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Book review: Mirjam Tuominen – as intense as keen

the Waiting room is full of people trying to sit or lie or sit in strange positions. Everyone has crutches, most of the black support rails – orthotics – around

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Book review: Mirjam Tuominen – as intense as keen

the Waiting room is full of people trying to sit or lie or sit in strange positions. Everyone has crutches, most of the black support rails – orthotics – around the left leg. We are insektslika arthropods with exoskelettet the outside of the body. ”Two-thirds of alpine tävlingsskidåkare suffer anterior cruciate ligament injuries in the left leg”, I read in the journal Physiotherapy. Now I'm really not any alpine tävlingsskidåkare, but has managed to tear of the cruciate ligaments and the ligaments anyway. Consequently, I am sitting still. And spend days reading Mirjam Tuominen.

It's a good idea, for several reasons. Mainly because her style is intense and as earnestly anxious to find just the right word for what it is she wants to describe. And when she makes it, hits the right, so it is as if the text stands up, and brightens. Everything else becomes insignificant, a concentrated in the here and now emerges. It feels as if the text is looking a stint in the eyes, challenging and dazzling. ”See this!” rumbles the letters, with an authority that it is not worth to argue with.

in the day? The closest I come to mind is Linda Boström. Her language has a similar passion seriously that would be överspänt if it were not for the fact that you actually trust the person who is speaking.

But it is also timely for an invalid like me, that almost all of the short stories deals with various forms of medical conditions. People are in rest homes, in hospitals, in beds and in institutions and is more or less isolated from the outside world. ”The reading of the stories, it is clear that certain themes emerge: medical conditions, art, children, family, motherhood, and the excluded condition,” writes Daniel Pedersen in his preface.

Mirjam Tuominen was born in 1913 in Finnish Kajaani, finland and grew up with his mother and his three sisters in Helsinki. The father died early, probably from untreated diabetes. Fadersförlusten characterized Mirjam Tuominen difficult, as well as her early experience of exclusion and social maladjustment. She is looking for in art, studying literature and art history in Helsinki and spend a year in Paris as an au pair. Her big sister Gunvor gets together with Göran Korsström, yourself get stuck she for the older brother, the teckningsglade Torsten, mostly referred to as the ”Totti”. She describes him in a letter to a friend as ”one of the most unconventional people that is left in this world”.

Mirjam Tuominen. Photo: Modernista

Mirjam tuominen's and Totti Korsströms daughter Tuva Korsström about his artistic parents and their lives during the war. It is a surprisingly enjoyable and entertaining biography, given all the trouble that surrounded the family. Tottis krigserfarenheter (he will be called up several times) and Mirjams själsmörker, which later results in psychosis, raseriattacker and paranoia, strikes hard against the marriage. Yet there is a singular love between them, despite the fact that they finally differ.

”the Fairy and Jordanden” is a solid dubbelbiografi, just over five hundred pages, which draw the two families, Korsström and Tuominen. Tottis watercolors, and drawings, as well as Mirjams notes, and reviews. The extensive rundmålningen serves its purpose. Tuva Korsström succeed with flying colors depicting both everyday life and the present, but to idealize or condemn. It may not have been an easy task.

”I want to live just to sometimes be able to laugh with my children. But there is a limitless tungsinne within me.” It says in one of Mirjam tuominen's diaries. And these ongoing tensions, between motherhood and privacy, love, and isolation, writing and disease, strikes like a heavy pendulum through life. The repeated wars makes Mirjam Tuominen to the glowing pacifist, which is also evident in her later books. Tuva Korsström writes: ”Miriam never came over the rise of the nazi crimes. She preserved the life out of a painful hudlöshet the face of afflictions and wrongs, also outside of his personal upplevelsesfär.”

Her favorite authors was Dostoyevsky, Hölderlin, and Rilke – together these three, and adding a school for the female perspective, to get perhaps an idea of the dignity of her prose.

the way to Tuva Korsström itself is a literary critic and author. She writes easily and läsvänligt and navigates smoothly among the quantities of materials without becoming inkrökt or lose focus. The book dedicated to her sister Kyra, and in any way it may be possible to see ”Fairy and jordanden” as a kind of closure and reconciliation. Now she's leaving of her writing to new readers. It is a cultural deed that is the right time.

Mirjam Tuominen has long been what you call ”författarförfattare”. That is to say, such a writer as other writers think about, but perhaps not as well known to the public. In the preface to the Modernistas republication of the novels writing Pedersen: ”the Name Mirjam Tuominen (1913-1967) has long been associated with a special luster, as if we readers were a specially selected crowd.” I nodded when I read it, as well as the future, where he writes about how difficult it was to obtain the books: ”some are almost impossible to get your hands on”. One of the nicest presents I got when I turned 40 was just a prosabok of Mirjam Tuominen.

The book (”Theme with variations”) have also come in new editions by the publisher Eskaton, who resolved to give out tuominen's poetry and prose. While the Modernista thus bet on the short stories. Consequently, to have new readers all the opportunities to become acquainted with his writings, who have for too long been a concern for the uninitiated.

in the debut collection ”Early doubt” (1938) is about a eleven year-old girl who wonders if she should die, and how she'll be able to ask the question to his mother. In this inledningsnovell are all developed and varied later in the oeuvre: the dödsmedvetenheten, the psychological djuplodningen, the view of children as equally nuanced thinking and individually sensitive as any adult at any time. This is also the particular combination of stationary and motion which stands tuominen's style.

She affirms something with certainty – an argument, a picture or a feeling – and just when the reader thinks that yes, it is. So shifts her position and moves in a different direction. It creates nerve and life in the text and is similar in many ways to the associative and rhythmic way that people actually think of. Like when the main character Irina in the first novel of brooding over what she should say to her mother: ”in the end, she had decided to simply say: Mother, shall I die? or: Mom, I'll never be healthy again? The latter was perhaps better, in that way avoided the she word die, which was so solemn, that she did not believe she dared to speak it aloud and so used to not do it. You said ’die’ or ’go away’ or ’fall away’ or that uncle Jonathan ’fall into the pit’.”

Tuva Korsström. Photo: Cata Portin

Irina find the right word, but she makes it and lands in a sort of security with their decision. Whereupon Tuominen writes: ”But it was as if the very fact that she is pre-formed and practiced, förtagit her the courage to make the question, when Mother finally came.”

The play is always a little between the thought and action of the protagonists, as well as the internal world and the external do not really go together. And it is here Tuominen shows his skill as a writer, she is razor sharp in the areas where almost all the other is cloudy. She can accurately describe the sliding shifts in själstillståndet of a human being. How the mundane can turn over in a terrible swoon, but also ljusningen when the anxiety is released, and the tranquility is present.

The two volumes can accommodate five books and twenty-four short stories and of course, it is not to comment on all of them. To read them in a lump is also quite heavy and not something I really would recommend. Tuominen, who at the end of his life converted to catholicism, has always been more existential plan in their texts. They are ideological, psychological, and often have a religious subtext. Her favorite authors was Dostoyevsky, Hölderlin, and Rilke – together these three, and adding a school for the female perspective, to get perhaps an idea of the dignity of her prose.

should read her slowly and piecemeal, with the air between them. So that it becomes the space of the thoughts which the words fluff. From a sickbed, even if you therefore do not need to tear korsbanden of you. Read a short story every now and then. It doesn't need to go fast, it does not in the texts either. On the contrary, they insist on slowing down in so long and patiently that it forced the reader to the end of the gather and the concentration is there. When it occurs it feels like to wake up in the morning and suddenly be healthy. This is the life. All new possibilities are open. That moment is worth waiting for.

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