English translation: Mitch Cohen

July 2024

My half-brother Johannes Lahtela wrote a book with a special focus on our father Markku Lahtela: “Yksinäisen miehen poika”. To make it clear from the start: I can’t say anything about its literary quality; my Finnish is that of a five-year-old. Good enough for everyday use, but not beyond that, of course. But I can say something about its content. Thanks to Google Translate and the aid of my Finnish ex-wife, I have quite a clear picture. To forestall any suspense: In regard to my father, it’s a caricature.

But first, why it’s important to me to say something about it in the first place. Because I don’t usually write reviews, and my Finnish family ties are quite loose. I had a rather poor relationship with my father, how my brother depicts him wouldn’t have to matter to me. Someone who doesn’t really look after his children, and he didn’t, is in no position post mortem to complain about nasty surprises. Karma is a bitch, as is well known.

But there is another side of my father, and that’s his authenticity as an author. And for me, that’s no joke. What may seem absurd, because my deficits in Finnish mean I can’t read and thus can’t understand his books. But, apart from his letters to me in German, when I once read an English translation of the first chapter of “Circus”, I felt extremely related to him in our approach to language: there was a special groove in the sentences, a very special rhythm that only those people have who are truly inspired and linguistically highly gifted. At any rate, I was very glad at that time, because I thought: Okay, at least in terms of language I can feel like his son. There was and is in fact, beyond my personal conflict with him, a kind of genetic-literary connection. A kind of spiritual nuclear power.

And because that’s so, I reacted extremely sensitively when I read the pages (translated with Google Translate and my ex-wife) in Johannes’s just published book “Yksinäisen miehen poika” where he describes, from our father’s point of view, how he supposedly experienced his last days. For example, that he sat in front of a vanity mirror and stuck his tongue out at himself; that he dragged himself to the window after waking up, naked and tired from drinking, and turned his gaze to where the lake and sky meet—and so forth. “And so forth” because these are all Johannes’s fantasies, of course—Johannes was four years old at the time of the suicide and not present at it. Thus, he turned our father’s last days into literature, in accordance with his own taste and ability (or inability). Which, in principle, would be absolutely okay, if he’d done it under the aegis of fiction, but not under Markku’s real name. Then it would probably simply be a little hokey, and so what?! In this context, it’s rather conspicuous that my name (“Silvo”) and Markku’s name are correct, but my father’s last wife, Eeva Reenpää (Ehrnrooth), for example, enjoys fictitious protection as “Gertrude”.

But since these projection-like fantasies take place under Markku’s name, the public is automatically intimated that this is approximately what happened. That our father’s psyche was really constituted the way his youngest son Johannes imagines. And since he’s dead, he can’t defend himself against being distorted into a caricature post mortem. But I can do that, and I do it here.

If an author leaves fiction, and he does that if he uses the correct names, then he has in principle two possibilities to write about other people: he can write to the best of his ability how he perceives the persons from his own perspective. That makes it always clear that he is himself involved and, logically, has a completely subjective perspective. Of course, he can certainly be ruthless. That is an honest variant: he enters the arena with an open, i.e., personal, visor. That is the principle of all authentic confessional literature: Here I stand and can do no other. The author clearly writes about himself and doesn’t waste his energy with fictitious arabesques. He doesn’t invent anything. In its more objective form, this kind of writing approaches documentation, which is serious journalism that names its sources and so forth.

Or, and this is the other possibility, one uses the authentic aura automatically radiated by the real name for stories that are only loosely connected with reality. That is then the realm commercially of advertising, politically of propaganda, and ideologically of framing. Journalistically, it is the principle of the yellow press or, in the Internet epoch, the principle of click bait. This manipulative mixture of fact and fiction has nothing to do with literature, because authenticity, whether of the described person or of the content or of the language ultimately plays no role in it. The point is just the effect: does it sell, does it catch on or not?

As I said, as an author, I myself am deeply uninhibited and have no scruples about writing the wildest things, as long as they sail with the truth or clearly with the wind of fiction. And that’s the problem with “Yksinäisen miehen poika”: it simply sails only a few yards with the truth, and instead mostly with fantasies, but fantasies disguised by the use of the names of real people. A striking example is the passage in the book where my half-brother writes that our father dragged me in Paris to the “hooker street”. Which sounds like he wanted to bring me in contact with prostitutes. In reality, and that’s what I told Johannes when he interviewed me, our father merely accompanied me to the cheap hotel where he had put me up—and the way there simply led through the Rue St. Denis, where the women stood, back then.

A “Buddhist” and lots more in the book I’m not either. But I can speak for myself. Our father can’t do that anymore, and he has earned a bit more literary respect than this kitsch version of him.

Which is a real shame, because actually I support my half-brother Johannes’s project with all my heart: to raise our father’s suicide out of its oblivion, to address the consequences of fatherlessness, to scratch at the lacquer of people’s image—these are all things that are truly significant for the present. But this unreflected mishmash of projections with fragments of facts is definitely not the way; it is itself only another cosmetic layer of lacquer painted on a vehicle damaged in accident.
But maybe it’s a beginning anyway.