Mission: Save mom from dad

"Lennart Bromander, if a familjeroman who becomes a detective story"

"Swedish romaners most frequent motif, the dysfunctional family, drawn in Nina Wähäs great novel the Testament out to epic dimensions. After the excellent debut S as in sister in 2007, and the slightly rougher Look, not backwards! 2010 is Testament Wähäs third novel. This is not some small closed norénsk nuclear family, but a family consisting of a mother, father and twelve children, or even fourteen, since a further two died in infancy."

"the Time is the beginning of the eighties, the family lives in Aapajärvi in the torne river valley on the Finnish side. Many of the children are adults, some in school and some even younger. The family of evil center around which everything revolves is the father Pentti. He is erratic, hateful, spiteful and violent. His own satisfaction he in the barn, but his wife, however, he has raped more than a dozen times through the years. All children are naturally deeply influenced by his upbringing, but in different ways."

"nfor christmas in 1981 the oldest daughter, Annie, drove from Stockholm, the rest of the siblings drops out and a plan crystallizing in order to save the mother from the marriage. The whole thing is developing into a classic deckarhistoria including a pair of arson attacks. At the end collect Annie like a Hercule Poirot all the siblings in order to investigate who is the culprit."

"The story is just a unifying thread. During the novel's time are presented, namely, each one of all of these siblings as well as modern both in breadth and depth, and the different members of the family are given substantial room to develop their own forms of dysfunktionalitet."

"Nina Wähä settles close to their respective siblings in his storytelling, but linguistically, we find ourselves with a driven storyteller in the 2010s, who are happy to use small antique English elements, unthinkable for these torne valley descendents (tornedalians several decades ago. But it works, one accepts the author's mix of proximity and distance. The novel is a rousing bladvändare."

"nMen at an important place, it works worse, romantitelns will. It is written by the dark central figure Pentti, and which tells the story from his point of view in the first person."

"Nina Wähä continues, however, unfortunately, writing as himself and not as Pentti. He is illitterate man, who never read a book and barely literate, characterises, for example, his father as a man with ”a moral compass that led him right along life marked path”, and if his sisters he writes, ”finally faded away, fell into oblivion, erased themselves from history”."

"How much stronger and more effective had it not become, if Nina Wähä as a contrast to his own berättarspråk in this central document, rather than trying to provide Pentti their own language."