Leena Lander

The novel’s settings are the Finnish winter and spring, while the historical context is the war between the White forces, fighting to defend the country’s independence, and the Red forces, intent on extending the communist revolution to Finland as well. War, intertwined with a wild and pristine natural world, forms the backdrop to the ordeal of an imprisoned woman and her interactions with the judge (an alcoholic, paranoid writer) and the soldier, with whom she lived for eight days on a deserted island and by whom she is expecting a child. The entire story unfolds within a former asylum, where one of the protagonists is a poor madman who believes he is photographing ghosts, laying bare the sheer absurdity of events. Finally, there is also a young boy, the orphaned son of the woman’s friend, who suffers violence at the hands of his grandfather and cousins before ultimately being rescued by her. Alongside the plot and the characters’ trajectories, brief introductions to each chapter depict the behavior of wolves and humanity’s attempts to exterminate them in an apparently endless struggle. It is then, perhaps, that the meaning of the book begins to emerge—a work that remains, in certain respects, cryptic and elusive. The woman is a she-wolf: fierce and determined, yet devoted to her young—both the boy in her care and the child fathered by the soldier. In a hostile environment, pitted against a judge who is both cunning and cruel, the woman, like a she-wolf, moves with calculated shrewdness. By contrast, the soldier (a young man who enlisted to redeem himself both from professional failure and from his father) behaves like “a dog”: time and again he saves the woman’s life, falls in love with her, remains loyal, and dies to protect her. Two heroes, then: the woman is the positive hero, who does not passively endure the absurdities of war, but reacts, confronting them with her gaze fixed on the future; she ultimately prevails, restoring hope to a child and carrying within her the germ of a new horizon. The soldier is the negative hero, a weak man destroyed by war who nevertheless, unlike the others, salvages his dignity through the very act of protecting the woman. The book possesses profound depth and addresses a remarkably timely theme. In a society that is unraveling, the future must be confronted with strength and tenacity.