Lowest Common Denominator
Writing in the wake of her father's death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio's autofictional novel (translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg) transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Saisio keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. Writing with her trademark wit and style, each formative experience--with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ "who has a beard like a man but a skirt and long hair like a woman"--drives her further and further from her family and others. Struggling to understand her place in the world around her, it's in language that she discovers a refuge and a way to be seen at last.
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An ABA Indie Next Pick for November
"Saisio beautifully captures the wonder and horror that can coexist in a child's imagination...Pirkko finds in literature the space to explore conflicts of class and gender ("Everything that exists in the world is waiting for me to capture it in books"). Readers will be grateful to share in Pirkko's discoveries."
--Publishers Weekly
Praise for Pirkko Saisio and The Red Book of Farewells
Winner of the Finlandia Prize
Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize "In Pirkko's Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom... Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio's work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen."
--Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life--Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented."
--Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere
"This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I've ever read before."
--Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra
