Talk to me about books for five minutes and there’s a high chance I’ll try to get you to read Antti Tuomainen. Whether it’s The Man Who Died or the YouMeFun trilogy about the actuary who inherits an amusement park and has to fend off deadly but inept gangsters, Tuomainen’s novels are warm, absurd and ridiculously funny. Recently, some people I know have been wondering out loud (on behalf of friends, no doubt) whether it’s possible to reinvent yourself in your early to mid fifties. The Burning Stones, Tuomainen’s latest stand-alone novel, seeks to answer that very question. For Tuomainen, the answer is a resounding yes.
Anni lives for saunas. In her remote part of Finland, with forest and lakes, it’s part of the natural order of things, though those around her are equally obsessed with true crime, Formula One, Dean Martin and aeroplane models. Her passion is also her profession, as she’s the sales manager of a major sauna manufacturer. She’s drifting apart from her loser husband and worn down by things that she did or which happened to her in her twenties. But when her newly-appointed boss is murdered in his own sauna, she swiftly becomes the police’s main suspect. And when the murderer strikes again, she knows that she hasn’t got much time to solve the crime. She wouldn’t think of herself as reinventing herself, but that’s precisely what she has to do.
The Burning Stones is less frenetic than Tuomainen’s previous work. More of it takes place in the head, and although there are certain madcap or deadpan moments that rely on Tuomainen’s ability to follow the absurd, there’s more of a focus on Anni working through the issues that have presented themselves to her. She has no real confidantes – her husband’s incapable of a conversation that isn’t based on motor racing, her colleagues all think that she’s a murderer (while she, in turn, suspects them) and the police are a different matter entirely. And yet while her inner voice is quiet, she’s resourceful and determined and exhibits the guile and verve of a professional salesperson to get to the bottom of what’s going on.
In The Burning Stones, Tuomainen frequently returns to the idea of the past, and the extent to which it rules the future – especially for the 50-something Anni whose future is beginning to look finite. The police chief is convinced she’s the murderer, because in the last century Anni’s father beat him in a race to hunt a spectacular elk. His junior officer is her former fiancé, dumped in the 1990s for reasons that turn out now to be false. Others in the novel are fighting hard to remake themselves anew, or indeed to keep everything the same. As in his previous novels, Tuomainen is interested in what interests his characters: their mundane obsessions and the way in which they may have beneficial or harmful effects. David Hackston’s translation makes this a world of both wonder and whimsy.
Midsomer Murders features bucolic villages that are ostensibly lovely and are in fact anything but. As chief cop Kiimalainen puts it after the second murder, ‘Puhtijärvi isn’t exactly Midsomer – a picturesque little hamlet with neat hedgerows, where, even in a normal week, at least six people are bludgeoned to death.’ It’s true that even Tuomainen’s comedy dramas include a hefty body count, but there is something so wholesome and hopeful about them that I’d happily live in the worlds he creates. And if you or your friends are fast-approaching middle age, you’ll definitely benefit from some time with the Stones.
Thanks to Orenda Books for the review copy.
Other Antti Tuomainen novels on Cafethinking:
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