Estoy leyendo el libro Mira si yo te querré por Luis Leante (ISBN: 978-84-204-7195-2). El texto me fascina. Es uno de los libros que no quieres dejar al lado antes de haber disfrutado las últimas palabras, uno de los libros que te abren un mundo nuevo sin visitas anteriores. Por lo menos a mí me pasa éste.
One day people in the radio were telling how the world economy is stumbling and probably falling down.
"In Japan unemployed men still go on living their daily routine as they did before. They leave their home in the morning. With their briefcase in the hand they go and walk around in the parks until it´s time to come back home. They want to hide the fact that they have no job to go to."
If you think of your memory span, it normally is as long as your life. However, we need not consciously carry around all that has happened to and around us. Our subconscious mind takes care of the administration of the stored material. We remember something just when there are enough reasons for that, when there are lively enough triggers to wake the memories up.
The person who was telling about the desperate behaviour of Japanese unemployed men had to be very small in the beginning of the 90´s. Had he been an adult living normal life in Finland, he wouldn´t have needed to situate his story to Japan. The same happened here. We, too, had people pretending to go to work in the mornings. As they had no job to go to, they went somewhere else to hide their shame.
The memory span of an individual person extends to some 90+ years, maximum. The memory span of a culture can be shorter. New generations construct new worlds. In their construction work they do not necessarily use the same material the previous generations did. That is because they do not have the same first-hand experiences the previous generations had and they may also consciously refuse to listen to those who have them.
I still remember how a famous Finnish pop singer and actress burst out in the 70´s that the Finns haven´t experienced anything dramatic. She had friends in Greece then.
No doubt the situation was difficult in Greece, but twenty years earlier it had been much more difficult and unbearable here in her own country. In fact it had been bad enough to largely soften the traumatic memories of the civil war in 1918.
Finns as a nation had experienced bad times, but they were not a part of her own personal experiences. That´s why they became insignificant to her. The 1968 generation did its best to re-evaluate what their grandparents, fathers and mothers had gone through. Later on growing age has given more perspective...
Reading Mira si yo te querré by Luis Leante is of utmost interest to me, because my personal memory bank was empty as regards to the material concerning the events in Spanish Sahara in the 1960´s and 70´s. I had to read twice the following chapter of the book to make sure that I understood it correctly:
"Eran tres Mirage F1 franceses Los conocía bien: los mejores aparatos del Ejército marroquí. Se acercaron como una punta de flecha, descargando su carga mortal con precisión. En cuanto cayeron las primeras bombas, el pánico se apoderó del campamento. El napalm y el fósforo blanco..."
Yes, it really says that napalm and white phosphorus were used to kill civilian people having escaped the war. Napalm bombing in Sahara is not difficult to imagine, but it certainly is disgusting to admit it having taken place also in Sahara.
When reading the text I started wondering why, all of a sudden, there is a certain odd character introduced by the author. What was this character for? As you might read the book one day, I´m not going to tell anything more about that. Having reached the end of the story I understood that the author had very few choices. It is exactly this character that makes me remember what was taking place in the Spanish Sahara thirty years go. That particular figure functions as a Gestalt.
They say that the most remarkable difference between human beings and dinosaurs lies in the fact that dinosaurs were not capable of artistic expression. We are able to describe our perceptions and experiences to one another by means of words, movements and pictures. Dinosaurs weren´t. Art makes it possible for us to extend and enlarge our memory bank to cover what hasn´t happened directly to us. It makes us priviledged in the sense that we can efficiently learn from other people´s experiences.
How often do we make use of that possibility? Maybe on the individual level every now and then, but on the level of cultures, the answer is more difficult to give.
Perhaps you noticed that our former president of the state Martti Ahtisaari has been rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Peace. If we really learned from other people´s experiences, we would arrange peace negotiations before napalm and white phosphorus are used, and not just after that.
Every autumn Finnish editors select a politician or another prominent person and hand him or her a plastic bag full of books of the year. Lists of the books are published. Their sales go up. In a few weeks´ time this person arrives at a special press conference to announce the winner of the Finlandia Prize for Literature of the year.
What follows is a lot of talk about why just that person was chosen to choose, why he or she made that particular decision, what the current state of the Finnish literature is etc. Sales figures of those particular books go up again. People feel relieved. Deciding what books to buy as a Christmas present has become easier. You either buy the prize candidates or you buy the ones never mentioned in that list.
Having read interesting books in Spanish I have learned to appreciate the book prizing systems. Had Mira si yo the querré not had the red tape telling that it is the winner of the Premio Alfaguara 2007, I might never have found it. You can find the English translation of it with the name See How Much I Love You. Somebody might enjoy having it as a Christmas present or para hacer un regalo de los Reyes.
Which would give better results - to choose what to read from the list of Premio Alfaguara or to check the books on the shelves of the city library to see if there are more prize-winning books there?
The number of Spanish books in the city library is not too large. Anyway it is larger than the one offered by the Academic Bookshop. They used to stock more Spanish books when we had very few Spanish speaking people here. Now that you can hear Spanish almost daily somewhere in town, the stock is smaller. How come?
When pulling the Spanish books out from the shelf one by one in the library, I check if they are covered with any tape indicating a prize won. That is how I found El amante bilingüe by Juan Mars, Premio Ateneo de Sevilla 1990.
Had I known the name of the author for some particular reason I would have found even his horoscope in the internet. Maybe even his favourite food and the contents of his wardrope.
Somehow - and so far - I like my own touch-and-look searching method more than any systematic Internet search for famous prizes and their winners. No doubt my method is dusty, but the role of the random chance grows bigger. You never know what you´ll find. Additionally you might meet someone special in the library or on the way there. The city library is popular and it has become our common livingroom.
Thinking of the economic recessions and other personal catastrophies we meet in life, it is very important to have nice and free public places where we can go to spend time and meet friends. It is not fun, nor is it comforting, to go to shopping centres, if you are broke or just feel miserable. We need shared space free of commercial push and pull.
Maybe we should pay more attention to creating interesting shared spaces. In Finland the approaching winter reminds us that most of the time must soon be spent indoors. We are just saying a seven-to-eight-month good-bye to the time spent lazying around in the parks and streets. Who decides now where you can sit down for a nice chat with your friends?
It´s funny that we prefer summer pictures to those taken in winter. If you looked at the photos of the Tampere City library above, only the first one of them shows some melting spring-time snow. The picture is far too sunny to have been be taken in October , or even in January.
Maybe it is normal for all of us to live in a dream world. We Finns have about four months more or less warm weather and eight months of cold and frost - warm overcoats, boots, mittens, scarves, socks and stockings - and anyhow we want to emphasize that it mostly is sunny, nice, warm and cosy here. We do not do that for the purposes of tourism only. We do it for ourselves as well.
A piece of advice - it´s no use of trying to sell, market or present candles in Finland in summer time. As we have no night then, the candle light is difficult to see and makes no impression. It makes no difference that would make a difference you aimed at.
This is the time for candles, hot coffee, chocolate, good books and literary conversations. You do not meet so many people by chance now. Anyhow, it is nice to know that a person who reads is never lonely. Having read something you´ll have ideas to share. You feel inspired to take the initiative to call your friends for a cup of coffee. You even want to talk to people whom you don´t know yet as you want to find out what they want to share with you...
Be careful with candles! Enjoy!
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Life Doesn´t Stop
"Sí, yo también había luchado cuando estaba en la universidad durante la dictadura franquista, e incluso después, también fui a manifestaciones y corrí ante la policía."
I fought when at the university at the time of Franco - and after that. I went to to demonstrations as well. And ran followed by the police.
I was reading La canción de Dorotea by Rosa Regás (ISBN: 84-08-04214-9) and watching how my Spanish friends of today were demonstrating and running in the streets of their youth.
"Having been hit by a policeman I said to him that he could be kind enough to help me to find my glasses." one of them told me years ago.
A short meeting with Flavia - our first one - in August brought her to the pages written by Rosa Regás. She, too, is a university lecturer, intelligent and elegant as the protagonist of the book.
What does the book La canción de Dorotea have to do with normal life in Finland? The book deals with the police in Spain - the confrontation between the big-bad-masculine and the good-small-feminine.
Maybe I´m naive, but in this case I have to say that probably all Finns are naive in the sense athat we trust the police. We think that the police are reliable and trustworthy. If the police asks for help to find out some information, people really help them. Helping them was to self-evident that I was surprised to hear that, for instance in Poland, people refuse to do that. They don´t help the police. Well, that is easy to understand and even to accept, if you think that the authorities in Poland have so often been representatives of a foreign power. In Finland the police is ours, not theirs or of any group that would have taken the power by force.
This does not mean that the police would be somehow respected. They aren´t. Some years ago two policemen were walking in the open market place in Kuopio. A foreigner approached them asking "Do you speak English?" The policemen shook the head. The man asked "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" and got the same answer. He asked "Talar ni svenska?" The answer remained equally negative. He went on asking in French, Russian, Spanish and Italian. As none of them gave any positive result, the tourist turned to walk away.
"It would be so useful to speak some foreign languages." one of the policemen said watching the helpless-looking foreigner going down the street. "Maybe I should start learning some." he pondered.
"I don´t think it´s worth the trouble." the other one said. "Didn´t you see what happened to this man? He speaks seven languages and none of them was of any use."
One of the most popular Finnish authors is Mika Waltari. His book The Egyptian has been translated into several languages. It was published in 1945 and it still remains as one of the mark books most Finnish people really read.
My grandmother told me that my grandfather made her read The Egyptian aloud when he was lying on his deathbed.
However, you need not be in any exceptionally active process of dying to read The Egyptian.
You can also imagine that especially in the after-the-war situation people must have appreciated the idea that life goes on, no matter what happens. It has been going on since the ancient Egypt. Additionally it still offers you exactly the same periods of pain and short moments of happiness it always has offered.
As it is the 100 anniversary of Mika Waltari, you might be interested in reading some of his books. What has been translated into English are his historical novels, but Waltari has written about the Finnish police as well. One of his protagonists is inspector Palmu. I happen to own one of the inspector Palmu books in Spanish. The name is Juego Peligroso, una traducción de Komisario Palmun ereydys, Editorial L.A.R.A. Barcelona, Primera edición, 1953. It really says ´ereydys´ instead of ´erehdys´. At that time ISBN-numebers didn´t exist and every letter in the book has been selected individually. The paper is thin and beautifully brownish.
"De los días de la semana que más aversión produce permanecer en una comisaría de policía, el lunes es el peor de todos. Aquella mañana, ademas, el comisario Palmu estaba de peor talante de lo que tenía por costumbre." the book starts.
If you have any opportunity, you might be interested in seeing some of the Komisario Palmu films shot by Matti Kassila. Seeing them and reading the Palmu books would reveal to you how to be a respected and trustworthy police inspector in this country and why intelligence and efficiency are not the most important requirements for being able to make a good, harmless Finnish policeman.
"El asesinato - me dijo - es la forma más concluyente del delito, ya que no existe reparación posible. Los bienes robados pueden ser recuperados, y el honor en entredicho puede ser restablecido. Incluso una falsificación, con el tiempo, puede ser olvidada... El tiempo lo borra todo, todo, ya que las personas poseen una memoria muy débil. Pero a una persona muerta, asesinada, nadie es capaz de devolverle la vida."
My Spanish friend Teresa asked me in an email, what happened to the boy who some time ago shot eleven people in his class. We all have been asking the same question: What happened to him? Why did all that happen?
He was not an extraverted person, but neither was he outstandingly introverted and isolated. He had been mopped by other students, but so have many others. Mopping is strictly forbidden and largely eliminated in schools, but it finds new and "sophisticated" forms. As human beings we are very talented in pointing out otherness around us. Finnish schools have received record results in PISA-research, but simultaneusly students say that they do not like school. If you were aa authentic, real teen-ager, would you confess that you like school?
He was twenty-two - and thinking from the inspector Palmu time-perspective he could have been a family-man in the 40´s and 50´s having to carry the corresponding responsibilities. In 2008 he was a student trying to find out where his place in the society would be.
Since the year 2002 he had been playing in his head with his bad memories, guns, internet, the ideology of human life as a source of all bad on the earth, as well as with the idea of leaving his own footsteps in the history of the humankind.
I find it very difficult to say who are to blame for not having been able to stop him - or any other people having done the same.
Maybe you know that the boy was interviewed by a policeman before he was given a permission to buy a gun. The policeofficer didn´t find out in a short discussion that the quiet, neat-looking young student was totally queer in his head.
Having been able to hide it for so many years in front of so many people, why would he fail now in front of this policeman? Had he been interviewed by a physician, would it have changed the situation? Had he not been given a legal gun, would he have looked for an illegal one instead?
There is no end to these questions... Some papers wrote that the life stopped. They were wrong. Life does not stop. It goes on. No matter what you do and what happens to you life goes on. Isn´t it a comforting idea, after all? Life goes on and it is our only opportunity to laugh and cry, to fear and to be courageous...
I fought when at the university at the time of Franco - and after that. I went to to demonstrations as well. And ran followed by the police.
I was reading La canción de Dorotea by Rosa Regás (ISBN: 84-08-04214-9) and watching how my Spanish friends of today were demonstrating and running in the streets of their youth.
"Having been hit by a policeman I said to him that he could be kind enough to help me to find my glasses." one of them told me years ago.
A short meeting with Flavia - our first one - in August brought her to the pages written by Rosa Regás. She, too, is a university lecturer, intelligent and elegant as the protagonist of the book.
What does the book La canción de Dorotea have to do with normal life in Finland? The book deals with the police in Spain - the confrontation between the big-bad-masculine and the good-small-feminine.
Maybe I´m naive, but in this case I have to say that probably all Finns are naive in the sense athat we trust the police. We think that the police are reliable and trustworthy. If the police asks for help to find out some information, people really help them. Helping them was to self-evident that I was surprised to hear that, for instance in Poland, people refuse to do that. They don´t help the police. Well, that is easy to understand and even to accept, if you think that the authorities in Poland have so often been representatives of a foreign power. In Finland the police is ours, not theirs or of any group that would have taken the power by force.
This does not mean that the police would be somehow respected. They aren´t. Some years ago two policemen were walking in the open market place in Kuopio. A foreigner approached them asking "Do you speak English?" The policemen shook the head. The man asked "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" and got the same answer. He asked "Talar ni svenska?" The answer remained equally negative. He went on asking in French, Russian, Spanish and Italian. As none of them gave any positive result, the tourist turned to walk away.
"It would be so useful to speak some foreign languages." one of the policemen said watching the helpless-looking foreigner going down the street. "Maybe I should start learning some." he pondered.
"I don´t think it´s worth the trouble." the other one said. "Didn´t you see what happened to this man? He speaks seven languages and none of them was of any use."
One of the most popular Finnish authors is Mika Waltari. His book The Egyptian has been translated into several languages. It was published in 1945 and it still remains as one of the mark books most Finnish people really read.
My grandmother told me that my grandfather made her read The Egyptian aloud when he was lying on his deathbed.
However, you need not be in any exceptionally active process of dying to read The Egyptian.
You can also imagine that especially in the after-the-war situation people must have appreciated the idea that life goes on, no matter what happens. It has been going on since the ancient Egypt. Additionally it still offers you exactly the same periods of pain and short moments of happiness it always has offered.
As it is the 100 anniversary of Mika Waltari, you might be interested in reading some of his books. What has been translated into English are his historical novels, but Waltari has written about the Finnish police as well. One of his protagonists is inspector Palmu. I happen to own one of the inspector Palmu books in Spanish. The name is Juego Peligroso, una traducción de Komisario Palmun ereydys, Editorial L.A.R.A. Barcelona, Primera edición, 1953. It really says ´ereydys´ instead of ´erehdys´. At that time ISBN-numebers didn´t exist and every letter in the book has been selected individually. The paper is thin and beautifully brownish.
"De los días de la semana que más aversión produce permanecer en una comisaría de policía, el lunes es el peor de todos. Aquella mañana, ademas, el comisario Palmu estaba de peor talante de lo que tenía por costumbre." the book starts.
If you have any opportunity, you might be interested in seeing some of the Komisario Palmu films shot by Matti Kassila. Seeing them and reading the Palmu books would reveal to you how to be a respected and trustworthy police inspector in this country and why intelligence and efficiency are not the most important requirements for being able to make a good, harmless Finnish policeman.
"El asesinato - me dijo - es la forma más concluyente del delito, ya que no existe reparación posible. Los bienes robados pueden ser recuperados, y el honor en entredicho puede ser restablecido. Incluso una falsificación, con el tiempo, puede ser olvidada... El tiempo lo borra todo, todo, ya que las personas poseen una memoria muy débil. Pero a una persona muerta, asesinada, nadie es capaz de devolverle la vida."
My Spanish friend Teresa asked me in an email, what happened to the boy who some time ago shot eleven people in his class. We all have been asking the same question: What happened to him? Why did all that happen?
He was not an extraverted person, but neither was he outstandingly introverted and isolated. He had been mopped by other students, but so have many others. Mopping is strictly forbidden and largely eliminated in schools, but it finds new and "sophisticated" forms. As human beings we are very talented in pointing out otherness around us. Finnish schools have received record results in PISA-research, but simultaneusly students say that they do not like school. If you were aa authentic, real teen-ager, would you confess that you like school?
He was twenty-two - and thinking from the inspector Palmu time-perspective he could have been a family-man in the 40´s and 50´s having to carry the corresponding responsibilities. In 2008 he was a student trying to find out where his place in the society would be.
Since the year 2002 he had been playing in his head with his bad memories, guns, internet, the ideology of human life as a source of all bad on the earth, as well as with the idea of leaving his own footsteps in the history of the humankind.
I find it very difficult to say who are to blame for not having been able to stop him - or any other people having done the same.
Maybe you know that the boy was interviewed by a policeman before he was given a permission to buy a gun. The policeofficer didn´t find out in a short discussion that the quiet, neat-looking young student was totally queer in his head.
Having been able to hide it for so many years in front of so many people, why would he fail now in front of this policeman? Had he been interviewed by a physician, would it have changed the situation? Had he not been given a legal gun, would he have looked for an illegal one instead?
There is no end to these questions... Some papers wrote that the life stopped. They were wrong. Life does not stop. It goes on. No matter what you do and what happens to you life goes on. Isn´t it a comforting idea, after all? Life goes on and it is our only opportunity to laugh and cry, to fear and to be courageous...
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