Miki Liukkonen - a cast of over a hundred characters all of whom have some psychosis/neurosis/phobia. We follow the stories of these characters as they and their psychoses and neuroses interact in all sorts of imaginative ways, starting with the suicide of a female student at the university

 

Miki Liukkonen, O. WSOY, 2017

What is O?

O is about a swimming team preparing for the Olympics, a company designing playground slides with attitude and artistic flair, and a man who flees his neuroses by locking himself in the shed at the bottom of his garden.

O is about how a walk across Copenhagen offers just as much inspiration as a poetry anthology.

O is about Roma men horse trading two hours in the future, thanks to a worm-hole in time.

O is about the life-threatening human experiments carried out by Bach fanatics who think nothing of eliminating anyone standing in their way.

O is about a shy, withdrawn boy who communicates exclusively via the medium of Post-It notes to a junkie living underneath a boat in Spain, who sees a vaulted sky through a hole his the upturned hull that outsiders can only dream of.

O is about taking OCD sufferers by the hand and painstakingly showing them how to make a chicken fricassee.

Whatever else it is, O is a very large book about what the everyday means in our world, and how to live in it.

Miki Liukkonen’s second novel is painted across an outrageously large canvas. It’s a megalomaniacal and encyclopaedic narrative of ordinary people and extraordinary events, neuroses, fixed ideas, and the irrational things that make us shudder. It is about things you have already known have felt, but which you are unlikely to have ever read about in a book.

 “Almost 1,000 pages, 100 characters, 7 days: this novel by a young Finnish author is an erudite labyrinth, an immensely charismatic beast of a book… The ambition of the project, its scale and its radicalism are as seductive as they are baffling… This book is an epic.” – Le Monde newspaper, France

“Miki Liukkonen’s massive novel O is a towering synthesis of our fragmented era. The overflowing gallery of characters tries to see if curling up in one’s neuroses is of any help when reality does not otherwise seem to stay put within any sensible framework. Excessive self-awareness and a constant flow of information eat away at the characters from the inside, forcing them to fixate obsessively on details, or to disappear entirely into the escapism of alternative functions. Behind the abundance and humour lurks an emptiness, in which the preacher’s voice echoes out, preaching on the vanity of vanities. Despite its massive scale, the novel is not a difficult read. Liukkonen’s language is a precise and a glorious flight of free spirit. In the world of Finnish literature, O is a truly unique case.” – Statement of the Runeberg Prize Jury

“Prose can be described as a collection of sentences that investigates the state of a thing. In this sense, Miki Liukkonen’s novel O is an investigation of the obsessive, neurotic age of the millennial generation, where the search for reason forms a forest in which every tree must be studied. O is stunning in its maximalism. The precision of its language makes the reader chuckle, and the linguistic material used seems inexhaustible. O manages to pique the curiosity of the reader on each of its pages and is unprecedented in the precision of its observations.” – Statement of the Finlandia Fiction Prize Jury

“Miki Liukkonen’s novel O challenges its reader to a prosaic wrestling match – in an ironic way. The massive scale of the work, its excessive weight, endless gallery of characters, countless footnotes and almost deranged immersion into details are alienating but also fascinating. Liukkonen’s narrative reaches something essential about the fragmented lifestyle of our times. O has been described as one of the most important novels of the decade – and with good reason.” – Statement of the Bothnia Prize Jury

“Miki Liukkonen has written one of the most important Finnish fiction books of this decade.” – Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

“Miki Liukkonen’s maximalistic novel O is an exquisite read.” – Turun Sanomat newspaper

“Successfully megalomaniacal.” – Kouvolan Sanomat newspaper

“Miki Liukkonen is a writer who intoxicates the senses and can immerse the reader in wondrously colour-saturated images and atmospheres… Liukkonen’s lyrical, original sentences, expressing all of their meanings at once, ring out majestically throughout his work… Liukkonen’s gift for creating exclusively potent images isundoubtable, and completely sufficient for creating a great work. But when this uninhibitedly effortless skill is combined with a cool intelligence, as is the case in O, it results in stunning literary power… An ambitious explanation of the world and a sheer display of literary prowess, O has climbed to a high rank on my list of the most important Finnish fiction works of the 2010s, alongside Jaakko Yli-Juonikas’ Neuromaniac and Laura Lindstedt’s Oneiron.” – Juhani Karila, Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

“Open the book to any page and it will offer some kind of epiphany or treat… Although the themes in O are well known from American postmodernism and time is disjointed as in the works of Philip K. Dick, Liukkonen’s virtuosic, magician-like approach and frenzied experimentation make the novel a true original. Rejoice, it declares, literature is not dead!” – Kouvolan Sanomat newspaper

“The entire novel can be described… as a ring-like concatenation of links of people and events that are connected in different but inexorable ways. It sets itself against linear progression of thought, narrative, and plot development… Liukkonen takes detailed descriptions to the extreme and does so impressively, making use of language with varying tones of voice. The work moves from poetic sentimentality to lecherousness, from the laughable to the ridiculous, from the serious to the comical. The language of the novel is a delightful stimulation of the senses… Liukkonen’s novel O is unquestionably a literary event that takes the reader to the other side of imagination and truth.” – Turun Sanomat newspaper

“Liukkonen is an exceptional figure in the Finnish literary field. There is also something un-Finnish about his prose. For this reason, it is some of the best modern prose in Finland… Liukkonen’s imagination and ability to make associations are surprising and original. At its best, the visions, landscapes and chains of events described in O build up into a dense, prose-poetic outpouring, a hysterical intertwining of carnivalesque imagery and language use stimulating all of the senses. With Liukkonen’s treatment, everyday life is contorted in a direction that is often grotesque and surrealistic. Black humour and irony swinging into comical horror are strongly present in the novel from start to finish… One of the greatest strengths of Liukkonen’s prose is its ability to mix a childlike, whimsical sensitivity with a multifaceted spectre of irony. This overarching sensitivity of a blessed and cursed poet brings to mind Arthur Rimbaud… In addition to Houellebecq, Wallace and Rimbaud, Liukkonen’s kindred spirits include James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoyevski. Liukkonen is a world-class author who skilfully distinguishes himself from the stagnant conventions of Finnish prosaic narrative tradition. He creates something new.” – Uljas, University of Eastern Finland newspaper

“O calls into question the relationship between fiction and reality by ironising and disputing realism. The novel has 140 footnotes of commentary that both add to the truthfulness and strengthen the fictiveness of the work. Meandering sentence structures, sentences spanning two pages in places, offshoots and associations demand a lot from the reader but are also greatly rewarding. In literary terms, we would call it an encyclopedic, polyphonic and hypertextual work of post-modern metafiction. Liukkonen’s novel has been compared to American author David Foster’s work Infinite Jest, ‘the book of all books’… O is a playfully fun novel. It is also a penetrating depiction of our time… O’s flowing language and labyrinthine world are enchanting and invite the reader to think of the woven text as a composition. If you want to experience a completely new kind of Finnish prose, you should choose this novel.” – Kaleva newspaper

“The greatest tensions of the novel emerge when there is an error in the information keeping reality together, [the work] performs both a transillumination and an autopsy of this cacophony of weak signals known as the information society.” – Aamulehti newspaper

“An ingenious work.” – Habaneran havaintoja blog

“O lived up to all its hype and went well beyond, too.” – Also Sprach Jussi blog

“From cover to cover, Miki Liukkonen’s O delivers Finnish literature a delightfully heavy-handed shake-up. The work in question is already one of the most significant achievements of the Finnish literary year, a book that will surely be discussed for a long time to come… O is a slowly progressing novel that devotes itself to its subject matter in an admirably comprehensive way, with a passion reminiscent of [Thomas Pynchon’s] Gravity’s Rainbow – Liukkonen simply tells his reader everything about his characters in his free flowing prose. I have not yet been able to experience such an all-encompassing literary experience that works at such a great scale within the body of Finnish literature. Liukkonen seems to have simply reached a level that no one has even dared to try to get to before – and he manages in an unbelievable way to keep the oscillating work under control… Liukkonen’s prose is beautiful text that lingers in its description of the world.” – Opus Eka blog

“Liukkonen masterfully describes our current era and its problems, of which the greatest is perhaps our relation to time, the passage of time and living within it. Do we exist in the real world or the virtual world? What does it take to exist in time and what problems are caused by keeping or not keeping in time?… I savoured, laughed, and thought; I was impressed and confused. A rewarding, astonishing, fun and wise work, about everything. The book is aptly named: the circle of life is endless, everything is, O… The beginning and end are not important.” – Kulttuuri kukoistaa blog

“A skilful analysis of our fragmented era. Miki Liukkonen has done something that has been long awaited. He has written a magnificent contemporary novel called O, a ‘universal study’ that also delves into history in order to tell what it means to live here and now.” – Kirjasta kirjaan blog

“O is a playfully fun novel. It is also a piercing description of our time… Yet the flowing language and meandering world are enchanting, inspiring the reader to view the woven text as a composition. If you would like to experience an entirely new kind of Finnish prose, you should choose this novel.” – Kirjoituksia blog

“I picked up this book, O, several times before I took it to the checkout counter. I was intimidated by the size of the book (over 850 pages), as well as the positive reviews praising it up and down as some kind of reformer and saviour of Finnish literature. But now, after the two-week-long reading experience, I have to say that this has the potential to be something bigger than just a spring novel… I don’t remember being so delighted by reading since The Famous Five… a mind-bogglingly good novel.” – Uki.nyt blog

“In Liukkonen’s novel, modern life does not come together as a clear story with a beginning and an end, actions and consequences. The book is massive, a cornucopia of information overflow and neuroses as a means of survival. The nature of information has changed. The novel makes you think about how it is no longer important or even possible to determine which information is truer or more important for a person than some other information. A dazzling novel of a new type.” – Kirjojen Suomi, YLE

The latest addition to my website is Miki Liukkonen‘s O [O]. Liukkonen, who died in June 2023 aged thirty three, has written a monumental novel (858 pages) in the Finnish original and 961 in the French translation which I read), set in Helsinki in 2013 about a cast of over a hundred characters all of whom have some psychosis/neurosis/phobia. We follow the stories of these characters as they and their psychoses and neuroses interact in all sorts of imaginative ways, starting with the suicide of a female student at the university. Sometimes the stories disappear for hundreds pf page, only to reappear. Many of them link with others. Some of it is very funny while some is deadly serious. Real (and dead) characters put in an appearance (Tesla, Jung). Many of the psychoses/neuroses will be familiar, at least to experts in the field but many, I guarantee, they will never have heard of. Liukkonen makes little attempt to explain why in the happiest country in the world, there are so many mental heath problems, though a couple of quotes give some ideas. In short we nearly all suffer some sort of mental health issue and it is not going to get better. This is an absolutely brilliant novel but sadly not yet available in English. - https://www.themodernnovelblog.com/2023/07/21/miki-liukkonen-o-o/

Miki Liukkonen, Life: A Prologue, WSOY, 2021

One night, the word ERROR appeared in the night sky.

‘Are you really saying that you don’t occasionally – at intervals yet to be defined – wake up, start, as if surfacing, with an odd, rubbery taste in your mouth? Doesn’t the room in which you wake up always seem utterly alien, blazingly white, and you scrabble to rise out of the thickened light as if tangled up in the curtains, and you think that the odd taste in your mouth, the taste of salty rubber, has something to do with all this?’

Here’s our cast: Henri Classic, whose job it is to design a new kind of cinema; Samuel Classic, who frets over his failure to experience the age of the Aztecs; Silvia Classic, who writes children’s books full of coprophilia and parochial politics; Nikolei Bidé, who enjoys nationwide celebrity as a chef making insect-based dishes; Olof Beskow, who creates oppressive adverts for dildos that fail to satisfy. And many, many others. They share the centrepoint of their orbits: an overarching project which aims to make life, and all it contains, three-dimensional. Do you feel that you’re being observed? No wonder.

In his new novel LIFE: A PROLOGUE, acclaimed Finnish writer and author of critically-acclaimed O (WSOY, 2017), Miki Liukkonen presents the reader with probable impossibilities and ominous probabilities. Liukkonen doesn’t just transcend the horizon of expectations – he moves it to a new place.

‘…the most significant work I have read during my entire career as a literary journalist. Nothing like this has ever been done in the history of Finnish fiction.’ – Seppo Puttonen, Literary journalist, YLE Finnish Broadcasting Corporation

‘…a metafictional novel that spans over a thousand pages and leaves no tangent unexplored. Life: A Prologue showcases Liukkonen’s literary genius and pulls the reader into a masterpiece of world literature. If this is not an export work, nothing is.’ – Aamulehti newspaper

‘Life: A Prologue is an ambitious, grand novel that can be called one of the most important events of this literary autumn. The meandering narrative does not let the reader off easily; it demands attention and concentration. But the broad spectrum of characters and skillful use of language make it a joy to read this impressive work, where humour also plays a key role. – Suomen Kuvalehti magazine

The aesthetic contribution of Miki Liukkonen’s novelty is a narrative typical of hysterical realism until the last brainstorming.

When comes seen inside and out, begins to embody some kind of spectacle of humanity. This is what happens to Henri Classic Miki Liukkonen in the novel Life: a preface. It offers its spectacle through both hysterical realism and existentialist allusion.

The novel is fetishically thick. It attaches mainly to role models of the same scale, coded in the name Georges Perecin multifaceted and architectural Life manual (1978), echo in the text David Foster Wallacen Endless joy (1996) stylistic and structural solutions, it forms a similar loophole where the beginning begins.

Dostoevsky’s existentialism exudes to the surface, the tradition of American postmodernism with its pynchons and conceptions of personality is present.

Liukkonen’s novelty I times, Henri Classic, is a traditional subject who tells about his inner world but also a subject of a computer program (ZAG) that deconstructs thoughts into words, unknowingly.

He embodies the idea of ​​romantic irony, which is Life: foreword underlying metaphic activity. Almost any argument made about it can be turned upside down. It is, for example, difficult to know whether the narrative comes from a computer program or the personality of a self-narrator – and does the self-narrator of fiction have any “personality”?

The play includes Liukkonen’s narrative repertoire, which moves smoothly from lyrical to comic, especially in Henri Classic’s narrative:

“Images of the night city at the bottom of the sea, whose crescent-shaped castles are inhabited by infamous rocking plants that speak a whispering ancient language,” he imagines the magician Ferguson conjures up, and soon switches to an audience with faces like “a mustard has been pushed into his ass” .

The written world artificiality is manifested in postmodernism with the help of familiar constants, one of which is precisely the demonstration of the artificiality of a person. Pavel Torkswift “had long been interested in the idea of ​​transferring human consciousness to the computer, into ones and zeros, curves and data, and through it, at least in his utopian dreams, into three-dimensional modeling”.

Life: foreword personal characters are not the result of realistic psychologization, but fictitious minds, mediated consciousness.

The aesthetic rendition of the work is a narrative narrative typical of hysterical realism up to the last brainstorm. This causes that Life: a preface at the text level provides language material in numerous shades.

Central to philosophical reflections is the external and internal exploration of humanity (in the white upper-middle-class male being) and in a few other narrators tuned for reflection. What is most interesting about the novel, however, is the structure that it is irony and metafiction as its means that make meanings slide.

A novel to read does not have to be a reader’s rule book. While the meanings of fiction are always somewhat open and uncertain, a burst of disengagement is not a very interesting reading strategy.

Life: a preface is both exaggerated and self-erasing in terms of meaning, and therefore it is pointless to start digging the message even as holders of criticism. “Analysis Paralysis” is one of the repetitive pairs of words in the novel – the Wallacean indicator light worn in the flashes.

The work is a textbook example of a maximalist novel striving for postmodernism. With its abundance, it burns the reader’s expectation of realism, creating dissonance and paranoia with the help of an omniscient narrator (most Life: from the preface is an omniscient narrative), raises ethical issues and encyclopedically exploits different disciplines.

Elements of metaphorics, such as structural references to consciousness, electronic consciousness, film, and architecture, permeate the work.

Such novels are not the most common of them, but their artificial resources have been in use for a long time. Because Life: foreword calling it “experimental” is apt in the traditional sense, but saying it is a bit retro.

References to singularity, from the revolutionary growth boom of artificial intelligence, to the one envisioned in the 1990s Ray Kurtzweil anchor the fate of Henri Classic to a transhumanist utopia: “Master-Torkswift [Eeli] says that our earthly life is just a preface to the life that follows it in bit space ”.

“Sienians” against technology, From Catherine of Siena a religious group that took its name. Catherine is used as a motif to open up the narrative line of the sacred anorexics.

Technoutism, of course, is an ethical dystopia. Violent breaking of the boundaries of the body is the dimension of human technology from the darkest businesses on the dark web to the human body taken over by software. The work reinforces rather grim technological imaginations – whether it serves as an element of narration or by drawing the boundaries between man and machine.

The relationship of the machine or the internet to human consciousness is not really rising Life: in the preface a very rewarding theme. It is dominated by fatalism, which is emphasized by the storytelling loop. In the words of a side person, “You want your own role in the system, your own place in the system, but at the same time you hate that you need your place in the system”.

Descriptions of the work the Internet and technological mediation exude a somewhat moralistic vibe, and it gives a Donna Harawayn Cyborg Manifesto (1985) in an increasingly interesting way, but rather as a solitary Henri pushing into the abyss:

“We are not united by anything other than airborne information clustered through millions of clusters of pixels on the screen, on the screen that those pixels are not real, they are data, and even if they convey an image to us … that image has no contact with the thing it presents ”.

The form of the novel itself is ironically related to the emptiness of technology. That, too, is an indirect artificial reality, and Life: a preface know it all the way to the point.

But the massiveness of the novel is a material fact. The maximalism of the work tests the reading contract, the wordless covenant the reader makes with the book. For some, this is exactly the pleasure of a giant novel, for others it may not.

Jaakko Yli-Juonikas has succeeded in its own maximalism in hybridity, in mixing different types of text, including image types (Continuation war-extra, 2017), also succeeded Marisha Rasi-Koskisen Rec (2020) in their outreach.

Life: a preface again there is a literary work in which the most brazen, in the end, is the mass. - admin_l6ma5gus

Miki Liukkonen, Guest Mode, WSOY, 2023

The posthumous literary masterpiece by Finland’s most erudite, postmodernist writer.

“And people fantasise because the world itself is not exciting, it offers nothing as such. People started making things up a long time ago, and since then it’s all gone pretty much up the arse.”

Ren Dawn is suffering from inventor’s block when a series of fiascos compel him to go to Cancún and undergo hormone treatments, delirium, and out of body experiences that give him a look at his life as if from the outside. And then there’s Louis Dufuette…

GUEST MODE is a dazzling novel in Miki Liukkonen’s signature maximalist style: about thinking, about disappointment in life as the ultimate goal, about world history as the evolution of a resting heartbeat, and a little bit of everything. Seatbelts are required but not part of the novel’s equipment. Behind a lighthearted narrative lurks something serious, heartfelt and sincere, begging the question: Where are you when you’re away from home?

An allusive, philosophical, and humorous novel that rejects both humour and philosophy by an author worthy of comparison to DeLillo, Foster Wallace, and Pynchon. At the time of his untimely death on 4 July 2023, Miki Liukkonen had finished this novel, which was published posthumously in Finland on 18 September to widespread critical acclaim and a confirmation of Liukkonen’s accession to Finland’s literary firmament.

GUEST MODE is a verbal pirouette by a sharp observer. The world of the main character of the work bursts with sensory stimuli, surprising events and randomly appearing characters. The text fluctuates between small details and the entire universe, between the concrete and delusions. The work is a fragmented cornucopia, where externality, the longing for love, the shock of the mind and deep humanity are put into words with masterful brilliance. – Statement by the Finlandia Prize Jury

‘Liukkonen has put together an outstanding parting for his readers, offering crystalline and knowingly obscure thoughts, linguistic talent and familiar Liukkonenisms.’ – Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

‘Dazzling…from beginning to end, a startling, but also joyful, portrayal of life.’ – Aamulehti newspaper

‘Characteristically masterful.’– Turun Sanomat newspaper

‘In short, a remarkable work.’– Kaleva newspaper

‘An incorruptible writer-thinker.’ — Esa Saarinen, philosopher

Miki Liukkonen, The Master of Silence, WSOY,

2019

A dazzling and genre-defying novel that captures the zeitgeist of our time.

At midday, a twenty-something man is found dead in his office chair. Meanwhile, Herman Leorne is interviewing people for his Youtube channel, discussing the interestingness of things. Elsewhere, a mother with an eating disorder considers ending her life with an overdose of Botox. But how does all this tie-in to the significance of Sinatra’s My Way in karaoke history, stringent Subway™ staff training days, and iced coffee?

Following his meteoric magnum opus, O, Finland’s rockstar literary savant is back with comparable brevity, with an astonishing new work about people, the difficulties of communication, and an interest in things external to their ontological being. In the author’s own words, it is “like a detective novel in a coma,” intriguing without movement or procedure.

In its titular homage to Rimbaud’s reference to death, Liukkonen proves himself a seer of the big questions of the era, with influences of Foster Wallace and Mishima in evidence in his brilliant, new novel.

“A Rabelaisian Danse Macabre… an incredibly fascinating, neurotic, and unique novel.” – Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

“[The Master of Silence] doesn’t feel like a secondary work, despite following Liukkonen’s mammoth novel O, which came in at almost 900 pages and was nominated for the Finlandia Prize. Its more concentrated form shows off Liukkonen’s humour as well as his ability to write quick, and absurd, cuts between chapters. The Master of Silence is a novel in its own right; one which is bought together by incorporating philosophy, a strong rhetoric, and a unique worldview. At times defiant, The Master of Silence gives two fingers to a world that is too sanitised and politically correct: if you happen to run into reality, tell it that there’s no place for it here.” – Jukka Petäjä, Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

“Enjoyable in the round.” – Etelä Suomen Sanomat newspaper

“Liukkonen is Finland’s David Foster Wallace — The Master of Silence akin to a deliciously-filled baguette… No one in Finland writes like Liukkonen… this is the most interesting, astounding, and intelligent novel of the spring.” – Aamulehti newspaper

“The language of Miki Liukkonen’s The Master of Silence is spell-binding. Each of Liukkonen’s sentences is like a ride at Särkänniemi theme park. As well as being about obsessive people, The Master of Silence is about a stuffed baguette from an American fast food chain, its server’s training and the Interesting Things YouTube channel. Liukkonen’s story is absurd, in the most entertaining and joyous way. The Master of Silence does not require its reader to dedicate the same attention to it as Liukkonen’s O, which was 858 pages long. The Master of Silence has been compressed, by Liukkonen, to just 350 pages.” – Aamulehti newspaper

“Liukkonen’s work captures the essence of our time, the weight of which many experience yet rarely understand.” – Keskisuomalainen newspaper

“Liukkonen is an unrivaled linguistic virtuoso who writes effortlessly flowing text full of fresh tropes – from where, who knows.” – Kaleva newspaper

“At the beginning of Miki Liukkonen’s third novel, the anonymous protagonist compares words to a weak rope bridge that people cross to reach one another, a gaping ravine beneath them. The Master of Silence is mostly made up of conversations people have with themselves and each other. Intense eruptions of speech are only seemingly arbitrary; the sentences are clear, and thoughts brim with energy. One of the book’s themes is bulimia, which comes across in its structure: the characters are greedy in their thoughts and ideas, which they purge in the form of words. Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace are recognisably Liukkonen’s literary role models.” – Suomen Kuvalehti magazine

Miki Liukkonen, Elisabet. WSOY, 2012

Unbridled youthful adventure with poignant depth.

Part 1: Histories in which are fabled poems at the expense of historical figures.

Part 2: On the General, in which the aim is very specific thinking.

Part 3: Paris Notations, the collection’s trickiest section, in which a pelican is buried in a hole in the air and advice is given in the style of the ancients.

Part 4: Fibonacci, Jazz, and Narcissus, in which a light-hearted mood is sustained into dancing about and thirteenth-century doings, until animals begin to die by violent means.

Part 5: Elisabet, in which can be found a beautiful and mature epistle to a mother who died too soon. From this part is dispersed the grief that can be detected everywhere in the work, though over the course of the collection it was folded out of sight.

Part 6: A Wintergarden in which farewells are ushered in by a stunning deluge of pictures.

Miki Liukkonen’s bold and experimental writing has earned him the recognition of being the most innovative author in Finland today. Elisabet is his second work of poetry.

Elisabet (2012) is as brief as the novel O (2017) is voluminous: we see here the two extremes of Miki Liukkonen’s work, two complementary sides, two representations of the same universe. In Elisabet, the author already reveals his taste for historical references, enumeration, name-dropping, the staging of the iconic artist… and above all for the most unpredictable associations of images and ideas. At the heart of this unbridled youthful adventure, the motif of mourning and the way the author approaches it add a poignant depth. In short, it is an eclectic and touching collection where the poet does not hesitate to lay himself bare, under the pretext of stylistic experimentation and self-mockery, in order to access the elusive forces that govern our lives, our thoughts and our emotions. – Sébastien Cagnoli, Translator

Miki Liukkonen (1989-2023) made his literary breakthrough with the astonishingly accomplished novel O – an encyclopaedic narrative of ordinary people and extraordinary events, becoming the most talked about literary tour de force in recent years. The novel was shortlisted for the 2017 Finlandia Prize for Fiction, and for the 2018 Runeberg Prize.

Succeeding in commercialising the uncommercial, Liukkonen’s work has been compared to that of David Lynch and David Foster Wallace. Liukkonen is a multi-talented artist, who felt equally at home in music and poetry as he did in literature.