Fantastic week for Finnish fiction: Pirkko Saisio’s Helsinki Trilogy was named among the best recently translated fiction by The Guardian’s John Self. The books are translated into English by Mia Spangenberg.
Self describes The Red Book of Farewells, the final part in the trilogy, as “clear prose” that “playfully shifts between third and first person” and concludes that “this enchanting series deserves to become a modern classic”. Helsinki Trilogy is published in the UK by Penguin Random House.
Earlier this year, also Financial Times ran a piece on the trilogy, calling it “a Finnish masterpiece of autofiction”.
Saisio’s trilogy has already travelled to 14 territories, becoming one of the most successful modern classics from Finland in the recent years and garnering prestigious accolades on the way. The autofictional books carry the reader through the childhood, adolescence and adulthood of a girl who wanted to be a boy and started calling herself “her” when she was eight years of age.
The strong themes of the trilogy – the relationship between an individual and the society, sexuality and being queer, and finding your voice – are told in a fragmentary, lyrical style, descriptive of Saisio. As the background, there is Helsinki, changing as the decades go by.