Author: Marjo Niemi
Finnish original: Pienen budjetin sotaelokuva
Publisher: Teos, 2025
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 280 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample, English synopsis
“Each of us is ashamed of who we are, individually and collectively. We each wallow in our own shame.”
They say it’s a country of equal opportunities. The narrator, who has long ago escaped to a big city, returns to her hometown after her father’s death. The town factory once offered the residents not only work and a livelihood, but also housing, school, daycare, healthcare, and hobbies. All that is left here now is a burned-down shopping centre and angst.
The narrator reflects on her childhood, and gradually the adult and the child in her become intertwined. She is defined by the experience of an outsider: she does not recognize the old class as her own, and the new class does not recognize her as one of its own. The self-help instructions of positive thinking sound like cruel optimism: Don’t you have all the opportunities to succeed? Why don’t you take advantage of them? You only have yourself to blame!
A Low-Budget War Film is not one of those working-class novels in which the spirit of the united grows into a collective force. Rather, with its ruthless directness and dark humor, the novel shows how class identity is fragmented into individual pursuits, and the shame is inherited throughout generations.
“One of the major themes in Niemi’s work is who gets heard, seen, and noticed. She also approaches class from this perspective.[…] Niemi has an admirable ability to see the world accurately by viewing it skewed.” – Helsingin Sanomat Newspaper
About the author
Marjo Niemi