a blog by Peter Leonard
Mikael Niemi came through Seattle this week, on a book tour for Popular Music from Vittula, his breakthrough novel of life in northern Sweden. He talked at both the UW and Elliot Bay Books, a bookstore in Pioneer Square. He's holding the original Swedish edition in the picture below, but the book has been translated into English, as well as 28 other languages. It's also recently been made into a movie -- trailers were showing when I was in Uppsala this summer.
The storyline concerns kids growing up in Sweden's Finnish-speaking minority community, above the arctic circle. "We spoke Swedish with an accent and weren't Swedes, we spoke Finnish with an accent and weren't Finns" is how he has described his community. During these years children were discouraged from speaking Finninsh in school -- sometimes through corporal punishment. Against this backdrop of cultural confusion, the young boys in the story discover an exciting new world through rock and roll records, brought to them by visiting American cousins from the midwest.
