Popular Music from Vittula

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 237 pages
• Published by: Seven Stories Press October 15, 2004
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1583226591
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1583226599
• Book Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 9.1 ounces

From Booklist
When a Beatles record falls into the hands of 11-year-old Matti, neither he nor his home village of Pajala, Sweden, will ever be the same. It is the early 1960s, and both Matti and Pajala are about to enter adolescence. This is a gorgeous, poignant, often very funny novel about growing up in a remote area. Niemi writes with real poetry as he strings together the culturally rich vignettes of Matti's experiences, snapshots of childhood that are at the same time intensely personal and universal: the burn of the first alcoholic drink, the thrill of a first kiss, the awe of first sex, the special closeness of a first best friend, the pain of the first real loss--all rendered pure and convincingly as a young boy's perceptions. Niemi also seasons the book well with the mysticism of childhood that suffuses the usually hidden psychological space where the transformation from child to youth occurs. An exquisitely gorgeous novel, artfully translated. Paula Luedtke
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description


"A blissfully eccentric, fiction-enhanced memoir. . . . His prose buzzes with wonder, fearlessness and ecstatic ignorance: the sensations of youth. Each chapter is an epic in miniature."-Hugo Lindgren, The New York Times Magazine

"Haunting and glorious . . . Niemi's finest achievement is to have created a world poised between an adult's fantastic memories of childhood and a child's nave dreams of his future. Graceless sentiments like disillusionment or regret are never allowed to trespass upon Pajala's icy rivers and twilit woods. The future remains a frantic hallucination, while the past is ridiculous and wondrous."-Nathaniel Rich, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Popular Music from Vittula is a tale of boyhood friendship elastic enough to include numerous digressions, some fantastical, some so precise in their sociological observation . . . that an anthropologist could make good use of them. . . . In British translator Laurie Thompson's hands, Niemi's language is a constant, fresh poetic surprise. . . . Even the alphabet-a scary army of sticks and half-moons'-comes strangely alive in this marvelous book."-Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times

"A gorgeous, poignant, often very funny novel about growing up in a remote area. Niemi writes with real poetry as he strings together the culturally rich vignettes of Matti's experiences, snapshots of childhood that are at the same time intensely personal and universal . . . An exquisitely gorgeous novel, artfully translated."-Paula Luedkte, Booklist

Now in paperback, the enchanting, unforgettable Popular Music from Vittula is the single best-selling book in Swedish history.

Poet and novelist Mikael Niemi grew up in Pajala in the northernmost part of Sweden, near the Finnish border. He is the founding owner of Pajala's sole bookstore.

Laurie Thompson has translated some 15 novels from the Swedish.

Reader Reviews
If you're looking for a funny and tender coming-of-age story set above the Arctic Circle, this is the book for you! It's set in Pajala, a small town in the remote Tornedalen region of Sweden, far north and near the Finnish border. The semi-autobiographical story is told through a series of twenty self-contained short stories that take Matti roughly from age 5-15 or so from the mid-'60s to mid-'70s. One is immediately given a taste of the book's style in the prologue, in which the adult Matti manages to freeze his tongue to a metal plaque atop a Nepalese mountain. He only manages to free himself (and live) by using his urine to break the bond, which then launches him into the story of his youth. The broad outlines of his experiences are similar to those of any other boy growing up in a remote place forty years ago. Life was boring and filled with hard work, some things were manly (hunting, work, fighting, hockey, eating, drinking, machines), and everything else is "women's work." If you're not good at manly things, well... at a minimum you won't fit in very well. Of course, Matti is a little outside the mainstream, but manages to make his way with best friend Niila by his side. Where the book shines is in the the specifics of his childhood, in which wacky antics shine with humor and pathos, and magic realism rears its head every now and then. Some of the events covered include: discovering rock and roll music via the Beatles, a summer job as a mouse hunter, a raucous arm wrestling contest, an equally grueling sauna endurance contest, a sermon in Esperanto, a mind-boggling teenage drinking contest, tall tales of family prowess, a will reading degenerating into a brawl, starting a band with a cardboard guitar, the vagaries of a fundamentalist Christian sect (Laestadianism), first sexual encounters, and a BB-gun war. And let's not forget the transsexual hermit magician... All these individual parts are quite entertaining, even if they never quite add up to a complete hole. It's an amusing, and sometimes very funny look at growing up rural which would probably resonate much more with other remote cold climate dwellers than the average reader. A welcome oddball addition to the coming-of-age genre. Note: The book was a runaway bestseller in Sweden, selling one copy for every twelve Swedes! Naturally, the book has been adapted as a film--which was co-written and directed by an Iranian who immigrated to Sweden as a teenager! Comment | Permalink | (Report this)