Swedish Novel Explores Youthful Friendship & '60s Culture

Vittula, as Mikael Niemi explains in his first adult novel, is short for Vittulajanka, a district located in the Swedish village of Pajala. It's a place where the winters are long, cold, and dark. But it's also a place where the joys of being a teenager burn vividly.

Popular Music For Vittula (Seven Stories Press), a November/December Book Sense 76 Top Ten pick, tells the story of Matti and his shy friend Niila, who grow up in the 1960s and experience just what you'd expect two boys to experience: rock music (they discover the Beatles and form their own raucous band), best-friendship, family squabbles, the first taste of alcohol, and girls. All this in the Arctic Circle.

While the book isn't directly autobiographical, Niemi does reveal a startling portrait of his own native village, a remote spot where traditional Tornadelen Finnish culture (the village is near Finland) collides and meshes with the modernity that has already swept through southern Sweden.

Niemi's tale -- translated into English by Laurie Thompson -- is often fantastical, fun, and poignant, as he chronicles the boys' experiences in a way that might make one recall the adventures of two other boys in literature. "I didn't plan to make them seem like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but I eventually noticed some similarities," Niemi said.

When the author began the book about 10 years ago, he started writing it in a serious, intellectual manner. "Yet it was too heavy, too dark," he recalled. Eventually, he incorporated a more humorous, playful style of storytelling. "Finnish culture is very depressing and dark because of the long winters, the poverty, and the wars, and to survive all that, it has needed humor. But not serious humor," Niemi explained.

When he finished Popular Music From Vittula, Niemi expected a few thousand copies of the novel to be sold -- which is about average for books published in Sweden. But he and his Swedish publisher, Norstedts Förlag of Stockholm, were pleasantly shocked. The novel has sold over 750,000 copies in Sweden -- more than any other book in that country, ever -- and has been translated into numerous European languages as well as Japanese. And besides being a commercial sensation, it's also been critically praised: the novel won Sweden's prestigious August Prize.

Beating at the heart of Popular Music From Vittula is Matti and Niila's discovery of rock music, namely the Beatles' cover of Chuck Berry's "Rock & Roll Music" and the formation of their group. Niemi captures their performances with frolicsome flair. At one point he writes: "We bashed away like madmen in the half-darkness…. Erkki got stage fright and started hitting out at everything that moved until the speed of the song was doubled. Niila was playing his chords in the wrong key, and Holgeri's acoustic feedback sounded like the last trumpet. And in front of it all. At the microphone. Was me."

The pop culture that swept through Pajala is something Niemi remembers vividly. "Television came to the north of Sweden in the early '60s, and we could see rock and roll on TV," he continued, "and at the same time, record players were being used frequently."

Like his protagonist, Niemi played in a band while growing up. "I sang very, very badly," he laughed. "But I wasn't the lead singer. We wrote our own songs and played covers of the Kinks and the Rolling Stones, including 'Brown Sugar.' This summer, when I was 44, I went to Stockholm and saw the Stones play live for the first time. The first song they played was 'Brown Sugar.' It was like they played it just for me!"

While Matti and Niila embark upon music, they also come face-to-face with many intriguing characters, including a mysterious male/female witch named Russi-Jussi. On a certain level, he/she is a metaphor for the artist, Niemi explained. "In at least a subconscious way, you need to be both a woman and a man as a writer if you want to write about everyone."

Later in the novel, we meet former Nazi SS officer Heinz, who has returned to Pajala to write about a horrible event in which he participated. As the Germany army moved through the north of Finland during World War II, they burned every village in site. "They destroyed the whole north of Finland," Niemi said. "And I've met people who were living in Sweden who could see their Finnish friends' houses burning and couldn't do anything about it. Heinz was burning those houses."

Music From Vittula has been such a success that its story has already been the subject of two plays -- one in Swedish, another in Finnish -- and is currently being made into a Swedish film. "They're finishing the shooting in Pajala now," Niemi reported. "I have a small part in the movie: I play a teacher who stands in the background. I look even worse than I do in reality," he laughed again.

"Many residents of Pajala serve as extras in the film. So most of the people in Pajala have been in this movie. I wrote a book about them and now they're acting in the movie as themselves! I think it's so great. The young people here just want to go to London or even Stockholm and get away, but it can be really funny here, too; something can happen here, too." --Jeff Perlah