This is
quite a different book. I bought it because the title fascinated me, and the
short summary of the story on the back cover. The story takes place during
1943-44. It starts in Trieste where a man is found beaten half to death in the
street. He is taken to a German war ship where a doctor takes care of him. To
everybody’s surprise the man survives. But he has no memory and he has no
language. The doctor, who is Finnish, tries to find out who the man is. The
only clue is the name ‘Sampo Karjalainen’ sown into the inside collar of his
jacket and a handkerchief with the initials S.K.
Presuming that the patient is Finnish he starts teaching him Finnish. However, the memory is not coming back so the good doctor thinks that the best idea would be to go to Finland. Once there, well-known places, peoples or incidents might trigger the memory to come back. He manages to put the patient on a train and ship to Helsinki with a recommendation letter to a fellow doctor in the pocket. A last tip of advice is:
‘One more bit of advice,’ he said. ‘I speak now as a man,
not as a doctor. Since language is our mother, try and find yourself a woman.
It is from a woman that we come into this world, from a mother that we learn to
speak. Fall in love, give of yourself. Switch off your brain and follow your
heart. You must fall in love with a voice, and with every word you hear it
utter.’
He arrives in the military hospital in Helsinki just to find that
the doctor is away fighting in Karelia. He is given a bed in the hospital
while waiting for the doctor to return. The local pastor becomes his
friend and teaches him the Finnish language. It is a complex language to say
the least. He teaches by reading and quoting from the great Finnish epos
Kalevala to help him understand not only the language but also the Finnish
soul. I will not reveal much more of the story here.
It is told in a beautiful,
poetic language. Even the bad weather is described in such wonderful words that
you almost forget the description and are lost in the words. It is a book that
makes us thinking about he past, present and future. What happens if we loose
one of these steps? Can we still go on? Are we maybe even happier than
before? Or are we lost forever without our memories?
"…I hope to find
some memory of me in someone else; I hope to find someone who can tell me about
even one single day in my past life: about one summer’s afternoon when I was a
child, some outing, what games I played. Because surely I too must have run around
a courtyard kicking a ball? I had spoken emphatically, almost angrily; but my
tirade vanished into the unresponsive darkness as though I had not spoken. ‘But
perhaps I’m wrong,’ I went on bitterly. ‘Perhaps that’s not what I should be
looking for.’ ‘Tomorrow this will already be a memory a small seed pearl,’ said
Ilma after a long sight. I was rejecting her and still she was trying to
comfort me. ‘To keep a memory you have to have somewhere to store it,’ I shot
back tersely. ‘You can glue it into your album of memories along with the
Porilaisten marssi. Night with Ilma, you could call it.’"
The book is
written by Diego Marani who is an Italian novelist, translator and newspaper
columnist. While working as a translator for the European Union he invented a
language ‘Europanto’ which is a mixture of languages and based on the
common practice of word-borrowing usage of many EU languages. You cannot
escape to notice that this writer is a lover of languages and words. It is
beautifully and skilfully translated into English by Judith Landry.
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