New Finnish Grammar

Diego Marani

Dedalus, £9.99

Review by Nick Major

WHAT reader in their right mind would buy a novel called New Finish Grammar? Moreover, the cover of this edition looks like it was designed on that tacky computer programme students use to make slideshow presentations. Masterpieces come in all shapes and sizes. I use the ‘m’ word advisedly, aware that critics are sometimes prone to throwing around more hyperbole than sense. But Diego Marani’s surprising book deserves the epithet. This is a beautifully formed novel, from the framing of its many stories, down to the minutiae of its melancholy sentences.

A man of unknown origin, with nothing on his person, wakes up on board a German hospital ship moored off the coast of Trieste in September 1943. He has severe amnesia and remembers nothing about who he is. Even language has been erased from his mind. His doctor, a Finnish neurologist called Petri Friari, presents him with the sailor’s jacket that he was wearing when he was picked up near Trieste railway station. There is a name stitched into the collar: Sampo Karjalainen. The doctor recognises it as Finnish, and Friari, in exile from the country of his birth, takes it upon himself to help Karjalainen re-learn what he thinks is his patient’s language.

When the confused man starts to make progress he is sent to a military hospital in Finland, and writes an account of his troubled rebirth, which becomes the novel in the reader’s hands. Karjalainen’s past has more in common with Friari’s than his own, but with nothing to look back on, it gives him a way forward: "Doctor Friari felt that in some abstract way we both belonged to the same world. We were bound together by some mysterious link, some bond which was not to do with blood, but which resonated in the sound of language. In the doctor it revived the sweetness of memory, and in me it aroused the will to live."

In Helsinki Karjalainen wanders the streets of his purported homeland, trying to rediscover his history, and grappling with Finnish, a fiendishly difficult language that developed in isolation from the linguistic traditions in adjacent countries. He does make friends with an eccentric pastor called Olaf Koskela, who teaches him Finnish folklore, and falls in love with a local nurse. But while his very selfhood is in doubt he can never give himself over to anyone: "In the innermost recesses of my unconscious I was plagued by the feeling that, within my brain, another brain was beating, buried alive".

Diego Marani’s inner life must be more enchanting than his workaday one to think up stories like this. He is the Officer in Charge of Cultural Diplomacy at the European Union in Brussels. New Finnish Grammar is the first part of a trilogy based on the theme of language and identity. It may look cheap on the surface, but it delves down into the deep linguistic and philosophical roots of what humanity is. Karjalainen’s tragic attempt to recapture his own illusory life is a bracing reminder that we know more about who we aren’t than who we are.