I must admit, I was hoping that the mysterious woman at the heart of
this novel turned out to be a dimension-shifting alien robot.
And
who knows, she might have been. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. I've
never read anything quite like RBLS,
the first of Finnish writer Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen's novels to
be translated into English. It is at once a mystery, a work of
magical realism, a work of fantasy, and a meta-fictional meditation
on what it means to read, write, and tell stories.
Ella Milana, the central character, is trapped in a life of
uncertainty and bitterness. She's been hired to be a substitute
language and literature teacher in the town of Rabbit Back, where she
grew up. Her return to the town is more bitter than sweet, since her
father is slipping away as dementia takes over, and she has recently
left a long-term relationship behind because she found out that she
has "defective ovaries" (apparently her boyfriend/fiance
wanted kids that she couldn't have).
Quickly
enough, strange things start happening that call Ella's attention to
the (in)famous Rabbit Back Literature Society, formed by a
world-famous children's writer named Laura White. The Society has
only nine members, not including Laura, and they were all handpicked
by her while they were still children. The goal was to turn them all
into great writers. Ultimately, they did become (mostly) successful
writers, but their intense, insular relationships with one another
over the years gradually pulled them apart.
Before
Ella learns all of this, though, she first encounters a bizarre book
virus. You read that right. Apparently, the virus can jump from one
book to another, provided they're touching, and rearranges words,
paragraphs, and even plots, until a novel like Crime
and Punishment
becomes nearly unrecognizable. Then, Ella is invited to become the
tenth member of the Society (supposedly because of a story she
published in the local newspaper), but at her inaugural celebration,
Laura White disappears in front of her guests in a blast of snow.
To add to these mysteries, Ella begins digging into the Society's
past, with plans to write a paper or book about it. The only way to
get the information she wants is to play "The Game," a
sometimes-dangerous method by which the members can get each other to
tell them secrets and suppressed memories. When Ella finds out that
there was once another tenth member who died mysteriously and whose
existence has been hushed up, she becomes even more adamant about
finding the truth.
The
key to all of these mysteries is Laura herself. When she was a child,
she fell through a frozen pond and was technically dead for a while,
before being successfully revived. Miraculously, she returns to
Rabbit Back after rehabilitation, seemingly recovered, but there's
something strange about her. Sometimes she's almost transparent. Her
children's stories are so captivating that people the world over are
obsessed with them. Her presence is disturbing, regal, and somewhat
otherworldly. And her bizarre disappearance suggests that maybe she
never actually came back from the dead. Was she some sort of
supernatural being? The town's collective creation? A species of
"undead"? We'll never be sure.
Ultimately,
Jääskeläinen asks us to think about how fiction is created and the
ways in which we use our own and other people's lives as fodder for
our stories. Everyone in the novel is engaged in some form of
storytelling, whether it's building their own personal narratives,
writing novels, writing academic papers, publishing a newspaper, or
dredging up forgotten memories. Ella's father, whose dimentia has
robbed him of the ability to know his own narrative, dies early on in
the book, unable to function as a part of this insular,
fiction-spinning community.
So lots of tasty questions and mysteries, no real satisfying answers,
and an addictive plot which is, I guess, only to be expected.
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