The Winter War

January 4, 2016
Finland-Swede Tier has been lauded for his poetry and short stories, so it comes as no surprise that his 2013 debut novel has been translated into English. The book—titled after the war fought between Finland and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944 and was “the best of all wars so far, because both sides ended up the victors” —tells the story of how Max and Katriina Paul’s marriage dissolved. Populated with interesting incidental characters and laced with dark humor, this domestic drama is set in present-day Helsinki and spreads from there to rural Finland, London, and the Philippines, aptly limning the global nature of 21st-century life. This backdrop offers the author space to ruminate on everything from how feminism has changed since the 1970s to the nature of interpersonal relationships. The strength of this novel lies in the disparate voices that Tier elucidates so skillfully throughout the novel; from a fading academic’s anxieties about his stalled career to a young art student who becomes embroiled in the Occupy movement, Tier sympathetically and accurately depicts the anxieties that plague adults young and old in the postmodern Western world. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management.

January 1, 2016
The cycle of satisfaction, frustration, creation, and ennui that dogs artists and scholars alike unfolds in two generations of a Helsinki family. Max, a sociologist known for his decadeslong work on sex, is turning 60 and struggling to produce a biography of a groundbreaking 19th-century Finnish writer as his legacy. But it's not just professional respect Max craves; when a young journalist interviews him, "above all, [Max] hoped that he was still sexy." His marriage to his wife, Katriina, is stale after they've raised two grown daughters. Katriina resents that while Max is thinking about a book that never materializes, there's not much hope he will "show an interest in something other than himself." She dreams of what she'd like to do for the next 30 years of her life, but what brings her pleasure elicits little interest from her husband. Their younger daughter, Eva, puzzles most of the family when she moves to London to study art--only Max has always predicted this path for her. Yet both Max and Eva are unhappy; Eva questions the meaning of what she does under the tutelage of a burned-out professor with whom she has an affair as her father has a dalliance with the journalist. Eva thinks she will grow into happiness, reflecting that "when her father was her age, he'd already written his doctoral dissertation." The other Paul sister, Helen, chose a more traditional path as a teacher and mother and often serves as the family observer. When Max's mother suffers a crisis, bringing the four together, Helen sounds a note reminiscent of Tolstoy: "every family experienced similar scenes that had to be endured, other hospitals with ill relatives, other small towns where a grandmother had suffered a stroke." A darkly comic, satisfying novel of richly rendered inner tensions played out in interpersonal relationships.

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