This was the Finnish book in our international online book club book in May 2022.
Since the main one "The Easy Life in Kamusari" was so short, I added this to my list. Another short story about a country about which we never read enough.
A war story, yet quite funny. Soldiers on their way home for home leave during the war keep telling each other stories of what happened to them or others and their way back and to the battlefields or even on the battlefields. Sounds like a sad war story but most of the tales are pretty humorous.
Definitely an anti-war story. Quite strange at times but definitely very readable. Short and sweet.
Comment from another member:
I would not have picked up this book if it were not for the book club again and am again some wiser. The many stories amused me a lot, (and some horrified me, like the one about the greedy pigs) but under the surface there was a lot of insights into what the wartime was like for my grandparents who were in the army then. It interested me to see from a very narrow perspective how day to day happenings were told to others, as there were no social media or televisions with news back then. I feel nowadays the war is often looked at from above and observed as a whole, in history books and in movies, while then all you knew was your orders and what rumours you heard from others.
From the back cover:
"Veijo Meri's novel is set in Finland during the last years of World War II. On a crowded troop train winding its way through the winter landscape, the home-going soldiers pass their time playing cards, drinking, snoozing, and exchanging stories of the battlefield. It is these stories (constantly interrupted by station stops, the intrusion of the military police, and simple fatigue) that make up the vibrant fabric of the novel. Laughter is the predominant note: the laughter of men newly released from the terror of battle. Though frequently macabre in detail and brutally realistic in its descriptions of men at war, the book is pervaded by a robust sense of comedy that purges combat of all taint of hatred and clearly underlines the essential and tragic ridiculousness of war."
I’d never heard of this book before, but it does sound good! Did you read it in English, Finnish, or German?
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard of it, either, Lydia. But I thought it sounded good and it was.
DeleteI read the German translation. I don't speak Finnish and we found in our book club that translations into other languages are often better than into English. And since I can get German books easier than English ones, I often read a German translation.