Seven brothers is a book written by the Finnish author Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Aleksis Kivi was the first professional writer that published his works in Finnish. He died in poverty at the age of thirty-eight. The book is wonderful, and Kivi is an intersting author, but, surprisingly, there is very little information about him on the internet. You can read more (in English) about this interesting author at this Finnish net site.

Published in 1870, Seven Brothers ended an era dominated by Swedish-speaking authors in Finnish literature.

For many Finns, Seven Brothers remains “the greatest Finnish novel of all time”, the classic among the classics in Finnish literature.

Seven brothers is a strange, humorous and wild tale about seven depicting orphan brothers, which to some extent reads like an adventure. To evade the Lutheran Church’s requirement that they learn to read and write before confirmation, they flee to the wilderness to make a living there. As Juhani, the eldest of the brothers, says: “learning to read is impossible…I have such a thick skull.”

So they flee to the wilderness, and new challenges. They start to clear land and settles down to live there. They fight nature, animals, cold, hunger, as well as their own convictions and beliefs. And there they stay, for 10 years. And then, after encountering all kinds of disasters small and large, the brothers return to society - matured and ready to take responsibilities.

Kivi’s individualism and his unconventional approach won him many enemies among the Fennoman movement, which emphasized agrarian and conservative values. Kivi also challenged taboos concerning what was considered decent. Thus, The seven brothers were considered too wild, to down to earth, too crude, to be literature at the time of its publication. The seven brothers were not modelled on an idealized picture of the people, but instead revealed their deep ignorance, their laziness, their resistance to culture and values, and their impulse driven ways of life.

However, it is a wonderful book. It is a very realist account of life, full of the comedy of daily life, told with passion, warmth, and understanding. It is also an optimistic novel, full of belief in the future. A great tale, a wonderful book!

Praise:

Reader review at amazon.com:

I haven’t come across many books I felt were pure genius, but this is one.
It compares favorably in many ways to The Lord of the Rings; although Seven Brothers is not pure fantasy, much else about it is similar. Instead of four hobbits who grow to maturity and achieve sanctification, there are seven brothers. Instead of being menaced by the ringwraiths and orcs, the brothers must contend with the mad bulls, and the fearsome Toukola boys.

You can order Seven Brothers by Aleksis Kivi from amazon US. You can also order the book from amazon UK: Seven brothers: A novel
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Brand is the drama of absolute intransigence in support of the religious life as opposed to the hedonistic one. The motto of Brand, the main character, is “All or nothing”. He is a strong person, a very stubborn Norwegian, and he does not admit compromises nor expedients, but goes directly to his goal, over-riding affections, memories and traditions. The conventional God is a God too spineless for Brand, a God weak and antiquated, a God who contents himself with fragments of human hearts, and who finds it sufficient that man, fortified by the Christian doctrine of redemption, offers Him homage every seven days.

Upon this petty and what he views as a vulgar concepcion of religion, the young Norwegian pastor declares war to the death. Better, according to Brand, to live in utter impiety, better to live like a libertine than to accommodate oneself to the practice of such a false and lying life. “Either everything or nothing.”

Thus Henrik Ibsen lets Brand struggle with and live out the dilemmas laid out by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in Either/Or (see Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (Penguin Classics)). And to some extent Brand may be viewed as Ibsen’s reply to, and partly also refutation of, Kierkegaard.

If there is a God, one should dedicate oneself to him completely, without dissimulation and without defections. In conformance to this ambitious ideal of his, Brand refuses to leave his parish although the climate threatens the life of his wife and child and later they die; and he also denies the sacrament to his aged dying mother, because she will not consent to give away all her riches. Contrary to Zarathustra, who from the mountain descends into the valley to be among men, Brand painfully climbs to the summit in order to be nearer to his God. But an avanche descends upon him. Dying Brand asks of the Eternal if the littlie grain of human will has any weight in the scale of redemption.

In the midst of the crash of the avalanche the answer comes to him: “God is love!” With such an answer the tragic Norwegian arrives at a more humane and generous conclusion than the philosopher Kierkegaard, whose life has some points of similarity with that of the cleric Brand. This is a wonderful play and a great, thought-provoking reading.

See also our Henrik Ibsen pages at ScandinavianBooks.com!

See also: George Bernard Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Dover Books on Literature and Drama), James McFarlane’s The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge Companions to Literature), and Toril Moi’s excellent Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism: Art, Theater, Philosophy.

The most popular Scandinavian fiction books at amazon.com (May, 2008):

1. Kristin Lavransdatter (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Sigrid Undset (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Editor, Translator), Brad Leithauser (Introduction)

2. Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (Perennial Classics) by Ole Edvart Rolvaag (Author)

3. The Return: An Inspector Van Veeteren Mystery (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) by Hakan Nesser (Author)

4. Four Major Plays: A Doll’s House, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder (Oxford World’s Classics) by Henrik Ibsen (Author), James McFarlane (Introduction, Translator), Jens Arup (Translator)

5. Four Great Plays of Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House, The Wild Duck, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder (Enriched Classics Series) by Henrik Ibsen (Author)

6. Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg (Author)

7. Hunger: A Novel by Knut Hamsun (Author), Paul Auster (Introduction), Robert Bly (Translator)

8. Unspoken: A Mystery (Inspector Anders Knutas Mysteries) by Mari Jungstedt (Author), Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

9. An Enemy of the People; The Wild Duck; Rosmersholm (Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford University Press).) by Henrik Ibsen (Author), James McFarlane (Translator)

10. Growth of the Soil (Penguin Classics) by Knut Hamsun (Author), Brad Leithauser (Introduction), Sverre Lyngstad (Translator)

(Translated by Arthur G. Chater.New : York: Knopf, 1936. New translation by Tiina Nanally.) (Norwegian title: Fortællingen om Viga-Ljot og Vigdis. Christiania (Oslo): Aschehoug, 1909.)

Set in Norway and Iceland at the beginning of the eleventh century, Gunnar’s Daughter is the story of the beautiful, spoiled Vigdis Gunnarsdatter, who is casually raped by the man she had wanted to love.

A woman of courage and intelligence, Vigdis is toughened by adversity. Alone she raises the child conceived in violence, repeatedly defending her autonomy in a world governed by men. Alone she rebuilds her life and restores her family’s honor, until an unrelenting social code propels her to take the action that again destroys her happiness.

More than a historical romance, Gunnar’s Daughter depicts characters driven by passion and vengefulness, themes as familiar in Undset’s own time - and in ours - as they were in the Saga Age. A strong, unsentimental book by Undset.

Knut Hamsun was a great Norwegian novelist, dramatist, poet, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He is perhaps best known for Growth of the Soil, Hunger, and Mysteries. These are relatively “heavy” and serious books, and they have contributed much to making serious and hard to read part of Hamsun’s image as an author. (You can read more about Knut Hamsun’s books at http://www.leserglede.com/.)

However, Knut Hamsun has many other qualities as a writer as well. He had a great sense of humor and irony, and he was socially engaged as well as a great observer of social change. A number of his writings display these characteristics, thus pointing to a “lighter”, and perhaps more easily accessible side of Knut Hamsun.

Segelfoss Town is one of these books. It is a wonderful, light novel, and my personal favorite among Hamsun’s books.

Segelfoss Town is the continuation of Children of the Age, but can be read indepent of it. Now Tobias Holmengrå, the entrepreneurial capitalist, is the big guy in Segelfoss. The lieutenant is nothing but a distant memory now; money and the struggle of the classes rule the day. Changing times, business cycles, and events large and small create problems for the city and even its richest citizen.

This is, in my humble opinion, an even more interesting book than “Children of the Age”, and full of black humor, fascinating interactions among the wide gallery of characters in the book, and with great observations about the dynamics of the changing circumstances.

While easier to read than most of Hamsun’s other books, this book still reveals the depth of Hamsun’s ability to observe, and is written in a beautiful, extremely well crafted language. Great fun, and a great experience, as well as food for thought.

The Fire Engine That Disappeared, originally published in 1969, is one of the books in the marvelous series about Swedish detective Martin Beck and his colleagues, written by Maj Sjowall (Sjöwall) and Per Wahloo (Wahlöö). According to Wahlöö, their intention was to “use the crime novel as a scalpel cutting open the belly of the ideological pauperized and morally debatable so-called welfare state of the bourgeois type.” How well they succeeded as far as the social criticism of the Swedish welfare state is concerned, is open to debate. However, what they did succeed in, was the creation of one of the most interesting and wonderful series of crime novels ever.

In The Fire Engine That Disappeared, detective Gunnvald Larsson and a street cop are on a stake-out when the house they are watching turns into a blaze of flames. While Larsson tries to rescue the survivors, the other cop runs to a phone booth to call in the fire brigade.

As Melander, another of Beck’s colorful colleagues, finds out through painstaking research, one of the inhabitants had committed suicide by closing off all holes in his room, and then filling it with gas. But even when the case is closed, there are a few doubts nagging at the backs of the heads of Martin Beck and Gunnvald Larsson. What caused the gas to explode? Where did the fire engine go that was originally called in?

All attention is focused on finding a possible suspect. Then the suspect is found dead in a car. Further investigation shows that the man was already dead when the house was blown up. The Fire Engine that Disappeared is a top police procedural. It is a wonderful read. However, reading the whole series in sequence is strongly recommended!

In our opinion, Sjowall & Wahloo’s series about Marin Besk is one of the top five series of crime books ever written. Some firmly place it in the number one spot. The stories are great, it works as a series, it is excellently written, the plots are rich and well executed, and the books are both interesting, engaging and funny as well. Great reads. How much more do you want? You can read more about the series at our site!

Order The Fire Engine That Disappeared (Martin Beck) from Amazon UK!