Paper short abstract:

In my paper I study the great power of fictional means to describe the ambiguous and polyphonic reality. I use the novels and memoirs of the Finnish author Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmi to tell the growth of a small rural town to a modern streamlined city and the change of a balanced idyll to a nervous always on-going building business.

Paper long abstract:

Kerttu-Kaarina Suosalmi (1921 - 2001) was born in Lahti, a small rural town in southern Finland. "The most important of one´s landscapes is the landscape of the childhood. …The landscape of my childhood was a small town idyll. A safe house, large yard with trees, lawns, arbours", she once wrote.

Lahti had developed peacefully in the beginning of the 20th century. Until the Second World War it was a wooden town dominated by the church and town hall, both on its own hill opposite each other. After the war Lahti began to change rapidly. The amount of the inhabitants grew faster than in any other Finnish town of about the same size, mostly because of the evacuees coming from the areas lost to the Soviet.

The growth caused serious problems. A new general plan was made in a great hurry to clean the chaos. It meant that the typical qualities of the town scape were intended to change to a modern effective town as the slogans were.

Suosalmi defined the post-war Lahti as a town of upstarts and aliens. She described the milieu and people of the unbalanced town in many novels. The disoriented town has lent its history and features to Suosalmi's characters, maybe most dramatically in the novel Jesus' little soldier where the collapse of an unfinished house embodies the soul of businessmen.

My paper studies metaphors and the relevance between the reality - the history and the town scape of Lahti - and Suosalmi's fiction.