New Finnish Grammar: a novel exploring language and the self

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t is 1940s Italy, and an amnesiac man is found on a quay in Trieste. Severe head injuries have erased his memory and ability to speak. The name Sampo Karjalainen is stitched to his sailor jacket, suggesting Finnish nationality. A doctor from Finland, exiled in Germany, cures his wounds and muteness by teaching him Finnish. Sampo, deprived of his identity, will travel to Helsinki and learn how to be Finnish (again).

As a senior linguist for the EU and the inventor of Europanto (a language consisting of vocabulary from different European languages), Diego Marani shares a special relationship with linguistics. His works do not deal with syntax and grammar but rather they play with words and people, record sounds and pick apart cultures. He asks himself what kind of connections lie between languages and identity. How does language affect the individual within society and within the self?

These are the same questions which the character 0f Dr Friari, a scientist hounded by regrets, seeks to answer and the enigmas which Sampo Karjalainen, a man who has forgotten his past and his language, strives to break down. However, New Finnish Grammar is not an essay. It is a journey towards an understanding of the inner mechanisms driving relationships and perceptions of the self.

“In Finnish to know is tietää, and tie means road, or way. Because for us Finns, knowledge is a road, a path leading us out of the woods, into the sunlight […]”.

In Helsinki, Sampo meets pastor Koskela, a priest who seeks to turn him into a true Finnish man through the Word of the Kalevala, the “bible of Finnish cultural identity”. With intense, daily lessons, Sampo works hard to re-integrate himself into Finnish society by retrieving a Finnish frame of mind, which is buried within his inaccessible past.

Through the eyes of a bewildered man searching for his own place in the world, Marani depicts an exquisite 360-degree portrait of twentieth-century Finland: the gloomy yet stunning landscape, the summer nights and the sounds of battles recounted in the Kalevala, which echo the sounds coming from the war on the Russian front. He entwines this with narrative sections dedicated to the complex beauty of the Finnish language. A tough grammatical system is turned into a mythical cosmogony, sounds are likened to music and air and words are transformed into colours which paint the urban landscapes of the Finnish capital city: “a belltower would remind me of a verb, I wasted a whole ship on an adjective and entrusted the all-important subject to a tram. The pastor’s thought was scattered throughout Helsinki, and I could reread it every time I pleased”.

Sampo’s alienation from his country is symbolised by his metaphorical return to childhood in order to re-learn his mother tongue. The book describes how, according to Finnish folklore, shamans used to be able to travel away from their body to read signs and receive revelations. One of them, Antero Vipunen, “travelled so far away from his body that he could not get back into it anymore”. Like Antero Vipunen, Sampo has been cut out of his ‘body’, i.e. the Finnish community, and now he is trying to get back into it. Hi notebooks are filled with grammar exercises and repeated words. He sits quietly on public transport, eavesdropping on conversations around him, repeating the words he hears to himself and then making them his own. Meanwhile, he creates a life for himself again, falling in love with a Red Cross nurse and fighting at the front for a country he embraces as his own.

His name, Sampo Karjalainen, stands as the only frail connection between the self and the concept of his own existence, interpreted as a sort of Heideggerian dasein (the German philosopher’s term for a human who is in a familiar world). His name lies in the middle of an intricate network of bonds, which his loss of memory has deconstructed. Two initials, S.K., initiated a process which re-built what was lost and sparked an encounter between the individual and a cultural space, in which Sampo was able to re-discover an education, a religion, a certain type of behaviour and a home. It is the story of those who move around and struggle to settle down, of those who have a foreign accent which automatically excludes them or perhaps it is all about those who silently swear to themselves because they still end up using wordreference.com to write an article like this.

[pullquote style=”right” quote=”dark”]Although the reader is prepared in advance, Sampo’s journey comes to an end unexpectedly and unsettlingly[/pullquote] Initially, it seems that the system of interconnections and stability has broken down, although when you think about it again, you realise what Marani is trying to convey here: that concepts of memory and identity are not as fixed and stable as you have always assumed. Pleasantly unsettling, yet beautifully written, New Finnish Grammar is a spectacular journey of language-learning which challenges traditional ways of thinking about identity and communication.