Odd, definitely odd. Quirky, even. The story of Olli, a publisher with a knack for losing umbrellas, member of a local film club, and married with one son. Into his life comes Greta, an old flame who friends him on Facebook. The writing style is deliberately simple, the story definitely strange. And it only gets stranger, and darker, as Olli’s past involvement with childhood friends who had a gang based on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five resurfaces. Soon Olli is caught in an ever-more nightmarish plotline where the lines between dreams and reality, between cinema and real life, become increasingly blurred. The secret passages in which the children used to play now become a metaphor for the hidden, secret lives of the adult world. It is impossible to go into too much detail of the plot, for it is there that the great success of this novel lies.

Who is Greta? What has happened to his wife and child? Where did Timi the dog go? The ending is suitably filmic, with credits rolling and alternate endings….

Yep, definitely quirky, but the book also takes you into darker areas where you question how we live our life and how we create our identity through stories. A really good read!

How to introduce this book? It’s a perfect example of contemporary magical realism.

It’s a story about childhood adventures, disappointments, pleasures, anguish, dread and misunderstandings. Also about literary world’s difficulties, routine in family life and about weariness in general. Here are secrets, small and big ones. And if you go along with this dreamlike world that the author is offering, you discover a very good story, that makes you developing new theories about the story plot and about outcome of it all. I was constantly wondering, whether I was reading some dead persons recollection about his life or was it somebody’s dream, who had been in coma for a long time, or was it somebody’s sick game with the victims, or was it just somebody’s fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

It's not an easy read, but ou it’s and interesting read.

I did not finish this book.

Reasons include:
1. Awkwardness of translation. It is overly obvious that the translator is from the UK because of word choice, including one very unfortunate use of the word fanny which means something very different in the USA.
2. Narrative flow. So many dream sequences. I think this is related to the translation as well, not knowing which metaphors would mean the same thing between Finland and the USA, feeling like dreams were overused to communicate themes the author wanted to represent.
3. Misogyny of the main character. This becomes increasingly uncomfortable considering his place of employment and his role in creating childrens books, ick.

Loved the cover though. Really wanted to love it. Would definitely have picked it up off the shelf to look at.

Quickly I realized this book was not for me. I had a really tough time connecting with the characters of the story. Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this book for my honest review. All opinions expressed are my own.

Olli Suominen, an absent-minded publisher, lives in Jyväskylä in Central Finland, where he spends his days trying to find new authors for his firm, serving on the parish council, and losing umbrellas. His marriage is losing its sparkle and, when an old flame erupts onto the Finnish literary scene with a compelling new self-help guide, Olli finds himself being dragged back into memories of childhood summers, when he was a member of a band of children based on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. But the blissful adventure of those summers hides darker memories of torment, transformation and loss, all mixed up with the secret passages that run below this unassuming hill town. I sometimes got the feeling that Jääskeläinen was trying to do too much at once, but it’s certainly a unique novel with its own peculiar flavour.


Olli and his wife Aino have gradually lost their emotional intimacy, if it ever existed, and Olli has taken to filling his life with other obligations: work, civic duties and, most recently, a film club. He’s captivated by the old classics and it’s thanks to this newfound interest that Aino buys him a present: a newly-published bestseller called A Guide to the Cinematic Life by Greta Kara. As soon as Olli sees the name – and the dedication: ‘To the love of my life, from the girl in the pear-print dress‘ – he’s swept back to memories of the time when he and Greta had a teenage love affair in the course of one incredible summer. Fascinated by her success, he delves into the book: a pastiche of the current fashion for self-improvement guides, which advises a stylised form of life based on characters and scraps of dialogue from classic cinema. The craze for cinematic living is spreading across Finland and Greta Kara has become a superstar. And, when she adds Olli as a friend on Facebook, it seems as though they might have a chance to rewrite the tragic ending of their love affair so many years ago.

Wound up with this story is the tale of Olli’s boyhood adventures with the Jyväskylä Five, a group of adventurous children who spend their summers exploring and even solving a few crimes. You don’t have to be that sharp-eyed to spot some parallels: children called Anne and Richard (Dick / Riku) and a dog called Timi. The leader of the gang is Leo; he, Riku and Anne are siblings and come each summer to stay with their Aunt Anna and their cousin Karri in Jyväskylä. Olli and his dog Timi are caught up in their expeditions and, for a while, everything is sunkissed and perfect. But, as the years pass, the childish adventures take on a darker tinge and, as the Jyväskylä Five come towards adulthood, certain choices are made which will shape the rest of their lives.

Jääskeläinen, like his heroine, seems to be drawing on all manner of source material and jumbling it together into a stew of plot-points which I ultimately found confusing to follow. We have a story of modern marriage and love re-found; another tale about coming of age; a crime thriller; and magical realism below the ground in the secret passages of Jyväskylä, where anything becomes possible. One of these plots might have made for a satisfying book: all of them taken together lead to a labyrinthine maze, each of the ‘genres’ undermining another. There are also masses of dream sequences which add further bizarre motifs and connections. The plot doesn’t always convince, even within the parameters of its slightly dreamlike world: would even someone as absent-minded as Olli fail to notice that his wife and child have been kidnapped for several days? And isn’t Greta’s backstory just adapted from Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In? How much of the whole thing is symbolic? How much are we meant to believe as the truth? I can accept that these questions aren’t meant to be answered – that asking them is the point, and part of the surreal game that the author’s playing with us – but knowing that didn’t make it any easier for me to engage with the book.

The translation by Lola M. Rogers is appropriately quirky, but the whole thing feels strangely detached: this is a great love story without emotion, in which the participants are actors on a stage rather than real people, and the stakes never feel that high because you feel you’re just watching a film – at one more remove than the emotional engagement you usually get with a novel. It’s a very strange book: it wants to embrace golden childhood memories; mid-life crises; profound questions of identity and self-fashioning; and omnipotent crime bosses, any one of which would be enough for most novels.

For the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/06/27/secret-passages-in-a-hillside-town-pasi-ilmari-jaaskelainen/

My reading point-of-no-return is fairly short; just a handful of pages, a chapter or two at most. So it's a rare occasion that I don't finish a book, particularly when I've invested so much time in it already. But this one is just not for me, and the idea of continuing makes my shoulders slump.

The premise sounded good, and the location unfamiliar enough to pique my curiosity, so at first I was happy to read along and see where it went. But I got sick of the umbrellas, I was confused about whether Olli was remembering, dreaming, fantasising or living his reality, and then when the plot really kicked into gear (around 50%) I just wanted to roll my eyes rather than jump on for the ride.

This was apparently a big hit in the author's native Finland, and to be fair to him I suspect there was quite a bit of humour and charm lost in translation. Ultimately I think I am not the intended demographic for this book.

This book sat in my "to read" pile for months before I finally picked it up and dug in. It has all the elements I love in a book- quirky characters, witty writing, and a narrative that makes ordinary events seem interesting and clever.

The bad news is that I found out in reading this book that I can't handle a slow-moving plot no matter how quirky the characters are or how witty the writing is. I kept glancing down at the page number and it felt like I would never reach the ending. With the book lacking a certain level of excitement, I found myself taking many breaks in reading it, setting it aside to fit other books into my reading schedule and grudgingly coming back only to struggle reading several more chapters before taking another hiatus.

If my summer consisted of lazy days on the beach I would probably finish this book. However, I just don't have the time or attention span to really push myself through so many pages.

I was intrigued by the title of this book and wanted to know more. there was much to like Olli and his many umbrellas, his Facebook ineptness, the film club and his childhood adventures as a member of the Tourula Five, in the style of the Famaous Five.
Olli’s work persona and role on Parish Council seemed promising (echoes of Confederacy Of Dunces). However his old flame Greta’s novel and guidebook ‘books within the book’ got too messy, We seemed to be wandering and not really getting anywhere. Olli’s assessments of women’s bodies began to bore me. I really wanted to like this book; I read this in bursts but eventually my access expired. While I am disappointed I didn’t finish it, I had got to a stage when I wasn’t enjoying it.

I just couldn’t get interested in this book. Didn’t make it past the first few chapters which is extremely rare for me.

What a lovely story! It starts slow and it developed into something that enthralls you. The descriptions of Finland are fascinating and the book moves and entertains at the same time.
Recommended.
Many thanks to Pushkin Press and Netgalley for the ARC

This is such a lovely story to read. It started really slow for me but part 2 is where everything got interesting. I love cinemathic aspect. Finland is my dream place and i found a site which shows a pictures about Jyväskylä is really enjoying.

This was a very strange read. The writing style was that of a child when indeed it's an older gentleman that the book is about. Completely odd. Not a bad story but I wouldn't want to read it again

I’ve been waiting my whole life for a book like this. As someone with a very faulty memory, I find it difficult to believe the clarity with which characters in most books remember their past. Much of the mystery in this book comes from the main character’s inability to remember the details of his adolescence. When he does start remembering, we are treated to a unique, fascinating, and truly magical love story.

When I started this book, I was wondering when I would finish this book. I thought of stop reading this book and pick something else. But in most of the cases, I would finish the book once I start reading it. So I stuck with it.

As I read through the book, I felt that story is not going anywhere. And because of the magic realism mixed with the unreliable narration, it was hard to distinguish where reality ended and fantasy began.But as I continued, at sometimes story made sense. The book is boring at most of the times probably because of the difficult to draw the line between fantasy and reality.

It is a confusingly weird book.

A few years back I had read Jääskeläinen’s The Rabbit Back Literature Society. That novel had been compared to “Twin Peaks meeting the Brothers Grimm” and was a dark and cryptic work which hovered rather awkwardly between outright supernatural fiction and magical realism. I had found this ‘ambivalence’ ultimately disappointing, but the novel was intriguing enough to make me want to sample the author’s latest offering, recently translated into English by Lola Rogers.

In its initial chapters, this novel seemed quite different from its predecessor, apart from its small-town setting and “bookish” background. Indeed, it starts off as a gentle, if quirky, tale of mid-life romance. Olli Suominen, the head of a publishing company based in Jyväskylä, is going through a minor crisis. Book sales are not what they used to be and, as far as family-life is concerned, he seems to be growing distant from his wife and young son. Through Facebook, he gets in touch with Greta Kara, an old flame who has since become the bestselling author of an influential self-help guide to “living a cinematic life”. He somehow convinces her to issue her next book – a ‘magical’ travel book about Jyväskylä – through his publishing house. This promises to boost Olli’s business – and amorous - prospects.

But Olli’s Facebook exchanges with Greta also rekindle memories of another group of childhood acquantainces – the three Blomroos siblings and their cousin Karri. Together with Timi, Olli’s dog, they formed a Finnish equivalent of the Famous Five. In true Enid Blyton fashion, they spent their summer holidays together, shared long, glorious, sunny days on riverside picnics and solved mysteries along the way. Typically, they also explored secret passages. And here things start to get weird, because unlike the relatively workaday secret passages in Blyton’s novels, the Toulura tunnels seem to warp reality and cause time to go completely off-kilter. Unsurprisingly, Olli’s memories of the secret passages are vague and confused, but we eventually learn that they were the theatre for shocking happenings shared by Greta and the Tourula Five.

Whether you will enjoy the novel from this point forward will depend on how crazy you like your fiction to be. In my case, I generally prefer novels which follow an internal logic, however strange their premise might be. And to be honest, it was sometimes difficult to understand where this book was going . But it still hooked me to the last chapter. Or chapters, given that the novel rather puzzlingly presents us with an alternative ending – probably a nod to “alternate movie endings” which are sometimes available on DVDs of certain movies.

So, how should we interpret Secret Passages? Should we take it at face value as a work of supernatural fiction? Or is this actually realist fiction, using elements of fantasy to give us a glimpse of the workings of Olli’s mind? Is the book a satire on modern life which, thanks to social media, seems to be all about living a “cinematic life” worth sharing with the world at large? Or is this an adult parody of Enid Blyton mysteries, particularly the underlying gender politics simmering below their surface? Perhaps it’s all of this, but it makes for a wild and crazy ride.

There was a point where I found myself wondering why I was still reading this book but luckily I stuck with it. The story got better about a third of the way in and then I was fully sucked into the narrative.

Overall this was a crazy read. Yes the twist was painfully obvious but the story was intriguing. A bit dated now though because Facebook is no longer a new thing.

I do wonder if some of the narrative was lost in translation. Since I can't read Finnish I will never know.