financial crises during the era 1930-1980 when the economy was regulated heavily throughout the world, starting from the Roosevelt era United States. (And the financial growth was steadier and even faster than it was before the current crisis.) These post-1980 crises started when the regulation ceased - and that was a deliberate decision from the politicians, not just some freak coincidence or a sign of the market's own will. After 1989 there have been at least three global financial crises - in twenty years! And still people think that capitalism is a good system! (Of course the era 1930-1980 contained a world war, the Cold War, lots of international conflicts throughout the world etc., lots of political suppression, but in the Western world, or in the free countries, if you will, and especially in the Nordic countries, many things were better than they are now.)

PS. Hmm.. did I mention the Poe biography only in a comment on Patti Abbott's blog?

Sangster's Private I

I finished this last night. Well, I can't actually say I finished it, because I had to stop reading some 40 pages before the actual end. I just couldn't concentrate on it in any way. I've been quarreling with my ex about many things (you may remember that they moved to Luxembourg and I haven't seen Ottilia for almost two months now and it seems that they won't be able to travel to Finland as often as I was originally told), and last night I realized that I hadn't understood anything that had been going on in the book for the last 50 pages. I didn't know what Sangster's hero, private eye John Smith, was talking about and who some of the characters were, so I thought it would be better just to drop it and read it some other time. (If you're new to this blog, scroll down a bit - there's a longer post about Sangster.)

But then I picked up the new Poe biography by Peter Ackroyd. I was tired as hell, but the book grabbed me and I read till midnight. It's a very good biography - and it's short, so it's highly recommended. (The Finnish translation just came out. I understood the book was published in UK only this year.)

Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym

I read the recent Finnish translation of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (it came out from Teos, translated by Jaana Kapari, who's most famous for her work on the Harry Potters). It's the first translation almost in hundred years, since the last one came out in 1915, if I remember correctly (it came out in two parts and I've seen it only once, and then it was only the first part and it had no covers and was missing some of the last pages - so you can gather it's pretty scarce; the actual first edition from 1903 I haven't seen).

The book isn't exactly a part of the Poe canon. There are parts which are boring as hell. Some of the bits are powerful. Everyone thinks the book stops in the middle of the action - maybe it was due to Poe's alcoholism or something like that. Poe constructs, however, a pretty thick theoretical (and also rather jokey) frame around the narrative that's supposedly written by the real Pym, and ending the book as it does must've been Poe's deliberate decision. Nevertheless, the ending with the scream "Tekeli-li!" is sure to get stuck in the reader's mind.

I found out that Poe got some inspiration from J.C. Symmes's theory of Hollow Earth that were circulating around the time Poe wrote his novel. It makes the ending even more powerful. No wonder that Jules Verne wrote a sequel to the novel, called The Antarctic Mystery. (Here's a pace of Poe-related fan fiction, there may be some stuff related to the Pym adventure.)

I wrote a review of the novel for the Kulttuurivihkot magazine. It will be out only in some months, so I thought it would be appropriate to already post it. It's here (in Finnish, of course). Note on the text: I didn't think that the translator Kapari had much evidence for her suggestion that the book might be autobiographical, but there seem to be others who think the same, and actually it seems it's a consensus on the book. I don't really see much relevance to the idea of reducing the book to Poe's life, and I can't quite gather how all this relates to the idea of the United States's identity, as some scholars seem to say. Maybe I should've gone to greater lengths about this.

(By the way, here's my earlier take on Poe's short stories.)