Trigger warning for rape.
After reading White Hunger, by Aki Ollikainen and translated with only a few vocabulary hiccoughs by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah, I’m not sure if the Russians or the Finns write the most depressing books. This novel is set during a famine in the winter of 1867-1868. Even though it’s a scant 97 pages in the kindle version, it is packed with tragedy, pathos, and unease. I think I can only recommend it to readers who are looking for something that will make them sob.
The first few chapters are old from the perspective of Teo, a Helsinki doctor who is worried about appearances even as he regularly visits a sex worker and takes “payment” from women who are brought to him to see if they have a sexually transmitted infection. These opening chapters give us a sneak peak at a politician who is determined to take what he thinks is the long view by spending money on trains instead of imported food. The Senator, as he is known, might have been seen as a leading statesman if it weren’t for the fact that Finland is in the middle of a famine. People are starting to leave their farms looking for food and work, desperate for a chance at survival. Parish priests, almoners, and the wealthy (or even slightly better off) refuse to do much more than offer the road people a poor, grudging meal and send them down the road. Some of these people do worse.
Most of the novel, however, is narrated by Marja, a peasant woman from the north of Finland, and her children. Through their eyes, we see Marja, Mataleena, and Juho, leave Marja’s husband in their cabin to die while they go looking for food. (Marja’s husband starved himself so that they could eat. He was too frail to take to the road with them.) First, Mataleena provides a child’s confusion about leaving her father and having no where to go. Like so many of the other people around her, she has no idea why she’s hungry. She has a feeling like she should be provided for, but all she can hope for is a small bowl of gruel. Later down the road, Maria takes up the narrative thread. Marja’s chapters are full of misery. Kindness is harder to find than food. And, because she’s a woman, Marja risks more than just hunger and disease on the road. The last chapter is narrated by through the blended perspective of Teo and Juho, as the famine winter drags on.
The epilogue, I will warn you, is a punch in the gut.
I suspect that White Hunger has two objectives. First, it succeeds in capturing a small piece of Marja’s hunger and desperation as she tries to find a place for her family. Second, I found that the book created a slow, burning anger at the people in the cities and in the government who whine about appearances or not getting the credit they think they deserve while a humanitarian crisis is in full progress all around them. So many doors are closed in Marja’s face that I grew furious on her behalf at the people who were only looking out for themselves. So many people hoard what they have so that they will be the ones to see the spring, even though there’s no way they can know how long the famine will last. I feel as though some of those privileged folk would be facing a violent revolution if the rest of the population weren’t so very, very hungry.