Brändövägen 8, Brändö, tel. 35
1975
Rarely are we able to enter a writer's mind and culture unguarded. Henrik Tikkanen grants us this privilege in A Winter's Day, his bitter and ironic memoir of childhood and youth in Finland. A son of the ruling Swedish aristocracy, Tikkanen plunges us into his own family's tumultuous past. He starts with his grand-mother's father, a champion marksman who forces his pregnant wife to hold up a lead disk and, in wild imitation of William Tell, shoots through it from a distance of fifty meters.
From the barbaric, drunken Christmas dinner at which has parents beget him to the moment when, riding a taxi to the cemetery, his flicks cigarette ashes into his father's funeral urn, Tikkanen creates a portrait of his warring upper-class family as it toboggans into history in a chaos of drunkenness, suicide, and alienation. That such a memoir of bruising familial relations, of sexual initiation of 30° below, of an adolescence spent in the trenches during the Russo-Finnish war, could be both so revelatory and so hilarious is a tribute to Tikkanen himself. Using self-parody, irony, and a prose of nearly aphoristic and poetic precision, he has produced a haunting work that reaches far beyond the lost world it reconstructs.
Henrik Tikkanen, born in Helsinki in 1924, is a well-known Finnish novelist and artist.
