The Happy Man. Hero of the gloomy spruce forest. Arto Paasilinna 70 years.
Date: 5.10.2012 - 14.1.2013
Time: 9:00 - 20:00
Place: In The Café & Agricola Room
Design, manuscript: book sector publicist Katri Wanner.
In co-operation with: WSOY Literature Foundation.
Free admission
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A resourceful loaner beats the system 49 books, over 50 translation languages
Arto Paasilinna has 259 foreign translation agreements. Except for one translation, all of Paasilinna’s works can be found in the National Library of Finland’s collections. It
would appear that our National Library has the world’s most extensive Arto Paasilinna collection, which naturally includes all of Paasilinna’s Finnish-language novels and nonfiction works. Materials from these collections,as well as from the archives of Paasilinna’s publisher WSOY, have been used to create an exhibition that offers the author’s biographical information as well as the possibility to peek at his international success and compare the works’ cover art from different countries.
In Finland, Arto Paasilinna is considered a skilful picaresque writer of folk comedy, but in Central Europe he is a natural philosopher providing consolation, boldness and food for thought. The books’ cover art reveals how the same book has been offered to the public as a comedy and philosophical work. Cover art is always an advance message used by the publisher to define the books and its author. The elegant covers of the Italian Iperborea publishing house’s editions borrow from the animal-themed oil paintings – a fox and hare – of Bruno Liljefors, a well-known painter from Sweden’s “Golden Age” .
The title of the exhibition, The Happy Man, is one of Arto Paasilinna’s most beloved works. Many Finnish men would like to identify with the bridge engineer Jaatinen, not the least the author himself. Through the novel passes the same red thread, a resourceful loaner beating the system. The main theme is intermeshed with the northern forest and the celebration of all of creation. Bears, foxes, hares and Finnish horses play major roles in Paasilinna’s wideranging output.
I want to be a son of the woods,hero of the gloomy spruce forest.
The exhibition’s subtitle, a line from Aleksis Kivi’s The Woodsman’s Song, tells of the landscape where Paasilinna’s large family lived in post-war Finland. Tervola, located in the province of Lapland, is the kind of place where Arto Paasilinna feels the most at home; the Finnish spruce forest is his “Rosebud. With his literary success Arto Paasilinna has been able to travel widely and make his dreams come true, but he has always returned to Finland to build a house in the middle of the forest.
Further information about the exhibition:
katri.wanner@welho.com
puh. 040 579 8838
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Arto Paasilinna - Anniversary Symposium (in finnish)
In connection with the exhibition,the Arto Paasilinna Anniversary Symposium will be organised on Wednesday 24 October at 17:00 att he National Library of Finland; the Chairperson will be publisher Leena Majander-Reenpää.
The speakers at the symposium will be:
Author Jouni K. Kemppainen:How did Arto Paasilinna
become a writer?
Author, PhD Lasse Lehtinen:The writer meets the master – on the trail of Nätti-Jussi.
Translator Anne Colin du Terrail: Arto Paasilinna – ambassador of Finnish literature and captivator of the French heart.
Literary critic Hannu Marttila: The reception of Arto Paasilinna’s novels abroad.
DSocSci Reino Paasilinna: Brother Arto
Free admission
