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 This last activity, dreaming, shapes much of A Fool’s Paradise as the female narrator slides easily and often without warning from waking to dreaming. She also traffics with astrology and divination although these seem fainthearted activities that do not fully enlist her allegiance. Although the story is basically sad, the narrator is not and she keeps the reader alive with barbed or funny observations.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
A Fool’s Paradise
by Anita Konkka
Dalkey Archive Press
2006, ISBN 1-56478-422-3, $12.95, 133 pages
The author is Finnish and this is a book that was published in Finland in 1988. This is its first appearance in English. Konkka lives in Helsinki and has written novels, essays, radio plays and a dream book.
This last activity, dreaming, shapes much of A Fool’s Paradise as the female narrator slides easily and often without warning from waking to dreaming. She also traffics with astrology and divination although these seem fainthearted activities that do not fully enlist her allegiance. Although the story is basically sad, the narrator is not and she keeps the reader alive with barbed or funny observations.
The narrator is out of work throughout most of A Fool’s Paradise and in love with a married man who is incapable of leaving his vampiric and emotionally unstable wife. It is in the fabric of the book that the dreams are so important because the development and eventual collapse of her relationship with Alexander is told, not through events, but through the emotional and intellectual stream of dreaming that accompanies the diurnal narrative. The skill behind this is especially considerable since Konkka provides connections that are smoothly seamless between the conscious world and the dreams.
One thinks of writers from northern Europe as more often dour and melancholy than not with what merriment there may be tinged with a berserker frenzy. Konkka eludes this stereotype even though she claims “Sometimes it feels like being born in Finland is punishment for some sins in a previous life.” But she can on the next page make the rueful observation after an unsuccessful job interview that “I looked like Don Quixote’s horse when I saw myself in the department store mirror.” And she has no illusions about what kind of job she will not accept – “I’d rather become a tube of toothpaste than a civil servant.” She deals forthrightly with the middle class penchant for narrow and unfeeling prejudices.
“An unemployed person is supposed to suffer and drink booze, engage in drunken brawls, and finally commit suicide. The happy unemployed shake society’s foundation and gnaw at the nation’s moral backbone.”
But is in the frequent bursts of poetic observation, so much more exact than scientific precision, that Konkka shines. “The moon is leaning against the chimney of the building next door, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slouched. He’s been fired from his job and doesn’t know where to go. He’s thin; his stomach is hollow. He hasn’t eaten properly for two weeks. He pulls his cap down over his eyes and slinks behind the chimney.”
Konkka is an important and exciting author. Her skills are abundant and her versatility is on a grand scale. One hopes and expects that Dalkey will bring us more of her.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His book Joyce Country, a guide to persons and places, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
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