On Elina Hirvonen's When I Forgot
by Hirsh Sawhney
The Times Literary Supplement, February 15, 2008

Elina Hirvonen is the first novelist of Finland's uber-cool, Nokia-in-the cradle generation to be translated into English, and her book When I Forgot begins on an appropriately modern note. Anna is sitting in a Helsinki cafe reading a novel - which seems to be Michael Cunningham's The Hours - and fiddling with her mobile phone. She has an overwhelming desire to flee her past: "Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about". Yet as she sips a cappuccino, or orders a Campari, she meanders through a chain of seemingly disconnected memories that revolve around Ian, an American scholar of Virginia Woolf who teaches literature in Finland.

Ian's New York childhood went from bad to worse when his father returned from the Vietnam war so demented that he could not recognize his own son. The years that followed were defined by mornings "when his mother's hand shook and the cereal spilled", and nights "when his father's screams split the air". The father ends up in a mental hospital, and this is where Ian and Anna's past lives overlap. For her brother, Joona, is also ill and is confined in an institution, a place where "the balcony is fenced in with wire mesh, and the people behind the mesh have eyes dulled by drugs, and tobacco stains on their fingertips". Anna reveals that Joona's misery and mental illness are the result of having been abused by their father, whose own father was rendered an abusive alcoholic by war.
Ian and Anna have learnt to deal with their painful family situations in similar ways. He spins tales about his father being a hero who used to ride around on a motorcycle, building homes for people ruined by war, while she fantasizes about an ordinary life in which "Joona would have children . . . and pay taxes, and we'd gather to celebrate Christmases with three generations" .

The attacks of September 11 mark a turning point for them both. Frustrated by his family, terrorism and US militarism, he takes a teaching job in Finland, where he meets Anna, a student who has suddenly seen herself in danger of drowning in the "sick-smelling world" of her brother. As the two explore each other's bodies, they also inspire each other to recount their personal histories and confront the past.
"With Ian I was able for the first time to stop managing and live all the feelings that I had squirreled away on the dark evenings when I had lain in bed with my fingernails in my palms and listened through the wall of the family room to Father's and Joona's increasingly heated voices."

At times, Hirvonen is dizzyingly garrulous, and she is inclined to overuse surreal images to represent emotion. "I sank down through the icy crust deep into the bowels of the earth, into soft lava, which sucked me into its arms and rocked me gently". But her prose can vary to meet the needs of different situations, and she uses terse, punchy sentences to evoke violence and sex: "Ian's lips were dry and his tongue tasted of wine. His skin smelled of the cold, tobacco, and sweat. His hands were large, strong, and rough".

Hirvonen's writing, which has been translated into an original and effective hybrid of British and American English, carries the reader through the first half of this novel. The second half is compelling because we want to know the fate of her characters. What happens to Anna's father? Why does she put off visiting Joona in the hospital? Will the promise of love be fulfilled? This apparently unpretentious book is in fact a sophisticated response to 9/11 and a delicately woven meditation on love and war.