Translated by Judith
Landry
Pages: 192
Publisher: Melville House
Released: 2013
Guest reviewed by Bronwyn Mauldin
This book is not about
Finnish grammar, of course. It is about language, specifically, the role of
language in constructing identity. How do you know who you are if you lack a
language to express it? Are you a different person in different languages? How
does language shape a nation?
It’s 1943 in Trieste, a
port city that has been the crossroads of cultures for centuries. A man has
been found, unconscious and badly injured. He is brought to a German military medical
ship where a Finnish doctor, Petri Friari, treats him. When the man wakes, he
has no memory of himself or who is he is. He has even lost his language. The
sailor’s jacket he was wearing when found has a tag with the name Sampo
Karjalainen: a Finnish name. Doctor Friari takes on Sampo as a special case,
grateful for the opportunity to speak his native language. When Sampo is well
enough, he sends him to Helsinki where, they both hope, memories will be
reignited and he will recover his language, his memories and his lost self.
The story is told
primarily by Sampo, in a journal Doctor Friari finds three years later. What we
are reading, Sampo wrote as he was only beginning to learn Finnish. The doctor
explains that he has taken the journal he found, the broken bits of spare and
often ungrammatical language, its lists of words, drawings, a few letters and
newspaper clippings, and reconstructed them into something more fluent. As the
doctor rewrites Sampo’s journal, he intersperses within it his own story of
exile from Finland, and the two come together powerfully in the end.
Finnish is a linguistic
anomaly. It is unrelated to the languages of its nearest neighbors in
Scandinavia or Russia. Estonian is in the same Finno-Ugric language family, as
are some of the Sami languages to the north, a few tribal languages in the Ural
Mountains, and Hungarian. Doctor Friari tells Sampo as he leaves for Helsinki,
“Finnish is the
language in which you were brought up, the language of the lullaby that sent
you to sleep each night. Apart from studying it, you must learn to love it.
Think of each word as though it were a magic charm which might open the door to
memory. Say each word aloud as though it were a prayer – prayers are made up of
words.”
That this orphaned man
has been sent to learn an orphan language is as tragic as it is ironic, for, as
we learn in Doctor Friari’s prologue, he misunderstood the clues to Sampo’s
identity. This man without a language is not a man named Sampo from Finland,
but he will discover this too late.
Sampo arrives in
Helsinki. He travels the city in search of memories, and of people who might
remember him. He studies Finnish language and history under the tutelage of the
kind but mad Chaplain Olof Koskela who uses the Kalevala, Finland’s great work
of epic poetry, as his text. This work was instrumental in the development of a
Finnish national identity, perfect for a man who is trying to find his own
identity and history. As they study together, they drink liberally from a bottle
of koskenkorva (Finnish barley vodka) that somehow always remains
halfway full.
In his journal, Sampo
describes his struggle to grasp Finnish grammar:
“I spread them out on
the table as though they were maps of my personal campaigns, filling every last
bit of them with formulae as unforgiving as equations, where every letter that
I wrote weighed heavy as lead in terms of sheer mental effort. Fragile as
houses of cards but logically indestructible, those syntactical digests were my
defence against an enemy who was attacking me from behind.”
New Finnish Grammar was written originally
in Italian by Diego Marani, linguist, translator and novelist, and the inventor
of his own language, Europanto.
Perhaps only a linguist could understand how grammar and its discontents create
both persons and nations. As Doctor Friari tells us,
“Language is a natural
phenomenon, peculiar to all humanity. Human stupidity has divided it up into a
plurality of grammars, each claiming to be the ‘right’ one, to reflect the
clarity of thought of a whole people. Thus each people learns the rules of its
own grammar, deluding itself that it is these same rules that will resolve
life’s mysteries.”
Sampo’s story plays out
against a backdrop of the seasons as Helsinki transitions from winter ice to
spring melt to summer mud. At the edge of these are preparations by the Finnish
army to defend the country from an impending invasion by Russia. As the
Russians attack, Sampo’s story comes to its inevitable and yet surprising
climax.
When Doctor Friari
finally learns the truth of Sampo’s origin, he realizes it was his own
experience in exile, his loss of identity and the homesickness he has suffered,
that drove him to see this patient without a name or language, as a fellow
countryman. He sent Sampo to Finland because he so desperately wanted to return
there himself.
“Sometimes human
thought gets lost in the warren of its own logic, becomes a slave to a geometry
which is an end in itself, whose aim is no longer the understanding of reality,
but the bolstering of some prior assumption. We are such monstrous egoists that
we would rather destroy ourselves pursuing false truths than admit that we are
on the wrong track.”
###
Bronwyn Mauldin is the author of the novel Love Songs of the Revolution. She won The Coffin Factory magazine’s 2012 very short story award, and her Mauldin’s work has appeared in the Akashic Books web series, Mondays Are Murder, and at Necessary Fiction, CellStories, The Battered Suitcase, Blithe House Quarterly, Clamor magazine and From ACT-UP to the WTO. She is a researcher with the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and she is creator of GuerrillaReads, the online video literary magazine.
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