The Danish Girl - David Ebershoff

'What if your name was, say, Lili?'

 Heyo!

My nail polish went so well with this book
- does that mean I need to do a new one
now that I've finished it?

[I translated an English quote from Finnish back to English for you, so it's probably not perfect, but I didn't find one I loved on Goodreads so it'll have to do.]

Anyway, hi again! 

I picked this book up from the local library, and more specifically, an easy summer reading shelf. And while I don't necessarily agree on this being very light, I worked through it quite quickly and decided it could be my Pride Month book. I've reviewed some books with gay relationships before but I'd rather not label them as such unless it's on the back cover and obvious, you know? Because I'd prefer people go into them seeing them as books about people rather than books about gays. This isn't about sexuality, but rather the story of a transgender woman. That's on the back cover, and it's kind of the whole point of the book, so... I think it's okay to classify this as an LGBT book from the get-go.

This book is the story of Lili Elbe, who was born as a man named Einar Wegener in 1882 and was married to Greta Wegener. When I say it's a story, I feel like it's a very accurate word choice. The people were real and most of the biggest events described were that too, but naturally the author had a lot of artistic license while working with the book. He mentions that The Danish Girl is not their life story, and if you want to know more about Lili, she has a biography that was released after her death. Maybe I too will read that one day.

The book has chapters from both Lili (at the beginning, they are Einar's) and Greta's point of view. They are painters living in Copenhagen, Denmark, and their lives change one day when Greta asks her husband to model in place of their mutual (female) friend's feet for a painting. Slowly, Einar realises what he actually wants from life, and from there we follow the birth and life of Lili Elbe.

This is where I started this book, quite a way
away from where I finished it.

Oddly enough, this book is marketed as an amazing/unusual/passionate love story but I would only call it unusual and definitely not really a love story. Greta is there for Lili because she wants to be a good wife above all, but Lili does not give her much love in return, in my opinion. Because of this, their epic love story didn't really work for me, and I didn't find myself too fond of Lili either, especially towards the end. Obviously she has the right to be herself, but I wanted her to thank Greta or acknowledge her at least. To me, this was the story of Lili and Lili alone. Nothing wrong with that per se, but the marketing felt a little misleading in hindsight. Had I wanted an epic love story, I would have been pretty disappointed by this.

Sometimes I have difficulties finding just one nice photo
of a book but this one has gone on so many adventures with
me? I feel a bond with this and it's a library book, too!

There is a lot of detail in this work, which is quite cool considering the author mostly made it up in order to bring the story to life. I'd say he definitely succeeded in it! Considering he's an American and probably hasn't spent years in Copenhagen or Paris, either. I haven't spent a ton of time in either of these places either, but it felt real to me.

On the topic of America, one of the biggest changes he made to this book as opposed to the true story is changing Greta into an American and calling him Greta. You see, the actual person was called Gerda, and like her husband, she too was Danish. Ebershoff changed her name and made her Southern Californian like himself. This was done to, quote unquote, 'please the American audience'. The heck.  Though I suppose that for what it's worth, the scenes set in Pasadena felt very real, so one might say that maybe Ebershoff knew what he was doing.

It still didn't feel worth a 5/5 for me for some reason. It might be the ending that leaves things open or maybe just the fact that some of the event didn't really feel necessary for me.

For the Helmet 2017 reading challenge I put this in category 23: A translated book!

Gisellen kuolema - Siiri Enoranta

'Minulla ei ollut ketään. Tiesin että saisin jos haluisin, eikä se ollut kehuskelua vaan fakta. Saisin jonkun hyvän kiltin hellän joka hitaasti syövyttäisi minut kuoliaaksi.'

'I didn't have anyone. I knew I could get if I wanted, and it wasn't bragging but a fact. I could get someone good kind tender who would slowly corrode me dead.'

I've had this book sitting in my bookshelf for a while and as I really loved Nokkosvallankumous (which I'll probably review when I decide to go through my favourite books again) and quite liked Surunhauras, lasinterävä, I decided to finally read it while eating the first and last gingerbread of the year. The fireplace really is doing magic to my reading.

Gisellen kuolema (The Death of Giselle) is a story about Joel and Linnea, two siblings. It's the story of Linnea, a ballet dancer who will never dance ballet again, a broken dream with nothing left. This story is mostly told through Joel's eyes, Joel who's always been distant from her sister, who's always been in the shadow and the lesser one. Suddenly Linnea returns to their broken home, Linnea who was never supposed to return, and Joel is left to be the only one who can sort of connect with her. They both need each other to give something neither of them has left.

The book is raw and poetic and emotional, and it left me with a weird sense of sadness I don't quite get. There's drugs and sex and alcohol, but there's also earnest feelings and conversations and the longing to be a child again. It's often mentioned that this book is, yes, indeed incest, but it didn't feel like as central to the book as I thought it would. More so, I felt the broken family and the need for another person to understand you to be in the forefront. The pain of losing and the fear of never having anything to lose again. Everyone has their own problems and their own means of trying to navigate through life and Joel seems to find them all repulsive even though he's not any better. Their home is extremely broken even though at first it was so difficult to point out why. Maybe it's not really anything to grasp at, or maybe it's a bit of everything, but for this book it certainly felt fitting.

As a piece of literature I felt that this book was extremely well-written. The style is very artistic and liberal and the description very earthy and Finnish and suddenly urban and wild again. The dialogue is also very believable, mostly because of the dialect and because the characters don't seem to feel the need to talk just for the sake of exposition or saying something smart. Of course, it can be left up for debate whether or not a teenage boy would actually think of all these poetic things of someone's eyes being deep wells filled goldfish swimming around restlessly, but that's what first person point-of-view literature usually gives you. I forever wish for these books to get an English translation because I've not really read anything like these books before and I can imagine people would want to. I want everyone to read them. This is easily her least fantasy-like story, but I wouldn't say the others are any less realistic because of that.

Rating-vise I'll put this nicely between Nokkosvallankumous and Surunhauras, lasinterävä at 4/5. It's really worth reading, a cohesive, beautiful story in under 150 short pages. I could read it again despite the heartbreak it gave me, and I'm sure it would reward that second read by unravelling something within its pages I didn't understand before.

Happy New Year, by the way. I took a bit of an accidental head-start to reading Finnish things but I'll try and keep at it next year!

PS. I accidentally somehow ordered the two Siiri Enoranta's books I didn't yet have online halfway through writing this. So expect me to review those as soon as I feel like I've survived reading this one!

The Spectacular Now - Tim Tharp

“Yeah,” she says. I’m beginning to see that her “yeahs” are almost always two syllables, one for “yes” and the other for “but I don’t know if anything will ever come of it.”

The Spectacular Now, I’d say, is a novel about youth. It’s about finding yourself and about finding your place, sometimes it’s about finding that there’s no place for you. It’s real and young and it should be everything I ever wanted.

The two main characters, the narrator Sutter Keely and the girl with insight, Aimee Finicky, are about as different as any two people can be. He’s foolhardy, outgoing and careless, she’s warm, calculating and only has wild adventures in her daydreams. She lives in the future, where she has worked out everything, while he doesn’t even want to think a day ahead of time. He gets the rare chance to make a change in her life, to convince her to come out of her shell and live, but at the same time he could end up ruining her. Of course, on this mission, which is not about seducing her, they end up dating, the unlikely couple surprising working. That’s pretty much the plot of the book, leaving out only what happens after they’ve ended up dating.

Oftentimes Sutter got on my nerves, for he is self-righteous and presents his thoughts like they’re the only truth. Empirical observing turned into scientific facts, he believes he understand guys, girls and life better than the people around him. The novel is clearly written by a man, and Sutter, while thinking of himself as a gentleman, ends up being a terrible jerk more than once. Maybe I’m not Aimee, but I didn’t find his carelessness about everything charming or even bearable. I don’t think people should be allowed to be so immature all the way until early adulthood. I didn’t like him constantly thinking about himself first, no matter how many times he named Aimee as his priority.

Sutter searching for his father felt much like the search in The Fault in Our Stars – if you want something too much, build it up in your mind and think it’s everything you’ve ever wanted, you’re bound to be disappointed. Only one of these books ends in a catharsis I found personally satisfying, however. I felt like The Spectacular Now didn’t have enough real, actual, heart-breaking joy to make up for the times it made me sad and despairing. The balance was off and the book left me wanting something else.

There’s that 2013 movie based on this book, and if I understand it correctly, it ends well differently from the book. I don’t know if I’m happy with that. I didn’t like the ending I read, but maybe that just meant I didn’t like what I had set out to read. The actors are some of the current YA novel-to-movie favourites – Miles Teller, Brie Larson and Shailene Woodley. Maybe I’ll give it a watch one of these days, since the novel wasn’t a total waste of my time. It wasn’t good, either.

PS. Sorry about not posting anything lately - I lost my laptop charger and finally, finally caved in and bought a new one! Will be posting reviews on all the books I've read this summer asap!