Nothing has happened here that I don’t want to remember.
Author: Helmi Kekkonen
Finnish original: Tämän naisen elämä
Publisher: Siltala, 2021
Genre: literary fiction
Number of pages: 211 pp.
Reading material: Finnish original, English sample, English synopsis
On the morning of the funeral, fifteen-year-old Helena puts on a red dress and eyes herself in the mirror. Her mother is dead; her father is waiting outside in his black suit. Helena thinks about eyebrows, boobs, and her boyfriend Johannes – so she won’t have to think about her mother and especially her own grief, her own feelings of guilt.
Helena grows from adolescence to adulthood, but memories of a childhood overshadowed by her mother never age and refuse to be forgotten.
“My throat constricts with grief, and I decide today is the day I’ll tell Dad. I’ll tell him about those days. I’ll tell him Mom is lying when she said we went to the park and the pool and the store. I just don’t know how to get the words out; I’ve tried so many times. Or maybe Dad already knows but is also unable to say anything. As if there were some agreement. As if the three of us had at some point made the joint decision that such this is perfectly normal and appropriate. As if we were a totally normal family.”
This Woman’s Life is a novel that moves through time in an extraordinarily beguiling manner, leaving an indelible mark on the reader.
“The style of Helmi Kekkonen’s fourth novel advances slowly in the face of important themes. Emotional and tragic blows are cushioned by a soft layer of writing, which removes the shock impact of the read. (…) Kekkonen is a master of female-perspective contemporary writing. The sphere is private and that is as it should be. In its stream-of-consciousness first-person narration, the work falls into Virginia Woolf’s tradition of writing about women and families. In a gendered society, feelings and attitudes are passed down from the bodies of relations to children, to be borne forever. This observation is fundamental to psychological prose. This Woman’s Life is a focused work.”
– Helsingin Sanomat newspaper
“This Woman’s Life…reinforces the image of an expressive prosaist with the gift of seeing major themes in tiny details. Pathos and artifice have no place in Kekkonen’s prose.”
– Suomen Kuvalehti magazine
“As we’ve come to expect from Kekkonen, This Woman’s Life is an exceptionally beautiful, touching, and tender; it observes in one sense from a distance yet brings its characters incredibly close. The book takes place in two different chronologies, and especially the flashbacks exhibit a force and lucidity I don’t recall having read in ages. (…) Kekkonen’s text shines with the keen, sensitive psychological eye the author relies on when describing characters. (…) The novel is exact and the scale of one woman’s life. It is constructed of little pieces, some of which fit together and others not at all, it is neither linear nor forced but rather bits and pieces here and there from the sort of life we are not used to reading stories about. It is a big story in its ordinariness and a superficial smallness which we rarely pause to consider, and that is precisely where its strength comes from: from the fact that behind everything there is always something larger hiding, capable of wounding, even sharp, in times both good and bad.”
– Mitä luimme kerran literature blog
“In one interview, Kekkonen described her idiom as airy, but for me her sentences are like cool, heavy beach pebbles whose surface has been honed silk-smooth by years of work. I’d like to put the most beautiful and meaningful in my pocket and carry them with me forever.”
– Kulttuuritoimitus
Also available:
Adult fiction
The Guests (2016)
Children’s books:
Topsy-Turvy Anna (2019)
About the author:
Helmi Kekkonen