The Red Book of Farewells

by Pirkko Saisio, Mia Spangenberg (Translator)

Overview

For fans of Claire-Louise Bennett and Eileen Myles, an enigmatic work of autofiction set in a time of leftist politics and criminalized sexuality.

Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel, in Mia Spangenberg’s tender translation, is a mesmerizing account of radical politics and sexual awakening in a series of farewells—to her mother, to the idealism of youth, to friends and lovers, and finally to her grown daughter. The novel embeds readers in a delirious Finland, where art and communist politics are hopelessly intertwined, and where queer love, still a crime, thrives in underground bars. But then one morning in 2002, on a remote island off the coast of Finland, the narrator Pirkko Saisio informs her publisher that she’s accidentally deleted her latest manuscript, The Red Book of Farewells. Playful and mysterious, The Red Book of Farewells is a work that stoically embraces the small revolutions of moving on.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949641462
Publisher:	Two Lines Press
Publication date:	04/25/2023
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	1,124,806
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor’s training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life (Elämänmeno, 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director.

Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.

Read an Excerpt

Light winds foreshadowing a storm of revolution have been blowing through the columned hallways of the university since the beginning of fall. Pamphlets drift among the café tables and hat racks and in the restrooms.

The mood in the café has changed.

Here and there, clusters of students are still avoiding lectures, consuming beer and time (I miss that right now as I’m writing these lines: the luxury of absent-minded distraction, the smoke-tinged boredom, the sudden, groundless outbursts of excitement); but the laughter has grown subdued, because now there’s an unsmiling torpedo of one, two, or three students constantly striding through the café and leaving behind their flyers and demands: Liberate the university! One man, one vote! Unite for change!

You don’t get power. You take it.

Editorial Reviews

02/06/2023

Saisio (A Man and His Affairs) revisits the dawning of her sexuality and her development as an actor and political activist life in this illuminating work of autofiction. While at the University of Helsinki in the 1970s, she discovers her lesbianism via a brash fellow student she calls the clown-eyed girl, and through subsequent decades, she imagines the playwright Bertolt Brecht as a mentor who dispenses advice she tries to follow (“Bert tells her to observe what she sees, tirelessly and ceaselessly”; “Bert warns her about giving into listlessness and self-pity”). Saisio’s passion for theater is entwined with her drive for social justice; she cofounds an organization called SETA (Sexual Equality for All) and is determined to legalize homosexuality in Finland. With the clown-eyed girl still in the mix, she falls under the spell of the bold and blithe Havva, with whom she develops a long-term but not always conventional relationship. Though it can be tough to track the narrative threads, there’s plenty of charm in Saisio’s free-flowing approach, as well as insights on her development as an artist. Fans of Liv Ullmann will appreciate this. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Finlandia Prize
Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize

“In Pirkko’s Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom… Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio’s work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen.”
—Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books

“A remarkable patchwork of narratives and literary devices in which every element is not only expertly expressed, but is a key player, baking up something of its own class entirely…The stories comprising The Red Book of Farewells are many things. They are poetries. They are critical and personally intimate experiences of Finnish LGBTQ history. They are love stories. They are stories of stepping in and out of one’s skin. They are stories of motherhood, daughterhood, personhood, and stories of the gains and unforgettable losses of one’s heart. They are multidimensional and oh-so-worthy of your full attention.”
—Elizabeth Hoover, Delphic Reviews

“The Red Book of Farewells is an at times overwhelming work, its structure shifting focus and moving across different windows of time. It’s also about the complex relationship between art and politics, and the challenges and hypocrisies of a society that advocates revolutionary politics while enforcing regressive social norms.”
—Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders

“Saisio revisits the dawning of her sexuality and her development as an actor and political activist life in this illuminating work of autofiction.…There’s plenty of charm in Saisio’s free-flowing approach, as well as insights on her development as an artist.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Dreamlike…A moving, uneasy, and artistic novel about growing up queer in a time of conflict.”
—Foreword Reviews

“A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life—Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented.” 
—Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere

“This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I’ve ever read before.” 
—Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra

“Pirkko Saisio might be the best Finnish author alive. She is wise, profound, funny, erudite, an old and precise person, and of course a divine storyteller and a master of dialogue. On top of all that, she uses the Finnish language masterfully.”
—Aamulehti (Finland)

“Saisio has had a major effect on the cultural atmosphere we live in.”
—Aleksis Kivi Prize jury

From the Publisher