People in the Summer Night

Good  Condition

Inside front flap:

There is almost no summer night in the north; only a lingering evening... When the music of late evening has sunk to a violet, dusky pianissimo, so delicate that it lengthens into a brief rest, then the first violin awakens with a soft, high cadence.... It is already morning, yet a moment ago it was still evening."

Thus does Frans Eemil Sillanpää introduce one of his finest works, a novel rich in texture, delicate yet forceful in tone, creating a sustained lyric mood both defined by and enveloped in the half-light of a Nordic summer night. Con- templating the activities of a summer weekend as the season of the harvest draws near, Sillanpää has created a tone poem in which the themes of birth and death, violence and tenderness, young love and the weariness of old age interweave in a pattern as arresting and beautiful as that of the musical suite whose image is so superbly evoked in the opening lines.

Sillanpää, raised in a humble peasant's cottage and trained as a naturalist, has an instinctive understanding of the ways of the country. He responds to the landscape and its moods, and is an acute observer of its life. The thoughts and emotions of country people are as familiar to him as his own and indeed, his poet's sensitivity is informed and strengthened by a peasant's matter-of-factness and shrewd realism. He is no idealist who sees country people through a haze of literary pastoral. Rather, knowing and loving them in their strengths and in their weaknesses, he is yet aware of the real beauty and dignity of their lives.

Sillanpää very early showed literary promise, and his path from the peasant's cottage to literary success and ultimately to fame as a Nobel prizewinner in 1939 was made easier by the assistance of influential and enlightened friends who recognized his talents. His first novel, Elämä ja aurinko (Life and the Sun, 1916), already displayed that ability to capture in sinuous, cadenced sentences the fleeting emotions of people and the transient aspects of the landscape which is so brilliantly apparent in People in the Summer Night. After World War II he wrote little, but turned instead to a more immediate and intimate means of communication radio. He was until his death in 1964 one of Finland's most loved public figures.

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