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12 April 2010

I tracked down Puukansan tarina, or Tale of the Forest Folk, from the Helsinki City Library looking for anything by Veikko Huovinen, whose backwoods comedy Havukka-ahon Ajattelija comes highly recommended to me, as do his satirical faux-biographies of Hitler, Stalin and Peter the Great: Veitikka, Joe-setä, and Pietari Suuri hatun polki. I had been assured that these were all “very famous” and “translated into many languages.” Except, it turns out, mine. As fortune would have it, the 1984 coffee-table volume Tale of the Forest Folk—part natural history, part biological treatise, part lyrical narrative--is the only one of Huovinen’s more than 40 novels, plays and other works that exists anywhere in English. It is also a book no other Finns seem to have heard of. But until my Finnish reaches a literary standard, Puukansan tarina it is.

Humankind appears in this story only marginally. “I wanted to write a book in which the woodland trees and animals were the ‘protagonists’,” Huovinen explains in a reader’s note. Men and women are just one of many inhabitants of a remote Karelian forest, among various fungi and grasses, insects and birds, swans and hawks, bears and wolves. The story takes place over centuries, outside the scope of human time, following the slow but sure rebirth and growth of a virgin forest following a catastrophic wildfire.

Huovinen, educated with a degree in forestry--he was a ranger before his writing started paying the bills--delves deeply into the mechanics of plant biology, detailing how pines, aspens, birches and spruces reproduce, grow and survive in the unforgiving Nordic climate. Even as he parses the finer points of cellular respiration and photosynthesis, he manages to keep the pace fairly brisk, not missing, as it were, his beautiful primeval forest for the trees. The poetic accompanying photographs, by Hannu Hautala, also do much to light the fire of one’s curiosity and keep the pages turning.

Meanwhile, multiple stories crisscross the burgeoning “tree community.” A bear urgently builds a den in which to spend the winter with her cubs, careful to obscure her tracks. Woodpeckers drill into the young pines to fashion nests or prove their worthiness in courtship. In a clearing, millions of ants busily construct a dozen or so mounds, each a bustling metropolis in its own right. A human of the 19th century, trekking through the wilderness in search of game to salt for the long winter ahead, sets up camp and builds a makeshift squat-sauna for one.

Huovinen’s subject is nothing less than the magic of the vast Finnish forest itself, from which emerged the Finnish people and the national folk epic, the Kalevala--although Huovinen’s searching and scientific mind permits little piousness toward notions mystical, rhapsodic or nationalist. For Huovinen, nature has enough wonders of its own already. To contemplate the teeming life of the forest is to contemplate the depths of one’s ignorance. This practical, unsentimental author, by describing the facts and processes of ecology, does much to explain the forest, but little to demystify it. That would be impossible. ( )

Havukka-ahon ajattelija