I finished this book in July of this year, but I’m starting to write this review the day after Christmas, in a bar in Zadar, sitting here alone, waiting for my boyfriend to run some errands before our trip back home to Zagreb. And I will most probably finish it and publish it in January 2019. This means (except that I’m really slow with this writing thing), if I still remember the book and want to write about it five months after finishing it, it’s a hell of a good book.
Whenever I finish a book, I start googling book reviews, Amazon and Goodreads comments and ratings to check if other people loved it as much as I did, how the book has left them, if they’ve made the same conclusions about it as me. After reading everything there is about it, my mind starts to systematically connect all the information it has gathered, confirming and additionally argumenting the reviews I agree with and strongly dismissing everything that I disagree with and I didn’t like. I believe it is a relict from my literature-student days, during which one of my main (and favorite) assignments was to read novels and analyze scientific reviews concerning them. It is also a way for me to preserve this academic part of myself despite of everyday life that has almost entirely pushed it to the very corners of my personality. This process also helps me understand which aspects of a book I really want to focus on while reviewing it and to organize my thoughts.
While browsing the web this time, I’ve found here a perfect summary of this novel, which significantly helps me to concentrate on every aspect I’d like to elaborate:
Child psychologist Elsa and artist Martti Ahlqvist have had a long, apparently successful marriage. Their only child, Eleonoora, is a tirelessly efficient doctor with an understanding husband and two grown daughters of her own. In the final stage of terminal cancer Elsa comes home from the hospital to live her last days to the fullest. When Eleonoora’s older daughter Anna, an emotionally troubled graduate student, comes to visit and give Martti a few free hours, Elsa arranges to picnic and play dress-up as they did when Anna was a child. But the dress Anna puts on never belonged to her grandmother. A surprised Elsa explains it belonged to a woman named Eeva. Eeva was Eleonoora’s nanny, hired so that Elsa could leave her very young daughter for weeks at a time while traveling for her career. Eeva also became Martti’s lover. As the characters remember or imagine Eeva’s life, she becomes a receptacle for all the forms love has taken in their lives. Imagining Eeva’s passion for Martti and Eleonoora as a child, Anna is influenced by her own unshakable sense of loss as she continues to miss the child of a former lover. Eleonoora, who does not consciously remember Eeva, has co-mingled memories of mother and nanny, but her deep-rooted fear of abandonment keeps her emotionally wary. Even now, while dreading a life without Elsa, whom he has truly loved, Martti remembers Eeva with a mixture of longing and remorse. How much guilt should Martti, or Elsa, feel for what ultimately happened? Is blame even relevant? Was the nanny a surrogate wife and mother or a usurper? Eeva remains tantalizingly elusive as she becomes more real, a girl from the country swept up by the cultural changes of the 1960s.
Here’s everything that it has made me think about.
1. Elsa
Even though the novel itself and most of the plot begins with the news about Elsa’s incurable disease, this is not a book about illness nor death. It is, just like many of the reviews state, a book about life, life in general and Elsa’s life.
Elsa was, and in her old age she still is, a famous child psychologist, very appreciated in academic and scholastic circles. She dedicated so much of her life to curing children with psychological disorders, spending a lot of time in various clinics, developing different kinds of therapies that could help them. She researched how a child’s personality develops, how much it depends on psychological processes that each individual goes through alone, but also how much effect grown-ups have on children. She observed and wrote about how their personalities are being affected by the trust they have in adults surrounding them, especially when a child has been abandoned in early age.
Her professional researches have certainly been very useful to many people and quite noble; however, her decision to dedicate herself to her career instead of exclusively to her family has brought Eeva into all of their lives and has started the train of events this book is all about.
I’ve found a couple of reviews in which the character of Elsa is being openly criticized. In the first one, the decision to share Eeva’s story so many years after it had happened is held against her:
(…) it is difficult to imagine why she would, many years later, feel compelled to share Eeva’s story, which intimately affects other family members and not just herself. She knows how vulnerable Anna is, yet takes a chance with her future life, possibly telling her more than she wants or needs to know. (…) I could not get past the feeling that in real life the sharing of this story would have been regarded as a violation of privacy from which some family members, including Anna herself, might not have benefited as much as Elsa thinks they would – not a legacy that most people would want to leave behind.
I believe Elsa decided to bring the story about Eeva to light because, affected by illness and close to the ending of her life, she felt the need for some kind of closure, the need caused by her guilt and remorse. This is precisely what incited her to talk to her daughter Eleonoora about her life choices and motives. She admits to Eleonoora that she’s afraid she might have chosen to dedicate herself so much to her career not as much for being so interested in helping all those children and in changing the world for them for the better, but because she longed for travelling, for excitement, for the adventures that peaceful and repetitive family life could not have provided for her. She’s scared that, after all, she did all of that not because she was so very noble, but because she was rather selfish. She confronts Eleonoora with all of those doubts because she wants consolation and forgiveness. Eleonoora gives it to her, stating that Elsa was a happy person and that all happy people try to enjoy life, to have fun and to change the world while doing it. That Elsa had both her family and the whole world. And I agree with her. Elsa’s choice to dedicate herself to professional progress while her child was so little and her husband was home alone with her might not have always been the most noble choice, but it was a human choice, which makes it perfectly understandable. Additionally, even though Anna was very vulnerable when hearing about Eeva, getting to know her story and all of its details helped her get a closure of her own, so there is much more benefit than damage from telling it.
In another review, written in Croatian and published in one of Croatian’s best known journals, Elsa is called “an ambitious and authoritative wife who very often uses her psychological knowledge to manipulate people, even the closest family members” and “a strong and self-confident personality who has managed to push out her rival from her husband’s life without much noise or scandal”. I would say these words say less about Elsa herself and more about the author of this review, but also a lot about Croatia and its society, maybe even about today’s western society in general. A woman who builds her career is an unscrupulous manipulator, an eternal villain; a woman who takes care of a man and a child, even if both are not hers, but someone else’s, is the right kind of a woman because she knows her place.
The question that should be asked here is what would the author suggest Elsa to do? It is clear that he (yes, as expected, it’s a he) thinks that Elsa shouldn’t have brought herself to that situation in the first place, but what would be his advice to her now that she has? To get a divorce, to dedicate herself only to her career now that she’s built it even though she shouldn’t have, to admit defeat saying that Eeva is a better wife and mother than she ever was? I’m sure there are many women who were once in a similar situation and who did precisely that, who were not able to get passed their husband’s infidelity and who filed for divorce, consequently dedicating themselves even more to their careers and leaving a free spot for the “other woman”. But were these women more appreciated for this decision? Wouldn’t this reviewer and all the people who agree with him say that this decision is a sign that this woman is even worse than expected, for abandoning her child and leaving it to someone else? In which direction should a woman who wants both marriage with children and professional progress go to get some approval, or at least some understanding?
While writing this, I’m finishing the fourth book of Elena Ferrante’s tetralogy and the lead character is facing the same problems. In her late thirties, she’s trying to reconcile her roles of a devoted mother to three daughters, a woman in love, a rising writing star, a loyal best friend and a caring daughter. She is feeling guilt for not being able to juggle with all of these roles at all times, for spending too much time travelling. She’s having a guilty conscience when she’s happy on the road while promoting her books and feeling remorse and even disgust towards herself when she realizes her daughters are not indispensable for her in every single moment in order for her to be happy. (I’ll write more about Ferrante in one of the following posts.) Would a man feel the same way in that situation? Would any man be criticized for pursuing professional development and success and feeling his family is not the only source of his happiness? And how would everyone treat his wife in case she found herself a lover while home alone with children? Would everyone be so full of understanding as they are towards Elsa’s husband Martti, or would they judge her, calling her ungrateful for cheating while her husband is killing himself of work, enabling her to just stay at home? Evidently, a woman can never get it right and a man is always right, no matter the circumstances.
Today I’ve shed so many tears while listening to Glenn Close’s speech at this year’s Golden Globes, where she won this prestigious award in Best Actress category for the movie Wife. I’ve cried while listening to the story about her mother, who dedicated her life to her husband and kids and at 80 she felt like she hasn’t accomplished anything. I’ve wept while listening to Glenn talk about herself, about her calling to be an actress she felt when she was very young, about the right women have to follow their own dreams and passions, to say “I can do that and I should be allowed to do that”. And while trying to get myself together, I started thinking that the society we live in is becoming more and more patriarchal each day. During history, we’ve progressed from asking “Should a woman have it all?” to “What could a woman do to have it all and not die trying?” and “Must a woman have it all to be found successful?”. And then, somehow, we got back to “Is a woman allowed to have it all if someone else will ever suffer for it, because if that’s the price of it, it’s best for the suffering to be done only by the woman herself.” How did that happen and why? And what can we do to stop that?
In the 1960s, fifty years before Glenn Close held that speech, while she was a young scientist, Elsa followed her advice before being able to hear it from anyone. She tried living while doing what she loved and while being a wife and a mother simultaneously. Was she a perfect wife, an ideal mother? No. But she did her best. She tried her best to be present without losing herself by pushing everything she is aside.
2. Anna, Martti and Eeva
When Anna was a little girl, she played dress-up with her grandmother, and with her grandfather she played another game she was very fond of. They used to go to a park, a bar or a pastry shop, observe the people passing by and imagine their names and their life stories. Through this game, Anna started to develop empathy and compassion, and it is ironic that she would begin to feel the highest-level empathy for her grandfather’s ex-mistress.
Anna finds out about Eeva from her grandmother and decides to tell her story. She starts to write it taking into consideration all the facts she found out from Elsa, but she enriches it with the help of her imagination and, most importantly, with the details of her own relationship, quite similar to the one Eeva had with Martti. A few months before finding out about Eeva, Anna broke up with an older man who had a little daughter, just like her grandfather when Eeva came into his life.
Moreover, one of the first things we find out about Anna in the novel, even before she finds out about Eeva, is that recently she’s had an emotional breakdown, caused precisely by the separation, not so much from her ex-partner, but from his daughter, a little girl she was very fond of and close with. A couple of months before she started taking care of her dying grandmother, she spent eleven days on the floor of her apartment, drowning in sorrow and, even though in the meantime she’s started a new relationship, she was still very fragile.
When her story about Eeva started to evolve, Anna began to investigate what happened to her after she stopped working for her grandparents. She found out about Eeva’s sister, she came to knowledge about Eeva’s friend, who she had already introduced as (an invented) character, and she completed her story with these new facts. Still, she continued to add numerous details from her own life, like her adventures in Paris with an interesting French guy, identifying herself with Eeva more and more with every written page. In the final part the story, in which she describes Eeva’s farewell with Eleonoora (whom Eeva was babysitting at the time), she changed, involuntarily and probably without awareness, her mother’s name with the name her own ex-partner’s daughter. Introducing her own loss and sadness into the story and channeling it through it, Anna found catharsis.
Nevertheless, the most important moment for Anna’s catharsis is the situation in which she confronts her grandfather, when she starts talking to him directly about Eeva. Worn-out by going through Eeva’s life, attributing her own story to Eeva and going through it again this way, Anna attacks her grandfather, blaming him for Eeva’s death. She tells him he had ruined her by turning their love into a prison for her and by not doing anything to save her from it. Her grandfather, on the other hand, explains to her that the only thing he did to Eeva was to love her – and love itself cannot murder anyone. He admits that sometimes he considered Eeva young and naive, but that now he understands she just lived in complete accordance to her values, the way she thought she must, without ever trying to reconsider her view of the world. He believes a person like Eeva must have belonged to another time, and since then, times have changed.
Their discussion starts to cool down in a moment in which Martti realizes that Anna is, actually, talking about herself, accusing him of things for which she actually blames someone else. He tells her that she is not Eeva, that her own love belongs only to her and that no one can take it away from her. It could never be her prison nor the obstacle to her freedom and happiness. He feels sorry about the fact that Eeva never understood this, and he finds that all of this makes her a very sad person. After those words, Anna’s rage began to fade and soon after, she left.
After reading this part of the novel and after finishing the entire book, I started thinking about this situation. A young woman basically died because of sadness and broken heart, and a situation of a sort always imposes questions about guilt. Who’s to blame about this? What I started to ask myself, after thinking about it thoroughly, is how much could other people actually be guilty for our own lives and fate? And how much of it is affected by our own choices, by the decisions we make every single day? Is it actually Eeva’s fault for not being able to resist Martti’s charm and just live her own life away from him? Or is Martti to blame, for noticing her own weakness towards himself and for taking advantage of it, for loving to have a sense of control over a woman – since he didn’t have it over his own, absent wife? Or is it, again, Eeva’s fault for not being able to recognize this angle of the situation and his flaws? Is she guilty for showing no empathy for his wife, her employer (who loved her and who she liked and admired very much)? And for having no empathy towards the child she had to take care of, who was clearly very confused by the whole situation, had tantrums and, later in life, has completely suppressed this part of her life because it was a very painful trauma?
How much could other people be responsible for our lives and how much of responsibility we carry ourselves? Are we responsible for our own actions at all times, no matter our character, our upbringing and the circumstances? Are they our responsibility, not only because wrong decisions could ruin our own lives, but also because they could irreparably affect the lives of other people, who are sometimes younger than us, weaker than us and it is not just our job, but also our (moral) duty to take care of them and protect them?
There is a nice comment/review of this book on Amazon:
This book is (…) truly about one person who is by nature a radical believer in Love. Her approach to love is not obsessive, or pathological. It is simply complete. It makes no concessions to the ambiguities of life, it is not wise or balanced: her loves just is, without limits or second thoughts. She hurts some people, but she mostly hurts herself. The generosity of her love is unworkable, unacceptable, uncomfortable to others. This book is a treatise about the potential hypocrisy of our feelings. We all say we aspire to love: receiving it, giving it. But is it true? If confronted with true, deep, simple uncompromising love, can we accept it? Eeva’s weakness is the purity of her love, a love that is not of this world (…)
When observed from this point of view, Eeva’s love sounds truly idealistic, very poetic and romanticized. And I think that, if you see literature as a space where uncompromising emotions – and concepts of emotions – must rule and win over anything else, you will see this book as an ode to their authentic beauty. However, if you are like me, and you see literature as a version, an exploration of reality, and characters as people who are just like everyone else, you won’t be as fascinated as you’ll be critical. You won’t exalt characters as innocent victims of their sublime and fatal feelings. You will instead try to see what could be learned from these feelings, what could help another person (real or fictional) deal with them in order to survive and to live a happier life instead of dying like a mythological, self-sacrificing heroin. And yes, in case anyone will ever wonder, but will feel too lazy to click on the link to this comment, its author is, naturally, also a man.
Speaking of a man, I must admit that Martti’s sincere words pronounced while arguing with his granddaughter made me like him more than I’ve liked him earlier in the book. He is absolutely right, at least I think so, and I believe the narrator agrees with me, too. The names Elsa, Eeva, Eleonoora all start with E – their stories are insolubly intertwined, so the identical starting letter is like an additional symbolic bond. Anna’s name starts with another letter, which means her story is separated from theirs. Their story doesn’t involve her, so she can continue living her life without burdening herself with it.
3. Eleonoora
From the first chapter in which she appears, Eleonoora is described as a serious, responsible woman, a rational surgeon, who immediately starts taking care of her mother, takes control over her everyday life, determines strict rules for her and for everyone who is supposed to look after her. Her father, Martti, seems to be the most surprised by his daughter’s approach and personality, often thinking how and when has this serious, professional woman replaced his sweet and playful little girl without him even noticing that it had happened. #empathy #responsibility #raisingahappyhealthychild
Everything we know about Eleonoora as a child we find it out from Anna’s story about Eeva, which she finds out about her grandmother. So, just as from the story we cannot find out everything about Eeva, because it is partly factual and partly the fruit of Anna’s imagination, we cannot be sure about how much of it is really true about Eleonoora, either. Still, considering that, up until the moment in which she discovers the painting representing Eeva, it seems like she doesn’t even remember her, the fact that she suppressed this entire experience for years means that it has definitely shaken her very profoundly.
In the story about Eeva and about Eleonoora’s (or Ella’s, as they called her back then) childhood there’s a very significant episode of little Ella torturing her beloved doll, Molla. At times she was leaving her alone and closed in the pantry, sometimes mistreating her physically, staging this way the moments in which she felt abandoned and emotionally wounded by both her mother’s and Eeva’s leavings. (This is particularly interesting and ironic considering Elsa was leaving to observe and to try to help children with psychological disorders caused by their parents abandoning them.) The echo of all of this in the present is reflected in the moment in which Anna asks her if she’s crying because of grandma and she replies: “I’m crying because of Mom.”
Eleonoora has forgotten Eeva as a person, but her mind hasn’t suppressed numerous experiences she’s had with her when she was little, like the trips to their lake house, so it attributed them to experiences she’s had with Elsa. Because of the trauma of suddenly losing Eeva, who to her was so immensely important, her mind connected Elsa and Eeva in one single person. It is proven in a couple of paragraphs in which Eleonoora tells Elsa about some of their moments she remembers from her childhood, which Elsa doesn’t recall at all. The loss of her mother in the same day in which she rediscovers Eeva, for her is a triple loss. She lost her mother, remembered losing Eeva and had to cope with losing her all over again. Going through all of it will be particularly hard for her because, as it is stated beautifully here, sometimes it’s hard to recover from the same loss twice.
4. Eero and Matias
Still, even though her childhood was sad, she has abandonment issues and the future will first and foremost mean a great deal of recovering from it all, it’s not all sad in Eleonoora’s life. Unlike Eeva and Anna, when it comes to love, Eleonoora was extremely lucky. She met her husband Eero in high school and they fell in love with each other while working together on a physics assignment. The story of them falling in love with each other is even sweeter considering her trust issues. While working on the assignment, he claimed that he would be able to eat an orange while standing on his head upside down despite of gravity they needed to study about, and she said it was impossible. He managed to do it, stating there are other forces in the world besides gravity, like trust, which she should have in him.
They’ve been together for so many years and their love and care for each other hadn’t diminished one bit. Eero is the only one allowed to see Eleonoora’s true self, the one she’s hidden behind the mask of a strict and tough surgeon her father is so surprised to see. She lets him take the mask down: when he hugs her, she lets herself open up and cry, it’s the essential thing that helps her cope with anything and everything. His name starts with an E too, meaning he’s also the part of the story. Luckily, he is the main part of its solution.
Anna often thinks about their love story and concludes she would like to have one of that kind. The one that is nice, fateful, that cannot be ruined by anything. Instead, she got a heartbreak and Matias.
She met Matias at a party, talked to him about some superficial stuff and she hasn’t felt anything in particular. He asked her out and she said yes, mostly because she wasn’t seeing anyone else at the time. During their date, she realized two things: that she likes his smile and that the lightness she feels when she is around him could be the beginning of love.
After a little bit more than a month of knowing each other, they’ve decided to move in together. They have a nice life and wonderful moments, habits they really enjoy. They cook together, go for long walks, he plays a guitar and is full of understanding for the entire world. He tries hard when her family is concerned, helps with tough manual labor when necessary. Still, she sometimes fantasizes about leaving him, she gets the urge to disappear, suddenly, without explanations, with everything she owns. She feels as if there was a large ink stain inside of her that’s spreading constantly and she hopes Matias could help her draw its borders to stop the spreading. And that’s not working out.
Still, she knows she will be able to deal with this ink stain only when she starts talking about it, about the past and her loss. Matias encourages her to do it, because she never tells him anything, but before taking that step, she must become ready for it.
And she does. She becomes ready for that conversation only after she finds out about Eeva and after she finishes her story, after her conversation with her grandfather and after her grandmother’s death. All of it provides her a final closure. At that point she finally lets go of all that past, understands that she shouldn’t carry these stories around within herself. She learns that her main task is to be present, to be herself in the present moment.
Matias is the one who helps her manage it. He’s always there, his things are everywhere as the traces of his constant presence. At the end, she allows him to take down the walls she has built around herself with his kindness and tenderness, just as Eero takes down Eleonoora’s walls, and she starts to tell him about her story.
Then she realizes that the lightness she feels around him really does lead to love and that she might actually still get her nice and fateful love story. And it seems that she also begins to understand that love couldn’t be a prison for someone, just as her grandfather explained to her. Love is not what separates you from yourself and from the world; it is what allows you to open yourself up and to return to your true self. Love is not destructive nor self-destructive. It can only build new and better things. Still, you need to be lucky enough, to find it and to see that you’ve found it.
5. Finland
I intended to dedicate some time to some other characters: Eeva’s sister, her best friend, Anna’s best friend. But then I realized that there is another character more important than those ones, and that’s Finland itself.
There are reviewers of the book who feel that the plot and characters’ relationships are so important and so well developed that the fact it all takes place in Finland is practically irrelevant – it could happen anywhere. And I couldn’t disagree more. Finland is absolutely present and noticeable, it is pushed in the background of the story, but it creates a very specific atmosphere in the novel. From the nature everyone is so connected to, particularly Eeva, to saunas as leitmotif that we encounter again and again, just when we forgot about it.
I’m personally not a fan of saunas and I didn’t even know they have first appeared in Finland, but after reading this book, I started to read about them online as well. I started to understand how much they are important to Finnish people. There are 5,3 million people in Finland and 3,3 million saunas. They have saunas in their homes, hotels, offices, gyms, even mines below the ground. There are private and public saunas, with the number of private ones constantly increasing since 1950s, since more and more people started to build their own homes, adding saunas to them. Presidents and prime ministers have their favorite saunas, sometimes they even take their foreign colleagues there for international meetings.
For the Fins, the sauna is like a sacred, meditative place they go to when they need to relax and unwind. It is a sterilized space where they go to in order to heal, where women give birth to their children. It is also a place for bonding with the people you love, your friends and family, just like Eleonoora and Anna, usually not particularly close, bonded with each other in their family’s sauna at their lake house.
I grew up in the Balkans, where the summers are very hot and the people don’t always see the heat as particularly beneficial. Sometimes we like it, sometimes it annoys us, sometimes it gives people dehydration and heart attacks. As people from a Mediterranean, Southeastern European country, we often see the Finns and other Scandinavians as cold and distant. It often seems to us that, since they are not showing their emotions so openly, they don’t feel them as intensely as we do.
However, there’s a saying in Croatian language, “we are all bloody under the skin”. The hot sauna helps the cold Finns remember that and it brings them closer to one another, and closer to us.
The Typewriter Lady 