Anu Kaaja‘s short story The Wallpaper (Tapetti) has been featured on Trafika Europe, a literature magazine that aims at introducing new voices and introducing audiences to contemporary European literatures.
The Wallpaper (Tapetti), translated for Trafika Europe by Darcy Hurford, is part of Anu Kaaja’s Metamorphoslip, a collection of short stories about metamorphoses. In The Wallpaper an artist is summoned to a country estate to make a copy of an antique wallpaper. The wallpaper is a lush, colourful portrait of a forest and a garden, but the lord of the estate hates it. In an escalation of the weird atmosphere at the estate the wallpaper is eventually brought to life.
The remaining short stories also deal with metamorphoses from different angles: a statue of Napoleon walks away from its pedestal, a divine messenger starts bothering a window washer, a night of partying begins in present-day Finland and ends up at the court of the Sun King, among other things. The metamorphoses are sometimes dreams come true, sometimes places of refuge, or nightmares. There are scenes both phantasmagorical and realistic, that both conceal and reveal all that is important and difficult for people, whether it concerns money, food, home, gender, or sex. And Kaaja tells it in language that is precise and crammed to bursting, whether with joy or sadness.
You can read The Wallpaper here.