The Winter War

by Philip Teir, Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

Overview

On the surface, the Paul family are living the liberal, middle-class Scandinavian dream. Max Paul is a renowned sociologist and his wife Katriina has a well-paid job in the public sector. They live in an airy apartment in the centre of Helsinki. But look closer and the cracks start to show.

As he approaches his sixtieth birthday, the certainties of Max's life begin to dissolve. He hasn't produced any work of note for decades. His wife no longer loves him. His grown-up daughters — one in London, one in Helsinki — have problems of their own. So when a former student turned journalist shows up and offers him a seductive lifeline, Max starts down a dangerous path from which he may never find a way back.

Funny, sharp, and brilliantly truthful, Teir's debut has the feel of a big, contemporary, humane American novel, but with a distinctly Scandinavian edge.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781487000448
Publisher:	House of Anansi Press
Publication date:	03/15/2016
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

PHILIP TEIR, a Finnish-Swede, is considered one of the most promising young writers in Scandinavia. His poetry and short stories have been included in anthologies, including Granta Finland. The Winter War is his first novel. He is married with two children and lives in Helsinki, Finland.

TIINA NUNNALLY has won numerous awards for her translations of Scandinavian fiction. Her most recent translations include Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (Viking) and Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life by Jens Andersen (Overlook). She lives in New Mexico.

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2016
Finland-Swede Tier has been lauded for his poetry and short stories, so it comes as no surprise that his 2013 debut novel has been translated into English. The book—titled after the war fought between Finland and the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1944 and was “the best of all wars so far, because both sides ended up the victors” —tells the story of how Max and Katriina Paul’s marriage dissolved. Populated with interesting incidental characters and laced with dark humor, this domestic drama is set in present-day Helsinki and spreads from there to rural Finland, London, and the Philippines, aptly limning the global nature of 21st-century life. This backdrop offers the author space to ruminate on everything from how feminism has changed since the 1970s to the nature of interpersonal relationships. The strength of this novel lies in the disparate voices that Tier elucidates so skillfully throughout the novel; from a fading academic’s anxieties about his stalled career to a young art student who becomes embroiled in the Occupy movement, Tier sympathetically and accurately depicts the anxieties that plague adults young and old in the postmodern Western world. Agent: George Lucas, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

It is a tender, funny, utterly convincing story about a brittle, unhappy wife, a fearful-of-aging husband, and their two adult children.

Minnesota Star Tribune

...a compelling narrative...

National Post - Philip Marchand

"A darkly comic, satisfying novel of richly rendered inner tensions played out in interpersonal relationships." - Kirkus

From the Publisher

2015-12-23
The cycle of satisfaction, frustration, creation, and ennui that dogs artists and scholars alike unfolds in two generations of a Helsinki family. Max, a sociologist known for his decadeslong work on sex, is turning 60 and struggling to produce a biography of a groundbreaking 19th-century Finnish writer as his legacy. But it's not just professional respect Max craves; when a young journalist interviews him, "above all, [Max] hoped that he was still sexy." His marriage to his wife, Katriina, is stale after they've raised two grown daughters. Katriina resents that while Max is thinking about a book that never materializes, there's not much hope he will "show an interest in something other than himself." She dreams of what she'd like to do for the next 30 years of her life, but what brings her pleasure elicits little interest from her husband. Their younger daughter, Eva, puzzles most of the family when she moves to London to study art—only Max has always predicted this path for her. Yet both Max and Eva are unhappy; Eva questions the meaning of what she does under the tutelage of a burned-out professor with whom she has an affair as her father has a dalliance with the journalist. Eva thinks she will grow into happiness, reflecting that "when her father was her age, he'd already written his doctoral dissertation." The other Paul sister, Helen, chose a more traditional path as a teacher and mother and often serves as the family observer. When Max's mother suffers a crisis, bringing the four together, Helen sounds a note reminiscent of Tolstoy: "every family experienced similar scenes that had to be endured, other hospitals with ill relatives, other small towns where a grandmother had suffered a stroke." A darkly comic, satisfying novel of richly rendered inner tensions played out in interpersonal relationships.

Kirkus Reviews