Anita Konkka

Anita Konkka is a Finnish novel writer. She has published since 1970 eleven novels, essays, radio-plays, and a dream-book. She is a tireless scholar of love and love relationships, problematic ones, too. However, she doesn't portray her characters as enervated by love or otherwise with furrowed brow. In these Finnish latitudes she is able to write about love and its troublesome and unhappy aspects humorously and as though smiling, not derisively or with pity but friendly and understandingly.

It has been observed from Anita Konkka's novels that dreams are important for her. Dreams appeared already in her debut work Break Free. Life's roughness, but at same time its diversity, a young woman's struggle for independence, a powerful father figure, unsuccessful love relationships and a lack of confidence with regard to work live their own lives in Konkka's dreams.

 Anita  Konkka took up the same same search for herself in her novel Winter in Ravenna. The dreams live there, too, quite as much as in the trilogy's other novels, The Daughter and The Same Family. In the Fool's Paradise was also constructed from the I's thoughts and the diary-like narrative, where reality and dreams overlapped. In the book Woman in the Mirror of Dreams the dreams have finally received the leading role. The explanations and interpretations follow them. Konkka has extensively familiarized herself with dream studies in various parts of the world. She relies on myths and ideas for her own dreams and brings forth many different methods of interpretation. Freudians, Jungians and many more modern concepts proceed side by side. Konkka interprets them crosswise. Thus the merits of the book are increased. Dream interpretation is witchcraft where no single truth exists.

A Fool's Paradise now in  English.

"A remarkable creation of a 'woman living on the edge,' A Fool’s Paradise is a powerful, disturbing novel in the great tradition of Jean Rhys and Violette Leduc."

Publishers Weekly:

"The querulous, nameless, love-weary narrator of Konkka's 1988 novel might have emerged from a Jim Jarmusch film: in her late 30s, recently unemployed,her engagement broken, off and in love with an unavailable man, the narrator is a cerebral, dreamy observer of the flotsam of life as she sits at the base other favorite pine tree writ-ing in a blue notebook. She imagines the lives of people she sees, diligently records her dreams and childhood memories that intrude in the narrative like non sequiturs, and dabbles in astrology, which underscores that "everything has some diabolical purpose."

When her lover, Alexander, goes back to his wife, Vera, a Russian woman who reminds the narrator of capricious characters in Dostoyevski, the narrator grows obsessively jealous, invents an elaborate scenario between husband and wife, and, confronting her status as a casroff, muses darkly about the inequitable relations between men and women. This is Konkka's first work tobe translated into English. As rendered here, her prose is wonderfully cadenced and vivid; it establishes her nameless character as a memorable figure‹not quite a cynic and not completely a sensualist, and none the wiser through experience.

A Fool's Paradise ANITA KONKKA, TRANS. FROM THE FINNISH BY A.D. HAUN AND OWENWITESMAN. Dalkey Archive, $12.95 paper (133p) ISBN 1-56478-422-3

The Guardian 

Fool's Paradise
by Anita Konkka translated by AD Haun and Owen Witesman (Dalkley Archive, £8.99)

A Fool's Paradise is an elliptical novel of alienation and marginalisation, which was first published in Finland in 1988. An unnamed female narrator muses on relationships and emotions while describing isolated incidents from her life, her dreams and her memory. She is a former scholar, in love in a desultory way with a married man, and rapidly becoming (both voluntarily and enforcedly) distanced from society. She mooches around, obsessively recording small details from her childhood, omens and observations, rousing herself only to spy on the wife of her ex-lover. Indeed, the novel might be taken as an allegory of a wasted life, as nearly subliminal references to current affairs (geopolitical and local) suggest that her withdrawal from life is a mistake. It is unclear at times what is real and what is dream. It is kind of existential, but in a gentle way. Very little of note happens, and the novel drifts around. Sometimes sharp and funny, often poignant, and more than a little strange, it is on the edge of surrealism but perhaps more interested in the fact that, as the narrator says, "there are a lot of things in this world that can't be explained".
J de G

The Complete Reader 

  This last activity, dreaming, shapes much of A Fool’s Paradise as the female narrator slides easily and often without warning from waking to dreaming. She also traffics with astrology and divination although these seem fainthearted activities that do not fully enlist her allegiance. Although the story is basically sad, the narrator is not and she keeps the reader alive with barbed or funny observations.


Reviewed by Bob Williams

A Fool’s Paradise
by Anita Konkka
Dalkey Archive Press
2006, ISBN 1-56478-422-3, $12.95, 133 pages

The author is Finnish and this is a book that was published in Finland in 1988. This is its first appearance in English. Konkka lives in Helsinki and has written novels, essays, radio plays and a dream book.

This last activity, dreaming, shapes much of A Fool’s Paradise as the female narrator slides easily and often without warning from waking to dreaming. She also traffics with astrology and divination although these seem fainthearted activities that do not fully enlist her allegiance. Although the story is basically sad, the narrator is not and she keeps the reader alive with barbed or funny observations.

The narrator is out of work throughout most of A Fool’s Paradise and in love with a married man who is incapable of leaving his vampiric and emotionally unstable wife. It is in the fabric of the book that the dreams are so important because the development and eventual collapse of her relationship with Alexander is told, not through events, but through the emotional and intellectual stream of dreaming that accompanies the diurnal narrative. The skill behind this is especially considerable since Konkka provides connections that are smoothly seamless between the conscious world and the dreams.

One thinks of writers from northern Europe as more often dour and melancholy than not with what merriment there may be tinged with a berserker frenzy. Konkka eludes this stereotype even though she claims “Sometimes it feels like being born in Finland is punishment for some sins in a previous life.” But she can on the next page make the rueful observation after an unsuccessful job interview that “I looked like Don Quixote’s horse when I saw myself in the department store mirror.” And she has no illusions about what kind of job she will not accept – “I’d rather become a tube of toothpaste than a civil servant.” She deals forthrightly with the middle class penchant for narrow and unfeeling prejudices.

“An unemployed person is supposed to suffer and drink booze, engage in drunken brawls, and finally commit suicide. The happy unemployed shake society’s foundation and gnaw at the nation’s moral backbone.”

But is in the frequent bursts of poetic observation, so much more exact than scientific precision, that Konkka shines. “The moon is leaning against the chimney of the building next door, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched. He’s been fired from his job and doesn’t know where to go. He’s thin; his stomach is hollow. He hasn’t eaten properly for two weeks. He pulls his cap down over his eyes and slinks behind the chimney.”

Konkka is an important and exciting author. Her skills are abundant and her versatility is on a grand scale. One hopes and expects that Dalkey will bring us more of her.