Translated material
Merry Corpses
The author's very manner is reminiscent of some kind of simple-minded folk tale, where a corpse is perceived as a natural phenomenon - such as the water cycle in nature. Nobody seriously weeps over the death of heroes in the Scandinavian sagas; So in Paasilinna, the body of a murdered person may well swim across the Baltic Sea, in the process being eaten by a voracious eel, which in turn will dissolve in the stomach of a Swedish sailor, and the sailor in the finale will only grunt: “Damn it, how delicious.” In general, Arto Paasilinna’s dispassionate intonation and deliberately primitive syntax are reminiscent of the style of “new naivety” or “new sincerity,” which for some reason took root best on northern soils. Paasilinna's closest geographical epigon is the popular Norwegian Erlend Lu, who, however, is still a long way from his Finnish colleague.
The beginning of “The Tender Poisoner” is reminiscent of a Scandinavian fairy tale that I read to death in childhood: a neat old woman in an apron against the backdrop of a red house waters young violets from a yellow watering can. The air smells of freshly baked bread, the granny is waiting for her granddaughter from the capital - what a start for a vacation story.
But after just a couple of pages it turns out that the grandson is not a grandson at all, but a seventh-year-old, with several criminal convictions under his belt; visits an elderly widow every month on her retirement day to take away her money, eat her supplies, take a steam bath and get into a good mess. He arrives in the company of two thugs, one of whom has already been noted for the murder of a peaceful passerby, and the second, as a child, ended up in a colony for a particularly brutal beating of a person. The entire neighborhood is suffering from a bunch of young idiots - from harmless pets to the good-natured baker. When the old woman, fleeing from the gang, calls the police, the local law enforcement officers behave not much better than the visiting hooligans: they finish the stolen pig, and after satisfying their hunger and drinking vodka, they leave.
Then the granny decides to act on her own: she moves to the city to live with her youth lover, a practicing doctor, and begins to study ancient recipes for making fast-acting poison. The funny thing is that the old woman feeds the first portion of the potion to her old boyfriend - thank God, without a lethal outcome. Having perfected the lethal agent, the “poisoner” gets to work. He sends his “granddaughter” a basket of “pies” to try, causing the whole gang to pass out for a day, but then come to life.
Next, both sides launch an open offensive, described by Paasilinna with the ingenuity of Agatha Christie. The geography of the novel expands, the action moves either to the Helsinki-Stockholm ferry, or to the outskirts of the Swedish capital. More and more new characters intervene in the story: feeble-minded brides, social workers, lonely psychologists, lawyers and even employees of the Ministry of Agriculture - Paasilinna seems to cover all layers of society, simultaneously making fun of everyone and everything.
The novel ends like an ideal children's fairy tale: the “poisoner” gets married and lives happily until her death. The corpses of the offenders plow through outer space. And the reader enjoys the inimitable intonation of Finnish absurdity, thanks to which any small event in his book balances on the edge of common sense and some kind of primordially northern, wild and direct, like a tractor, humor.