The main Scandinavian bestseller of the last year (in Sweden alone, more than a hundred thousand copies were scattered in a year) Nina Vyakhi's Testament is one of those books whose charm is not immediately revealed. At first, the novel seems tediously traditional - it reproduces all the patterns and clichés of the classic northern family saga too neatly.
The huge Toymi family from the provincial Finnish Tornedalen - mother Siri, father Pentti, their many children and grandchildren - gather at their home farm before Christmas. They all met under their parents' roof mainly because, shortly before the holiday, one of the youngest children, eight-year-old Artaud, fell into a vat of boiling water and was badly scalded, so now both he and the mother caring for him need help and support. The sisters are busy with the household, in spite of everything getting ready to celebrate Christmas, cows moo comfortably in the barn, men are busy with simple and not too tiring peasant labor for winter time, snow is sown over the hopeless northern wilderness, and the unremarkable 1980 is now it will be replaced by 1981.
However, in the closet of the Toymi family, a pair of skeletons are quite clearly rattling, the tension is growing, and the older children are plotting a coup in order to depose and expel their stern father, who has lost the moral right to be called the head of the family and is obviously unable to run the farm anymore.
As mentioned above, the magical - you cannot say otherwise - the effect of Nina Vyakhi's prose appears gradually, growing as more and more characters appear to the reader from among the brothers, sisters and parents of Toymi. We begin our immersion in the reality of Tornedalen in Annie's head - coldish and restrained, as if by nature not capable of strong feelings of an older sister, who happily escaped from her native village to Stockholm, and now waiting for her first child and experiencing complex, ambiguous emotions about this ...
Little by little, the focus shifts to young Lauri, a handsome gay man who also left his home for the Swedish capital, got a job as a waiter on a sea ferry and strives to get rid of his rustic roughness as soon as possible, forgetting life on a farm like a nightmare.
Lauri is replaced by Esko - the oldest, honest and reliable of the surviving children of Toymi, the only one who truly loves the northern land and dreams of inheriting his father's household. Then the most charming of the sons comes to the fore - the twenty-year-old Tatu, who has just been released from prison, where he thundered for an accident with human victims, and behind him is a quiet teenage girl Lahya, always hiding in the shadow of her prodigy brother Tarmo.
What at first seems like a typical and monolithic family saga - one of many, crumbles, branches into many separate sleeves, each of which may well pull into a separate story or novel. The conventional and schematic plot structure flourishes with a whole gallery of human types, written out with great love, understanding and literary generosity - for another, more zealous writer, such a number of heroes would be enough for a good trilogy, but Nina Vyakha is not inclined to be petty on trifles. As a result, after a couple of hundred pages, all the heroes of "Testament" cease to be perceived as abstract characters - you involuntarily begin to think of them as real, warm, personally familiar people, and their troubles and joys become your joys and troubles.
An additional effect that, perhaps, the Russian reader will be able to fully experience is the effect of kinship. The realities of a remote Finnish village of the early 1980s, lovingly recreated by Nina Vyakha, with its not completely forgotten hunger, with its meager nature, cold winters and poor harvests, with traditions dating back centuries, desperate drunkenness and specific local pride, will surely respond to living recognition anyone who has read Russian village prose of the 1960s - 1970s. The great tradition of Fyodor Abramov, Vasily Shukshin and Valentin Rasputin, completely extinct in Russia and, it seems, no longer being restored, in neighboring Sweden, it seems, is alive and productive - the news is surprising and, perhaps, gratifying.
This article was sponsored by Jeffrey Petro
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