To the Finland Station
From LA Weekly, 16 March 2001
Richard Rayner on his new novel, The Cloud Sketcher
By Brendan Bernhard
“I asked my father-in-law what he could tell me about the Finnish Civil War. And he said, ‘There was no civil war in Finland.’ I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said, ‘There was no civil war in Finland.’ And I said, ‘Well, forgive me, but I understood that in 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Reds seized power in Finland and there was a war and Finns were killing Finns.’ And he said, ‘Ah! That was the War of Independence.’
By Richard Rayner. 435 pages. $25. HarperCollins.
From International Herald Tribune, 16 March 2001
Reviewed by Jabari Asim
Born in Finland in 1890, Esko Vaananen grows up in the tiny village of Pyhajarvi, where there is no railroad, one telephone and only one building with electricity. The son of an unstable, abusive Marxist, Esko is a lonely, motherless child. After losing an eye and acquiring extensive scars from a fire, he becomes a bookish, solitary figure accustomed to a life of rude stares and cruel insults. He seems doomed to a confined, loveless existence until two fateful encounters...
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