THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR
HENRIK TIKKANEN
By turns ironic and uproarious, The Thirty Years' War is about a soldier who carried on World War II by himself, years after it officially ended. In satirizing war and the making of a war hero, the controversial Finnish-Swedish writer Henrik Tikkanen gives many a nod to American culture and the American military. His comic novel, reminiscent of the best writing of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., is now available in English, ten years after its original publication in Finland.
At the onset of World
War II, Viktor Kappara, the son of a fisherman and a maid who once
worked for J. P. Morgan, is sent to guard a remote outpost on the
Finno-Russian front. Late in the war, Viktor is ordered to stay there
until his sergeant returns with a supply of booze. Peace is declared,
the sergeant never returns, and Viktor stays put. An order is an
order. During his years of isolation, Viktor writes but does not mail
letters that describe his misadventures with a country couple, a
sheriff, and a radical journalist, who tries to convince Viktor that
the war is over. Loyalty like Viktor's is too idealistic and sublime
for the complicated contemporary world of half-truths, and eventually
he must defend himself as the entire Finnish army stages a televised
attack on his outpost.
In passing, Tikkanen takes swipes at the
Great Powers, the radicals, the conservatives, Finland's
"real-politik," and militarism. But the centre of the book
is Viktor himself, naive and touching, bull-headed yet likeable.
The twenty drawings are by Tikkanen, a noted artist and caricaturist as well as author. The Thirty Years' War was translated into English by George and Lone Thygesen Blecher, who were named Translators of the Year in 1984 by the American Library Association. George C. Schoolfield, who provided the afterword, is chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages at Yale University and an authority on Scandinavian literature.
22 x 13 cm. 158 pp.
Very good condition, dust jacket worn along the top edge, book itself clean and tidy.