FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE, Finnish language translation of folk/cozy horror-tinged fantasy murder mystery...no, really

FISHING FOR THE LITTLE PIKE
JUHANI KARILA (tr. Lola Rogers)
Restless Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the utterly original, genre-defying, English-language debut of Finnish author Juhani Karila, a young woman’s annual pilgrimage to her home in Lapland to catch an elusive pike in three days is complicated by a host of mythical creatures, a murder detective hot on her trail, and a deadly curse hanging over her head.

When Elina makes her annual summer pilgrimage to her remote family farm in Lapland, she has three days to catch the pike in a local pond or she and the love of her life will both die. This year her task is made more difficult by the intervention of a host of deadly supernatural creatures and a murder detective on her tail.

Can Elina catch the pike and put to rest the curse that has been hanging over her head since a youthful love affair turned sour? Can Sergeant Janatuinen make it back to civilization in one piece? And just why is Lapland in summer so weird?

Fishing for the Little Pike is an audacious, genre-defying blend of fantasy, folk tale, and nature writing.

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My Review: I'm endlessly absorbed in stories about the Arctic, and learning to be so about stories in the Sámi culture. The more I learn about these complex interrelationships, and the fascinating people and cultures they produce, the more acutely aware of climate change's personal costs I grow.

At no time was I sure what was going on. That's by the author's design. Is the mythic world of the Sámi real? I mean on the consensus-reality scale, none of what happens ought to happen; so is the Sámi model of reality real? It is to Elina, and the consensus-reality world of the story's framing device can't account for the stranger events, so....

It's just delightful to be in that "no, that thing can not exist but she's...omigawd, what?!" head when there's a police detective from the consensus-reality world as flummoxed as we are, as stymied as possible in the execution of an apprehension, and just as bewildered as we are. The people of Vuopio don't hesitate to gossip around her, like the time the mayor, well...her consensus-reality mind doesn't accept that.

The nature writing in this story is evocative enough to make me feel summer sunburnt and skeeter-bit, colorful enough to fit seamlessly around the frankly disturbing delineation of Sámi supernatural entities, and the gestalt becomes as immersive as The Man Who Spoke Snakish. I'm charmed, I'm unnerved, I've laughed, I've stressed my limbic system into believing I've Seen Things.

Slabber Olli told her about the places he had been. He had been to the bottom of the sea and wandered endless gardens of stars in outer space. He said that human time as we know it was over. That the waters would rise and then fall, and then fiery waters would come. The Earth would be reshaped into something new. Mud would flow. Boiling canyons would open up.

"The mountains are already starting to move,” Slabber Olli said.

He told her about creatures that used to live in the sea, like reptiles with two mouths, a horizontal one and a vertical one. He told her about creatures at the bottom of the sea shaped like elm leaves, with five eyes and long, bendy elephant trunks and scissors on their heads.

About sharks with anvils growing on their backs. Flightless birds three meters tall that ran after deer on graceful, muscular legs that bent and stretched, bent and stretched, their beaks opened wide. He told her about the rockets people would build to shoot themselves off to other planets, and how badly it would turn out. Humans would continue their journey. They would find doors to knock on and portals that wouldn't open when they knocked, and the humans would break them down, and the ones they couldn't break they would build keys for. And all the while, humans would be changing. Humans would be changed not just by time but by humans themselves, and before long you'd have to call them human derivatives, and then something else entirely. In the end, it was just matter rearranging itself over and over. What was the Earth? Nothing more than an entrance hall where humanity had once briefly waited.

The consensus-reality world doesn't knowingly or willingly contain these things. Elina, in her calm way, accepts this deluge of weirdness, and then goes on about being in Lapland to prevent a curse from activating and ruining her life.

After all, why else are there raskels, or frakuses, or that bloody murderous knacky who's trapped her into the highest-imaginable stakes card game? And was the mayor of her hometown really...disappeared...by a wraith? The consensus-reality detective, who just wants to bring Elina in for questioning as there's reason to believe she's, um, involved in a murder, certainly thinks so. The villagers say so, too. (The wraith thing not the murder, although....)

I'd give this truly wacky, fun, off-kilter setting all five stars alone. I can't get that high because Elina's curse is unsatisfyingly acquired and self-perpetuated. She's taken it on to process a set of guilts that do not properly belong to her. I'm down for the fantasy aspects of the story but I draw the line at emotionally self-sabotaging women.

I'm as close to all five stars as that grunt of dissatisfaction will allow me to get. I'll read anything Author Juhani Karila writes that's translated, though, because I had a fine old time with this story.

THE PLACE OF TIDES, privileged man has mid-life crisis in the Arctic

THE PLACE OF TIDES
JAMES REBANKS
Mariner Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: We are all in need of lights to follow.

One afternoon many years ago, James Rebanks met an old woman on a remote Norwegian island. She lived and worked alone on a tiny rocky outcrop, caring for wild Eider ducks and gathering their down. Hers was a centuries-old trade that had once made men and women rich, but had long been in decline. Still, somehow, she seemed to be hanging on.

Back at home, Rebanks couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on the rocks. She was fierce and otherworldly—and yet strangely familiar. Years passed. Then, one day, he wrote her a letter, asking if he could return. Bring work clothes, she replied, and good boots, and come her health was failing. And so he travelled to the edge of the Arctic to witness her last season on the island.

This is the story of that season. It is the story of a unique and ancient landscape, and of the woman who brought it back to life. It traces the pattern of her work from the rough, isolated toil of bitter winter, building little wooden huts that will protect the ducks come spring; to the elation of the endless summer light, when the birds leave behind their precious down for the woman to gather, like feathered gold.

Slowly, Rebanks begins to understand that this woman and her world are not at all what he had previously thought. As the weeks pass, what began as a journey of escape becomes an extraordinary lesson in self-knowledge and forgiveness.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Author Rebanks, "an expert advisor to UNESCO on sustainable tourism", tells us an amazingly convenient story of going to learn the old folk ways of Anna, an elder who has made her life as far away from others as she can get; has devoted herself to maintaining a lifeway that, should any significant number of just this book's readers attempt to emulate would result in environmental devastation; but which fuels the itchy sense the world is enshittifying everything worthwhile without offering any remotely practicable solution to that real and accurate feeling.

I admit I'm a grouch, an also am in existential crisis about the world's horrifying trajectory. This book's pretty, nicely turned and selected sentences, all supporting a beautiful fantasy of life utterly in harmony with nature, are NOT A HELPFUL HOW-TO. They should not be read as anything inspiring you to reproduce the actions the author took. Inspiring you to look into ways to work with local nature-preserving groups? Absolutely. Don't think it's going to be like the author's time with Anna.

There are not a lot of ways to experience the thrill of being able to immerse yourself in unmediated nature. The author does it as long as it suits him, and his emotional needs. Then he returns to his 21st-century life. That's a whole huge pile of unexamined privilege there, sir. The majority of us can't find an Anna, still less go spend a lot of time not doing what people with lives and families must. After all, that was what drove you to seek Anna out.

“Anna’s example was simple: if we are to save the world, we have to start somewhere. We just have to do one damn thing after another. Hers was a small kind of heroism, but it was the most powerful kind. The kind that saves us. We all have to go to work in our own communities, in our own landscapes. We have to show up day in, day out, for years and years, doing the work. There will be no brass band, no parade. And we have to accept and keep the faith in each other, and somehow work together. It is the only way we can make our own tiny deeds add up to become the change we all need.”

As lessons go, this one is hard to fault. It applies to all people everywhere. If your pretty sentences do good for the world, this is the good they do. It was, however, a lot more like a very good Longreads piece instead of a resource-heavy printed book; hence my mingy rating.

Just don't think it's going to look like an isolated life in a beautiful Arctic setting. See the message not the movie, and set out to make a small, undramatic difference wherever you are, however you can.

MY BROTHER: A Novel, Scandinavian grimdark not-fantasy with a sting in its tail

MY BROTHER: A Novel
KARIN SMIRNOFF (tr. Anna Paterson)
Pushkin Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A Swedish publishing phenomenon: a literary noir of extraordinary power follows the discovery of a young woman’s body in the long grass behind the sawmill...

Which part of the story is not for telling?

Jana Kippo has returned to Smalånger to see her twin brother, Bror, still living in the small family farmhouse in the remote north of Sweden.

Within the isolated community, secrets and lies have grown silently, undisturbed for years.

Following the discovery of a young woman's body in the long grass behind the sawmill, the siblings, hooked by a childhood steeped in darkness, need to break free.

But the truth cannot be found in other people's stories. The question is: can it be found anywhere?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: First, read this:

We were born just a few minutes apart and are alike in many ways. Especially in how we look. We are thin and gingery, with straggly unpigmented hair. We are so bleakly unremarkable that nobody used to remember either of us as somebody. Only as the twins.

–and–

So the police were looking into her death I said.
Of course they did. What did you expect. A dead woman found in the grass near the sawmill and it turns out she has slept with most of the married men in the village. And a number of others as well. On top of that one of the suspects is a convicted murderer.
Who I asked. Me of course he said.

You're now familiar with the author's voice in this, the first of three novels set it the Arctic Swedish town of Smalånger, where Bror and Jana are from...Jana has left...Bror hasn't bothered, he can drink himself to death in the comfort of what was the family's home. With, now, the company of his twin, as she chooses to come back to, to, help? Anyway, bear witness if not accelerate the crash. To keep herself in food (Bror worries about booze, nothing else) she starts working for the local social services department, which she calls smalångerhomecareservices, thus making herself useful while getting fully up on the local gossip from the people she works with and the ones she's helping to survive whatever time is left to them in a modicum of physical comfort. No one in Smalånger lives in psychic comfort, she discovers early, and often.

My idea of what I was in for was too weak-kneed. I thought I'd get something dark, but not my-eyes-my-poor-eyes dark! A woman suffers a dreadful childhood; returns to the scene of the crime to be there with the brother ("Bror" is Swedish for "brother"; unlike Jana, he has no personal name) whose life was stalled, stopped, and never had any particular reason to start it again. He drifts aimlessley, but reasonably harmlessly...yes, he sleeps with his best friend's wife, but it's not like he was the only one who did; he's drinking himself to death, sure, but when the woman he loved but who was murdered by person or persons unknown, what else is there to do except hang out with her widower and drink?

No, not chuckle one in this book. But there are two more in Swedish and I need to read them now!

What the heck? I need to read them? Yes, while I wouldn't have predicted that I'd get invested in this Nordic grimdark saga of terrible, sad, claustrophobic life in a tiny, remote, and dark (physically) place, that is exactly what happened. What more there is to learn I want to learn it.

It's that kind of a read, y'all. You won't leave the same as you entered.