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Anita Konkka

Reviews on works by Anita Konkka

translated by A.G.Haun

Johanna Vihanto: Women Astray in the Garden of Passion. Review of The Garden of Desires, Demari 24.11.1994

Is it possible for a woman writer to laugh mischievously at her lovesick sisters’ expense, at a time when women‘s language, as a concept, is an occultism pronounced to be sacred? The answer is affirmative, because in her seventh novel, Anita Konkka continues her chord in her own voice. The Garden of Desires is of the house and lineage of its predecessors, In the Fool’s Paradise (1988) and Three Notebooks (1990), only deeper and more unwavering, more multivoiced and more analytical. One can't help but love Konkka's fools.

People on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

The Garden of Desires is a portrait gallery of people on Ibiza for the winter, when the Persian Gulf War breaks out. At Juanita's cafe gather Paula, the building custodian and life's pushover; Rosa, who sweeps men off their feet; Eugenia, the neurotic virgin; Dolores, who practices witchcraft; and Leif, the poet. With Adam, the hermit-composer, who still lives on the nearby hillside; Teresa, who meditates perpetually under the fig trees and unemployed Milopa, a fool for women, Konkka's deck of cards is shuffled and ready. Wars have always broken out, but what is more dramatic to the people of The Garden of Desires is whether the Tarot cards promise only temporary, or eternal, love. Everyone wants the latter, but for the most part are satisfied with less.

In the winter and summer on the backward hippy island, people become enervated and fanatical in such a frenetic way that the reader has a concoction of passions to deal with. But the writer is able to tell about it. She tells about the planets' interactions, about the black roses that flourish in the garden and about the full moon’s divine fools, whose instincts it is impossible to repress. In the novel, everything is possible or even probable, because in the characters' world one can kill a person by blowing off the down of a dandelion or foretell the future by means of almond blossoms. People live in a world where love is indeed long-suffering, but not especially affectionate. When one wants to die from love or, when it is lacking, to commit crimes of passion, the narrative's game is near and present.

Theme and Variations

If one had to name the theme of The Garden of Desires in one phrase, it would be, "But the greatest of these is love." In this connection, it is really suitable to include all the ironic additional tricks. Paula works as an inept custodian and writes letters to her husband in Finland, without receiving a reply. Rosa has two lovers, of whom the shabby married man wins the victory, which is doomed to destruction. Adam has a legion of women, but what happens when one of the group is missing...Dolores' cards tell about the truths of love to the desperate--it's another matter as to whether the fortuneteller is a pitiless bluffer and a destructive seducer of the other people's possibilities. When a person's sorrow and bliss are identical, it's almost a matter of indifference whether one person or eleven people tell the story of one's life. The variations on a theme turn into one consciousness, in the labyrinth of which there is latitude for various solutions, suspicions and endeavors.

Laughter on the Bleak Street

The Garden of Desires nevertheless does not remain in the sphere of ridiculing the absurd. It’s good that way, because merely on the level of comic idiot-logic, it could be an exhausting novel. Konkka's way of using logic thus is complicated, because a hyper-surface is in place.

When the inhibited Eugenia, who spent her youth in psychoanalysis, finally meets a man, nothing happens according to fantasies. Lovemaking, which for the woman has meant a new life and the fulfillment of love, is to the other party only one experience of intercourse among hundreds. "Now at least I know. When I look at my face in the mirror, I see death. My hair turned gray within 24 hours and in place of my eyes there are just holes. It's no longer green in the garden, it. was black," the woman concludes her narrative.

The more realistic Paula, too, when she was young, dreamed of life as though in a Russian novel. Never in a Finnish novel, "boring", where "Silja was near death, the ears of the grain swayed in the wind and the people spoke to each other curtly--" in the world of the adult woman, the home environment, for its part, paradoxically is comparable to Dostoyevskian gloom. "It was almost as gloomy as in our own neighborhood, the sun rarely shone and the people were always on the verge of going insane and killing someone, if they hadn’t already killed and gone insane." In that community there remained of love only the concept, "that the men had nothing else to do in the world but drink, piss and screw girls."

In the Same Mental Landscapes

Although Konkka is skilful in analysis and understanding, I would call her feminine rather than feminist. The novel's Adam can't lure back Eve, the woman of life. Alcohol and the pill bottle end the frustrated man’s version of destructive Eros.

Konkka allows her characters to speak, to an equal degree, obscenely, sensitively, paranoidly and uninhibitedly. And that's granting a great deal in Finnish women's prose. Unscrupulous people can be heroes, but the women, too, are masters of the cruel whims of human relationships.

Although The Garden of Desires is a series of candid human destinies, it seems that the writer has released her characters on freer waters. Read, laugh and cry. Anita Konkka has the tools to create The Longed-For Finnish Erotic Novel. Capricious, irascible and crazy, like life itself.

Raija Hakala: A Bird of Paradise in a Flock of Sparrows. Review of The Garden of Desires, Pohjolan Sanomat 30.12.1994

There are some details from Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Garden of Desires on the dust jacket of Anita Konkka's novel of the same name, a candidate for the Runeberg Prize. In the manner of the Dutch painter, who lived around 1500, Anita Konkka is also a tireless fabulist and painter of colorful details, but Bosch's pessimism, and especially his moralism, are half a millennium away from her.

In accordance with its title, The Garden of Desires is rather a garden of stories than a road leading to a certain goal, or a traditional novel. The red thread is the residence of Paula--a Finnish woman in her early 40s--on Ibiza, as the hired hand and building custodian of the artist Irene, another Finnish woman. Sharp-eyed, sharp-eared Paula makes amusing observations about the original inhabitants of her environment and above all about the deficiencies and highlights of her love-life. At the same time, she writes letters to her own partner, left in Finland--without receiving any reply.

Among the colorful company sitting in Juanita's cafe, measuring their lives, are among others: Rosa, Dolores, Eugenia, Teresa, the Hermit and the Clown. All of them have lived very peculiar lives, and all of them take turns throwing light on that. The author names her novel's chapters according to whichever individual is taking his or turn at confession. Along with their own confessions, the characters also expose each other's carryings-on, so that none of the portraitists remains unidimensional. The writer knows how to give an excellent cross-exposure to her portraits by means of gossip. A juicy, vivid overall view is born of the small village community.

When Anita Konkka was a contender for the Finlandia Prize in 1988, with her novel In the Fool's Paradise, I remember delighting in her colorful, playful and wonderfully ironic style. In Three Notebooks (1990), the style was stiffer, in my opinion, but in The Garden of Desires, Konkka has regained her powers. Although in the lives of the novel's characters, longing seems to take a great deal more time and energy than achieving satisfaction, the atmosphere is all the time joyfully light. Anita Konkka depicts her characters' moments of depression and madness as universally entertaining.

The extraordinary abundance of details makes the text rich in color. It seems as though the writer's eyes and ears reach everywhere. Konkka is also on the pulse of the times. In The Garden of Desires they aren't living in any erotic enclosure insulated from the world. Although the village is small and backward, it is part of the surrounding world and in the range of its communications. All the while, the writer also combines into her novel the social element and of course offering juicy criticism.

Hieronymus Bosch has been characterized as the painter of dream landscapes. In Anita Konkka's "paintings" dreams have occupied an important place before. In The Garden of Desires nearly everyone has their dreams and tries to explain them. Nevertheless, the dreams of the characters in Konkka's novel do not mystify life, but amuse the reader. The dreams belong to the inhabitants of The Garden of Desires as a compass belongs to a seafarer. In addition to dreams, they gaze at playing cards and the stars and try to orient themselves onward in their love, according to their mysterious hints.

At no stage, however, does Konkka let the reader take her feet off the ground. The use of imagination does not mean repression of reality as far as Konkka is concerned, but the joy of narration. The Garden of Desires confirms my conception of Anita Konkka's special status in our literary field. She is at once sad, cheerful, ordinary, cultural, witty and ironic. She shuttles sovereignly back and forth here and in the past, among us and elsewhere. She's like a bird of paradise in a flock of sparrows.

Tellervo Peltonen: The Garden of Desires Gives Joy. Review of The Garden of Desires, Ilkka 5.12.1994

Anita Konkka's 1988 book In the Fool's Paradise advanced to the list of candidates for the Finlandia Prize. This year's book, The Garden of Desires, didn't get that far, but this work, written in Konkka's erotic-humorous-ironic style, offers interesting reading matter, especially to us aging women.

With In the Fool’s Paradise Anita Konkka found her style, which she has been able to maintain. The Garden of Desires is an entertainingly erotic and humorous book. It tells about Paula, who is spending the summer on Ibiza as the building custodian for the rich but miserly Irene, an artist.

In Paula, however, Irene finds a worthy opponent. Paula doesn't go to the shop to exchange every piece of cheese and wine bottle, even though Irene, in a fit of rage, tries to run at, or actually to run over, Paula with a defective bicycle. All in all, the failure in the everyday chores and the old women seem to persecute Paula. Even though in fact the wrong wine eventually is to Irene's taste and tastes good, too.

Irene leaves for Finland to organize her exhibition and Paula remains on Ibiza to look after the garden and the cats. Paula's love affairs are also a bit so-so. She goes on writing letters and postcards to Harri, who stayed in Finland, but she gets no answer. Sometimes she blames the slow progress of the mail, sometimes she fears that Harri's feelings have come to an end.

The world goes its way, the Persian Gulf War breaks out too, but on Ibiza they sit in Juanita's cafe. Rosa and Dolores, the Hermit, Teresa--who is considered to be crazy, Eugenia and the Clown sit there. Paula also goes there, to look for a letter from Harri in the post office box. There just isn't any letter, and so sometimes Paula also stays to sit in the cafe, read the newspaper and taste some liqueur. Thus she gradually becomes acquainted with Juanita’s cafe's idle, rootless and already slightly aged, regular customers.

From day to day, these same people meet each other, drink herb liqueur, gossip, recount their dreams and slander each other, but what they have in common is that each one is waiting for a great love, which will not cause them all the vexations which previous love relationships have caused.

Anita Konkka is a tireless scholar of love and love relationships, problematic ones, too. However, she doesn't portray her characters as enervated by love or otherwise with furrowed brow. In these Finnish latitudes, as a portraitist of love, she is actually quite special, because she is able to write about love and its troublesome and unhappy aspects humorously and as though smiling, not derisively or with pity, but friendly and understandingly.

The periodical alternation of the I-narrator brings to the book a multifaceted expressivity. In addition to Paula, Rosa, the Hermit, the Clown, Teresa, Eugenia, as well as Dolores have their turns. The Garden of Desires begins with Paula as the narrator, but the reader gets to become acquainted with Rosa's truly wide-ranging love-life with Rosa herself as the narrator.

With this alternation of narrators, Konkka has succeeded in putting at the reader's disposal a very colorful, peculiar and original set of human destinies and above all, love relationships. The reader may have to find herself in a really problematic situation. Which one, now, would really be best for Rosa, Henri or Pedro? Or should she continue according to the previous pattern? That is, with both. Neither can Henri really leave Emilita, because Emilita could commit suicide and then Henri couldn't be with Rosa any longer, either. And on the other hand--Rosa loves Pedro, after all, even with his faults, for which she can excuse Pedro, just because of love. Dolores' cards also foretell what will happen. Dolores may be already quite silly.

In addition to humor and a certain kind of playfulness, Anita Konkka's present to literature as a scholar of love is in the fact that she is truly very tolerant. There's nothing about her that could be called a moralist, either. As much as there is in the world that's impossible, Konkka can make it possible in her depiction of love. One should read Konkka's book with pleasure, and at leisure.

Raija Hakala: It's Good to be in the Fool's Paradise. Review of In the Fool's Paradise, Pohjolan Sanomat 19.12.1988

Anita Konkka definitely was not a very familiar name for the general public before becoming a candidate for the Finlandia Prize. Before the novel In the Fool's Paradise, nevertheless, she had already succeeded in publishing four others. Her debut novel, Break Free, appeared in 1970, the novel The Daughter in 1973, and two years later the novel The Same Family. Winter in Ravenna was born in Italy and appeared last autumn. In this autumn's novel, In the Fool's Paradise, according to the reviewers, the same narrator's voice is to be heard as in its predecessor: both novels are constructed from mosaic-like fragments which are fascinatingly interlaced with each other.

Anita Konkka's In the Fool's Paradise is related to the upswing in short prose works which seems clearly to predominate in the current book markets. Calling it a "tale" may be due just to its small number of pages, and not so much to its structure. But the number of pages is no measure of quality. Often the reverse is the case: a short prose work compels one to polish up what one has to say, to refine it to the last degree. Anita Konkka works with care.

In the Fool's Paradise is constructed from diary-like fragments. The main character, an unemployed woman not quite forty years old, writes about the incidents of her days and her relationship with a man named Aleksanteri. She has adequate time to look about her in peace and to make observations about those around her. Besides that, it's free entertainment, it doesn't affect a poor person's pocketbook. With the passing winter, the relationship with Aleksanteri begins to disintegrate and eventually is broken off. The man has a wife in a foreign country whom he doesn’t want to divorce. So much for that.

One would think that a story situated within such a framework would primarily be gloomy to read, bare everyday routine, disillusioned wrangling. No, no. In Anita Konkka’s company it's entertaining and in quite a new way.

Konkka's main character (the writer's alter ego) has eyes to see the absurdity of the world. She makes acute observations about social events and adds her own edged comments to them. The comical aspect of things is revealed. For example, about unemployment: "In the newspaper two cheerful unemployed people announced their pleasure over the fact that they had the chance to use the time as they wished. They acknowledged that they enjoyed life and that they were satisfied living on unemployment compensation. They shouldn't have said that. A mass of suffocated citizens answered them, who were of the opinion that it was irresponsible to enjoy life. An unemployed person is supposed to suffer and drink alcohol, fight when he's drunk and finally commit suicide. Happy unemployed people shake the foundations of society and gnaw at the nation's moral backbone."

In parks, streets and buses, the main character keeps her eyes and ears alert. And often she needs do nothing other than to register her environment since the reader is already amused. The brief, laconic phrases recount the essential, without the writer pointing to anything: "A young father came toward me, pushing a baby carriage. He had a blond ponytail and a gold ring in his ear. He turned onto Park Road. I didn’t see the mother. Probably she'd gone to have a beer with the girls."

Since the author's main character is for the most part together only with herself, memories, imagination, dreams and wishes take charge and create a disturbance unhindered. The main character tries to get her life organized by interpreting dreams and stars, but life goes on, indifferent to her efforts to explain and steer. Not even Rilke and the I Ching are generally of any help in real situations.

One of life’s realities is love between man and woman and the end of it. The main character's expectations of love in Anita Konkka's novel are wonderfully self-ironic: "Desire comes so suddenly that there isn't time to even feel lust. It rushes into love, like an express train into a tunnel, the whistle just shrieks. Many years pass before light again begins to glimmer from the end of the tunnel." Or: "Unrequited love tears the heart. It has nine lives like a cat and it doesn't end, rather an end is made of it. Marriage kills love. That’s why people get married."

The associations in Anita Konkka's novel are the alpha and omega of everything. The thoughts shift around, unrestrained, from observations to memories, from knowledge to inferences, from the everyday to dreams, from actions to feelings, from the earth to heaven and back. And yet, the reader stays in control very well during the journey. One needs do nothing other than allow oneself to be transported by the writer. It's good to be in the fool's paradise.

Suvi Ahola: A Welcome Surprise: A Free and Amusing Woman. Review of In the Fool's Paradise, Helsingin Sanomat 12.11.1988

In Finland there are several writers who quite clearly write the same story over again, continue where they last left it off, vary the characters and settings, but change the basic story only slightly.

Anita Konkka always writes about a woman who's the same age that she is, and of this woman's family, her deceased parents, whose life and essential nature the woman tries to discover. From book to book the picture becomes richer, the woman grows and becomes stronger.

Winter in Ravenna (1986) was still a melancholy search for the mother and self-awareness in the manner of English writer Anita Brookner. In the Fool's Paradise brings to mind two of Finland‘s women writers, Leena Krohn and Sirkka Turkka. At least they can't be charged with a lack of self-awareness: certainly both of them go their own way.

So with Konkka now, too. The new book is the speech of a strong, independent and amusing woman. It resembles Turkka's prose-poetry only because of its cheerful matter-of-factness and asceticism. The way she depicts Helsinki and its colorful residents brings Krohn to mind. Konkka, however, is more firmly attached to reality.

The book's first-person narrator is an unemployed woman who writes. She lives a slow life with her cat, and the world is sometimes very far off. The woman can study dreams and omens, remember, walk along the beach, in the library, in the city. She reads the Paper Workers' Union newspaper sent to the former resident of her apartment, listens to the radio occasionally and to the neighbor's wall clock.

On Vacation from the World

The woman is connected to reality by a difficult lover and the National Unemployment Compensation Board, to which the unemployed person must give an account of her life.

The lover has an ungrateful Russian wife whom he idolizes. The narrator contemplates her relationship to the man and to other men, rages at her love and finally shakes herself free from it. At the end of the book she also has a job.

Thus In the Fool's Paradise is not the cry of a victim. It's the relaxed and analytical monolog of a woman who's independent--and who gradually notices this herself. The end of love is for her an unfortunate, but not a hopeless, situation. The woman can behave irrationally but she likes herself so much that she can also see the absurdity of the actions. It's really an indication of power and freedom.

In addition to man and love, Konkka speaks a great deal about woman, work and unemployment, childhood, freedom, bureaucracy, the state. The quiet text bursts into bloom from time to time, when Konkka laconically analyzes the situation of the human, and the world, situation. Woman-like, the text has a way of looking at things in general through the most private human relationships.

In the Fool's Paradise is also a very humorous book. In Finland there really aren't too many amusing women writers.

Riitta Kurkijärvi: In a Dream, Everything Is Possible. Review of Woman in the Mirror of Dreams, Aamulehti 27.1.1994

In Anita Konkka's book Woman in the Mirror of Dreams one recognizes themes that already appeared in her debut work Break Free. And is that any wonder? Konkka dredges out her dreams, her own past.She has drawn on that for the content and spirit of her novels.Life’s roughness, but at the same time its diversity, a young woman's struggle for independence, a powerful father figure,unsuccessful love relationships and a lack of confidence with regard to work live their own lives in Konkka's dreams. Konkka took up the same search for herself in her novel Winter in Ravenna. The dreams live there, too, quite as much as in the trilogy's other novels, The Daughter and The Same Family

In the Fool's Paradise (1988) was also constructed from the I's thoughts and the diary-like narrative, where reality and dreams overlapped. In the book Woman in the Mirror of Dreams the dreams have finally received the leading role. The explanations and interpretations follow them. Konkka has extensively familiarized herself with dream studies in various parts of the world. She relies on myths and ideas for her own dreams and brings forth many different methods of interpretation.

Freudians, Jungians and many more modern concepts proceed side by side. Konkka interprets them crosswise. Thus the merits of the book are increased. Dream interpretation is witchcraft where no single truth exists. In each case the author's life situation is found in the explanations of dreams.

Konkka's dreams are fascinating. They are populated by Finland's cultural figures from Pekka Tarkka to Hannu Salama, from Kalevi Seilonen to Jorma Ojaharju, from Sirkka Turkka to Aale Tynni, etc. There is a broad range: even Pentti Saarikoski is to be found in Konkka's dreams.

All of them turn up in different, but strange, situations, only allowed in dreams. The Finlandia Prize also leaps into many dreams. Konkka herself was a candidate at the end of the 1980s. And Konkka also finds a concrete explanation for everything. The border between fiction and fact fades.

It is surprising, but for the most part one enjoys reading Konkka's dreams, even though it usually seems silly to listen to other people's dreams. It's also because of Konkka's narrative method. In all their surrealism, Konkka’s dreams are concrete and real. She has told about keeping a dream diary for thirty years already.

It's not worthwhile to devour the book in large portions. A bit of it now and then. One can return to it later, too, because the book's good index helps you to find the dreams' symbolic meanings. zf one believes in dreams and interpretations, now. They are multifaceted and offer alternatives. Something for everyone.

Dreams Breathe Surrealism

Konkka has divided her dreams into eleven different groups. Where dreams come from; snakes and other animals; traveling all the time; the interior mirror; the dream-lover; children and parents; couple's relationships in the mirror of dreams; crimes, sex and violence; society and politics; church and religion; and literature and art.

An especially large number of familiar names is marched out in "society and politics", likewise in "literature and art".

Konkka has loaded into her book the failures and successes of her whole life. She renders an account of divorces, losses of lovers, therapy, unemployment, rejections of manuscripts, etc., all with the same intensity. Actually it is the poorest part of the book. It progresses monotonously, it lacks high and low points, if you don't regard the appearance of public figures in dreams in that way.

The dreams themselves are per se surrealistic tales. The book's elegant cover, designed by Ulla Vuorinen, based on Max Ernst's painting, indicates that. Full points for that.

Dreams have always been written about. The power and strangeness of Kafka's texts often lurks precisely in dreams. Likewise, Graham Greene has admitted to writing about his dreams and even Stevenson’s tremendous Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were born from the author's dreams. Bunuel’s films also often depict the world of dreams.

There are numerous dream books, their authors a whole crowd of psychoanalysts, beginning with Freud. In the bibliography of sources in Konkka's book, one finds quite a massive catalog of relevant literature, likewise the index deserves praise.

The text itself is sometimes quasi-scientific, even banal. Nevertheless, Konkka seems to believe in her explanations and in a situation of conflict with herself, she often summons authorities to the arena. She herself seems to enjoy her dreams and interpreting them, and there's no lack of humor, too. There's no question of a dead-earnest affair.

Raija Hakala: The Dream Interpreter. Review of Woman in the Mirror of Dreams, Pohjolan Sanomat 28.12.1993

It has already been observed from Anita Konkka's novels, most recently The Garden of Desires, for example, that dreams are important for the writer. Her main characters have dreams and remember them. The dreams tell about their lives and especially the matter that is essential about themselves.

In the book in question here, Woman in the Mirror of Dreams, Anita Konkka recounts and interprets her own dreams. The work is thus a type of dream book. In her preface, the writer tells us that she began to write down her dreams during the spring of her university matriculation examination, when the alarm clock didn't force her to rush to school, rather she could think in peace back over what she had just seen and done in her subconscious. The writer has notes on almost three thousand of her dreams over nearly thirty years. The shortest and most revealing dreams were selected as the material for the book.

Since dreams are often very absurd and incomprehensible, in order to interpret them it was necessary to address inquiries to old dream books and myths as well as psychoanalysts. Anita Konkka's copious interpretive knowledge demonstrates that explaining and interpreting her own dreams is not just a hobby for her, but a passion.

In the writer’s opinion, every person can obtain from her dreams an abundance of knowledge about herself if she just finds the keys to her dreams. The dream books' schematic explanations are, however, inapplicable. Dreams are always closely connected to the viewer's life and personality. Each person is herself the best interpreter of her dreams, if she just immerses herself into her task properly. In examining her own dreams, Anita Konkka wants to show how closely they are connected to the course of her life, In explaining her dreams, at the same time she inevitably comes to explain about her life as well, its phases and human relationships. Konkka’s dream book is thus a type of personal autobiography. Quite a treasure trove--and jungle--for a literary researcher!

"Everyone, when she’s asleep, is a poet who creates her own world and figurative language," claims the author. In the same way at first that the language of poems can seem difficult to understand, likewise the language of dreams is initially obscure to the interpreter. But the language of dreams is to be opened up where the language of poems is, also. According to Konkka, when the person finds her dreams and begins to understand them, in her way she finds a poet in herself.

Anita Konkka's dreams may seem more colorful and wilder than usual (Princess Anne's husband gives birth, and President Kekkonen weeps on the author’s shoulder) but indeed a quite normal person is capable of the same thing, when she just begins to have an active relationship with her dreams and to think about them. In Konkka's book there's a great deal of knowledge about the various symbols of different cultures, and what's best, at the end of the book there's an ample bibliography of source materials and an index. thus the book can be used later as well, as a kind of guide when one is interpreting one's own dreams.

An interesting first night!