Secret Passages in a Hillside Town

Thank you Netgalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
I first wanted to read this book because of the colorful cover.
Then I read the first sentence:

Publisher Olli Suominen spent the rainy days if autumn buying umbrellas and forgetting them all around Jyvaskyla. He also accidentally joined a film club.

and was ready to plunge in as soon as possible.

I liked it a lot, even though it's not my usual kind of book.

Spending time between the pages of this story was like living through a dark and wet winter in Finland.

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.

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.

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.

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

Olli Suominen, publisher, husband, and father, lives in small town in Finland. His two most distinguishing traits are a tendency to lose umbrellas and a penchant for detailed, disturbing dreams. When the town is gripped by the surprising bestseller, How to Live a Cinematic Life, by local author, Greta Kara, Olli, like many of his fellow citizens, joins a film club whose mission it is to work through Greta’s film suggestions and the advice based thereupon. It turns out that Greta is looking for a publisher for her upcoming book, a magical travel guide set in the small hillside town of Jyväskylä, where both she and Olli grew up. When she reaches out to him via Facebook, Olli’s life is thrown into turmoil.

Up to now, you might think that Secret Passages is just another novel about an unhappy man trapped in an unhappy relationship looking to rekindle a long-extinguished romance. You would be wrong. This is, after all, a book of magical realism, where abovementioned passages appear in unlikely places and lead to unpredictable destinations, with unforeseeable results. The events that happen to Olli and Greta in the course of the story are rooted in a long-buried secret from their shared past whose actual enormity is skilfully and purposefully unveiled to the reader chapter by chapter, like a bud blossoming in slow motion. In the end, the novel presents two alternative courses of action, but can there be a happy ending in either one? I’m not going to tell you, because Secret Passage in a Hillside Town is a book you need to read for yourself to experience its beauty and tragedy fully.

Besides being an engaging read, this novel is also a wonderful example of an excellent translation, work that in my opinion isn’t really appreciated enough. In this case, translation credits go to Lola M. Rogers.

Secret Passages in a Hillside Town is published by Pushkin Press. I received a copy via Netgalley in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own.

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.

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!

What started off as a quirky and whimsical tale of a family man experiencing a midlife crisis, developed into something much more intriguing, with a dash of mystery, fantasy and psychological drama. Quite the page turner, and that ending! Quite a cinematic moment, indeed. Brilliant!

Recommended for rainy day reading.

Like The Rabbit Back Literature Society I loved the quirky, murky, whimsical but nasty tone. The mystery kept me intrigued, even when I guessed the part that gets revealed about the 75% mark, leaving more twists to come. However, there was something just a little... not quite misogynistic, but a bit icky about some of the writing that left me a little uncomfortable, briefly. Which is a shame, because otherwise there was a lot to like here.

As ever, a longer review is available on my blog.

Plot: Olli Suominen is a publisher in a small town and lives a pretty simple normal life, where his main frustration is frequently losing his umbrellas. When an old love interest, Greta, comes back into his life, things begin to go awry and the plot takes an unexpected turn.

My thoughts: While this book started off just as I would expect from the description and the cover – a fairly mundane account of a publisher in a normal Scandinavian town – in fact, both the plot and the style ended up being quite unexpected. The plot focus around magic realism was really quite lovely, making the mundane into something special that made you think. And the big plot point – which I can’t reveal as it would be a huge spoiler! – even though I figured it out a bit before, wasn’t the direction I’d thought we would go at the beginning. I loved the normality mixed with the strangeness, although I’d have preferred the plot to have pushed on more quickly in the beginning.

Love the cover and loved the book. Great characters, compelling plot, amazing setting. Will definitely recommend this book.