Rattvig Hotel, Northern Sweden, Summer Pole

DREAMING ABOUT SCANDINAVIA

Maybe it is because of this string of hot-hot-hot weather we’ve been having in Arizona, but I’m thinking about northern climes–Scandinavian countries come to mind. I’ve spent quality time in Sweden, and a bit of time in Finland, but still have not made my dream trip to Norway’s fjords or the charms of Denmark.

It is possible that I can win a trip at this fascinating site about Scandinavia. And maybe you can, too. To win an I-pod and other goodies, submit a travel story. To win a trip to Scandinavian on Iceland Air, just comment on one of the stories you’ll find at the site.

Deadline: JULY 13  (HURRY!)

If you need some inspiration for travel to Scandinavia, here are some past articles from A Traveler’s Library.

Finland: The Year of the Hare; A Winter Book; A Summer Book.

Helsinki Outdoor Museum

Uh-oh, nothing from Denmark. (Need recommendations, please)

FLY TO GREECE

Temple of Hephaestus in Athens

This contest somewhat misleadingly says fly to your favorite Greek island and then offers a choice of Athens, Crete or Mykonos for your five-day/four-night stay. But, hey, ANYPLACE in Greece is fine with me, even if Athens is not an island, and my favorite island of Siphnos is not a choice. Besides, the contest is sponsored by Voskos Greek yogurt–always a GOOD thing, and a food I associate strongly with Greek islands. Check out the Facebook Page of Voskos Greek Yogurt.

Deadline: July 31

ANOTHER TRIP GIVEAWAY

Door of our VRBO Paris Apartment

HomeAway is celebrating its 20th anniversary (they also own VRBO, y’know.). Go to their website to learn how to win a $5000 vacation rental and airfare for FOUR–or nineteen other nifty travel prizes–adding up to Twenty–get it?

Deadline: August 12

WANT MORE CHANCES TO WIN A TRIP?

Travel Onion, a consolidator of Travel Blogs, offers a page with travel contests. Good stuff!

Like contests? Do you enter on-line contests? Ever win a trip somewhere? Those that came with “winner must participate in a seminar on time shares” does not count.

And how about Denmark literature–suggestions??

(I received no compensation for promoting these contests, and all the photos are the property of Ken or me. If you wish to reuse a photo please ask first.)

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Book Cover

Destination: Finland

Book: The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna (NEW in 2010)

Did you ever just want to chuck it all and wander in the woods?  Leave the business world behind to travel like Barbara Weibel who shares her experience at Hole in the Donut?

If you are too timid to actually cut all the ties to your “civilized” life, but still have a yearning to get away from clocks and calendars,  Arto Paasilinna’s The Year of the Hare: A Novel provides the perfect escape literature. A journalist riding across Finland with a photographer, feels the car hit a hare (not a bunny rabbit–hares are larger, related to jack rabbits ). Vatanen, the journalist, gets out to check on the hare, who has retreated into the woods with his broken leg, and the two of them just keep going.

Snowshoe Hare

This is no cutsey cartoon version of a Bugs Bunny, but a portrayal of a real animal, and a human who takes responsibility for the fellow animal’s well being. Nevertheless, at times the book seems a bit whimsical, but that may be a trait read in by the reader who cannot truly imagine someone just walking away form job, wife, friends, and all those THINGS that surround our lives. But whimsical or not, The Year of the Hare will have you laughing and gasping by turns, as the man and the hare live through adventures that spiral from normal to fantastically bizarre, from heart warming to life threatening. All this happens in less than 200 pages, in chapters that  range from four pages to ten. The writing is as spare and clean as the lines of Scandinavian design.

Ken and I visited Finland briefly on our way from Sweden to St. Petersburg. We stayed overnight in the fort-town of Turku, mentioned in this book, and in charming Helsinki, where people thronged the sidewalks in summer sunshine, happy to emerge from the winter darkness. The train passed through dark woods and neat fields. Although we visited a Sami  restaurant (when I was a child my school books called them Laplanders)  in northern Sweden and dined on reindeer, I would still like to visit northern Finland. The author lives in the north, and much of the book takes place there.

While we get a good picture of the Finnish countryside in this book, and some snapshots of an unmistakably “foreign” culture, the thing that struck me most was the universality of reactions of the people to Vatanen and his hare. From suspicion of his motives, to off-handed “its his own business”, to officious requirements for the proper papers, to those who wanted to make a buck off the situation. I doubt that these reactions would vary much from country to country. Author Paasilinna portrays humanity in its many varieties–not just Finnish humanity.

One couple is frightened when he appears at their door, and calls the police. who talk like policemen always do.

“Okay,” the constables said.  ”What’ve you been up to?”

“I asked them to call for a taxi, but they’ve called for you instead.”

“And am I right in thinking you’ve got a hare with you?”

….The hare peered nervously out of the basket, looking somehow guilty.

The constables gave each other a look, nodding, and one of them said: “Okay, sir; better come along with us. Hand over the basket.”

That bit of dialogue cracks me up. The humor in this book just sneaks up on you. Everything about the book is as gentle as the handling of the hare by his sympathetic rescurer.

Paasilinna is the author of 30 books, and it is a shame that he is not better known in America. The Year of the Hare was first published in Great Britain in 1995, and in America in 2006. The current Penguin edition, with an introduction by travel writer Pico Iyer, came out last year.

Pico Iyer, by the way, is the perfect person to write an introduction, as he burst into the public eye when he left a promising career with a major magazine and turned to travel and freelance writing. I love his capsule description of the book:

It sometimes feels–such is the runaway pace of the shaggy-hare subversion–that the whole novel is drunk, starting out relatively upright and conventional but soon keeling over, rubbing its forehead, and wondering what in the world is going to happen next.

Of the many lines in this book that I cherished, the last is one of the most delicious.

“…Vatanen is a man to be reckoned with.“

So is this book.

I am posting this on the date of the Chinese New Year, since this is the launch of the Year of the Rabbit–a very special year to me, since I was born in the Year of the Rabbit. Sometimes it is called the Year of the Hare.  But hares are not rabbits!

All good things have to come to an end, and this is the last day of the January book contests and the Cambria Suites Giveaway. However, you have until 12:00 p.m. MST February 1 to leave a comment to win a copy of The Year of the Hare and to be entered in the Cambria Suites Giveaway. See contest rules.

If you like this review, please share it with your friends. I get lots of extra readers when you Stumble a post, or link to it on Facebook, and I would like many people to learn about this wonderful book.

You might also want to read:

A Summer Book

A Winter Book

Scandinavian Fiction

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Wintry Icicles. Photo courtesy of A House Called Nut

Destination: Finland

Book: A Winter Book by Tove Jansson

Finnish Winter Retreat

Guest Author Michele Simeone

If you’re tired of hearing about summer, how does a good dose of Finnish winter sound?

It was during my second year in Finland that my friend surprised me with a copy of [amazonify]0954899520::text:::: A Winter Book [/amazonify]. With one bitterly cold winter under my belt, I was now less worried about basic survival and more concerned with keeping cabin fever at bay during the long, dark months ahead. No matter how many winter sports a person picks up, I’d discovered, the extremity of the Finnish winter means spending a lot of time indoors. Thank goodness for books, piles and piles of books.

Finland. Ice in Winter. Photograph courtesy of A House Called Nut

A Winter Book (2006) is the first collection of Tove Jansson’s short fiction for adults to appear in English translation in almost forty years. Jansson, probably Finland’s best-known queer figure, is so overwhelmingly famous for authoring the Moomintroll series, that her contributions as a visual artist and writer of adult fiction have frequently gone unmentioned. But the popular reception of her novel The Summer Book (originally published in 1972 and reprinted in English in 2003) sparked a renewed interest in Jansson’s adult prose.

In addition to previously published stories and a selection of black and white photography, this latest compilation includes the piece “Correspondence,” appearing for the first time in English translation. This spare, poignant story is based on the actual letters exchanged by an elderly Jansson and a young Japanese fan. Tokyo resident Tamiko first writes to Jansson hoping to learn how to write stories, and a friendship soon buds. Tamiko’s letters reveal—we are not privy to Jansson’s side of the exchange—a great intimacy and understanding that defies cultural difference, age, and a vast geographic divide. In one letter, Tamiko writes:

How many lonely islands are there in Finland?

Can anyone live there who wants to?

I want to live on an island.

I love lonely islands and I love flowers and snow.

But I can’t write how they are.

Together, the stories collected in A Winter Book form a moving, but wholly unsentimental meditation on aging and youth. Unlike The Summer Book, not all the stories are confined to one season; here, winter takes on the more symbolic meaning of age. The first two parts of the collection are made up of stories told from the perspective of a child, while the third part takes an enormous leap into old age. Most of the pieces are semi-autobiographical and portray real people and events from Jansson’s life.

Tove Jansson’s success in making a family of plump, white trolls the symbol of a nation must be proof of her great mastery as a storyteller. Her adult fiction, though less known, is no exception. Whether you’re lying on the beach, or escaping the cold like I was, A Winter Book will transport you to Jansson’s universe—funny, sad, and always wise.

Michele says: I’m a freelance writer and award-winning literary translator. Since moving with my husband to our friend’s lakeside eco-cottage, I’ve written A House Called Nut about our pursuit of a simpler, greener life in the Finnish countryside.

Michele, thanks once again for sharing a look at Finland with A Traveler’s Library. Your blog, A House Called Nut is another wonderful virtual trip to Finland. What an interesting life you lead.

I am curious to know if anybody here has read those Moomin books? I read that they are the best selling book in America by a Finnish author, but I had never heard of them. Multi-talented author, huh? And in case you missed it, Michele discussed Tove’s Summer Book here earlier.

More reading on Scandinavia: Books, Movies and Plays about Sweden, A PBS Movie set in Sweden

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Meadow at The House Called Nut, Photo courtesy of a House Called Nut.

Destination: Finland

Book: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

A Journey into the Finnish Summer

by guest author, Michele Simeon

Swedish-speaking Finnish writer Tove Jansson has been called the “laureate of small things” for her astounding ability to capture beauty, darkness, and meaning in deceptively simple details. Jansson’s novel The Summer Book follows an elderly woman and her granddaughter, Sophia, over the course of many summer stays on a remote, Finnish island. Time seems almost suspended in the eternal light of the Nordic summer, and the two protagonists, one at the beginning of life, one at the end, retreat into their shared world of magic, mischief, quarrels, and adventure.

Summer Midnight in Finland, Photograph courtesy of A House Called Nut.

The Summer Book entered my life at just the right moment: my husband and I were in the middle of uprooting our lives in a move from London to Helsinki. Trapped somewhere between happy anticipation and heartbreak, I let Jansson’s evocative descriptions carry me far from the urban jungle to a tiny island in Finland’s Pellinge archipelago.

The authenticity of the novel’s setting shines through and is, perhaps, due in some part to its basis in the actual island and cottage where Jansson and her extended family passed their summers. Such annual migration from town to country is customary in Finland, where places of business and work collectively shut their doors for the month of July.

Although our suitcases weren’t quite destined for a small island in the Gulf of Finland, the measured rhythm of life, embracement of simplicity, and return to nature that the novel portrays are all qualities customarily associated with the Finnish summer. Each of The Summer Book’s twenty-two chapters could be accessed as a self-contained short story, at the heart of which lies a deep communion with nature. From the powerful effect of geographic isolation to the sweet sensation of diving into the sea, Sophia and her grandmother’s interaction with their island natural surroundings permeate the novel:

“Do you know what it feels like when you dive?”

“Of course I do,” her grandmother said. “You let go of everything and get ready and just dive. You can feel the seaweed against your legs. It’s brown, and the water’s clear, lighter towards the top, with lots of bubbles. And you glide. You hold your breath and glide and turn and come up, let yourself rise and breathe out. And then you float. Just float.”

When I first read The Summer Book (because I have read it three times in four years), I had no idea that I’d eventually find myself living in the Finnish countryside in a modest home not unlike Jansson’s beloved summer cottage. Like Sophia, I wish for storms when the weather has been too fine for too long, and I have special parts of this plot of land with special names to accompany them. And now, at the height of summer, I lose track of time in the abiding northern light, and marvel that this once distant, foreign land has become my home too.

Michele says: I’m a freelance writer and award-winning literary translator. Since moving with my husband to our friend’s lakeside eco-cottage, I’ve written A House Called Nut about our pursuit of a simpler, greener life in the Finnish countryside.

Michele, thank you so much for introducing us to this enticing book about Finland. And lucky Library, Michele will return in three days with another book by Tove Jansson!I have always felt that life in Scandinavia is influenced by the seasons in a way that people from a more moderate climate cannot understand. How about you, reader? Have you lived in a place where the seasons dominated everyone’s lives?

Note that photographs are the property of A House Called Nut. All rights reserved.

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