Kännö’s witty Human Twilight depicts the destruction of life and man, Rauma’s Hävitys bullying in the school world and the oppression of children.
Heikki Kännö is Finlandia candidate for the second time. Now the work is Human Twilight. Kännö’s previous novel Runoilija was nominated in 2020.
Over a thousand pages long, Human Twilight deals with art history, philosophy, mythology, human history and a fictional vision of the future. The pages of the work reveal Heikki Kännö’s background as a painter. Kännö actually admits that his background as a painter has definitely helped the man’s career as a writer. At some point, it just started to feel that one picture is not always enough to tell the story.
– For me, telling stories has always been why I’ve made art in the first place. Literature has been the most important art form for me from the beginning, perhaps precisely because of the storytelling. When I painted paintings, I often tried to make them into a story in some way, says Kännö.
The framework of the Turku writer’s epic novel is the German Richard Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung opera series. The series includes, among other things, the opera The Destruction of the Gods, also known as the Twilight of the Gods. Heikki Kännö’s Twilight tells about the destruction of man in addition to life.
Merciless description of oppression and violence experienced by children
Turku’s Iida Rauma’s third novel Hävitys also became a topic of conversation at the beginning of the year.
The merciless novel depicting physical and mental violence at school feels very personal, but Iida Rauma is not one with the main character.
– Hävitys is a work of fiction and fiction. There is one part that deals with the main character A’s school days in the 90s. In that, I deviate from fiction in the way that everything that A experiences in elementary school in music class is something that tends to document very precisely what happened to me during my elementary school days.
The powerful text describes how the main character is subjected to severe bullying, discrimination and violence – both by young people and adults.
Rauma states that the violence faced by children is often belittled or considered an inevitable force of nature, for which there is not much else to do but to try to find out after the fact. In his opinion, this oppression of children can be seen on many levels.
– It can be seen, for example, in the kind of social policy that has been implemented in Finland. I actually went to my elementary school during the recession of the 90s, and when the recession finally started to ease, child poverty started to rise, which is pretty crazy. Socio-political decisions have been made here that have systematically weakened the status of children and created poor children in a completely new way.
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