Popular Music

An episodic account of a boy's coming of age in northern Sweden, Niemi's novel brings to life a lifestyle and part of the world hard to access in English translation. If you can cope with sudden bursts of magical realism (particularly in the sections written about the boy's younger years), then this is an often comic read peopled by hapless characters often engaged in the faintly ridiculous (miming to the Beatles, engaging in a sauna endurance contest, drinking one another senseless etc). What this wasn't however for me, was remotely gripping. The episodic nature of the novel lets each section resolve itself, so there's no real draw to find out what happens next and I often found myself losing interest in the graphic descriptions of drinking contests.

Anyway, read this for it's remote world and descriptions of the Arctic. Don't read it expecting Nick Hornby.

oh my gawd! (0/0 people found this helpful)

I am 15 from Glasgow and I read this book when I was about 11. It immediately became my favourite book EVER. Something about it, something about the beautiful, bittersweet way in which it is written just touched my heart. It made me feel all warm and happy inside every time I thought about it! And then just recently i remembered it, that amazing book i read so long ago. After scouring all the large bookshops in my city with no trace of it, I was almost despairing! So I was overjoyed to find it on good ol' Amazon. A real gem, not to be missed. Thanks, Amazon!

A great read! (0/0 people found this helpful)

This really is a great novel and I’m glad I acted on a hunch from a very brief newspaper review to buy and read it. It is a bittersweet coming of age story set in the bleak north of Scandinavia, where the author still lives, and the style is earthy, funny, clear and sharp. The characters and village life are well drawn and the narrative insightful. The paperback edition also has an interview with the author, snippet reviews and some background, a format I hadn’t seen before but which seems like a clever marketing tool.

Warm, witty and funny (1/1 people found this helpful)

I have just finished reading this book in my mother tongue, Finnish, and I just had to place an order for an English copy for my English partner as well! I loved the heart-warming, wonderfully 'spiced-up' stories from Matti's childhood in the small town of Pajala in Northern Sweden, near the Finnish border. The author paints a very realistic picture of the every day life in the slowly - but surely - improving economic climate after years of difficulties following WWII, describing how new ideas and influences are starting to make their way even to Pajala. The older generation is of course not always very understanding when it comes to new phenomena such as rock music, and they endeavour to make sure that old traditions, such as drinking and fist fights at weddings, are not forgotten either!

You will learn a lot about Scandinavian and Finnish mentality and culture by reading this book. For example, as strange it may sound to foreigners, sauna endurance competitions do take place even today, especially when you have a large group of drunken Finnish men under the same roof!

In conclusion, this is a great book - funny, heart-warming and well written. Thoroughly recommended.

Episodic Swedish Coming-of-Age Story (3/3 people found this helpful)

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!

Mikael Niemi

Reader Reviews:

Popular music with an irregular beat (0/0 people found this helpful)

oh my gawd! (0/0 people found this helpful)

A great read! (0/0 people found this helpful)

Warm, witty and funny (1/1 people found this helpful)

Episodic Swedish Coming-of-Age Story (3/3 people found this helpful)

Similar Products

Categories