Backlight
$23.00
Additional Info
- ISBN: 978-1-949641-80-6
- Size: 5" x 8"
- Pages: 278
- Publication Date: June 10, 2025
- Distributed By: Publishers Group West
Pirkko Saisio, now a teenager, can’t decide which she hates most: God, her father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. When she’s not escaping into her books, Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is until her Finnish teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer, but only if she is willing to work hard and make certain sacrifices.
Years later, Pirkko spends the historic summer of 1968 working at a Swiss orphanage. The world is shifting around her, and to make matters even more complicated: she’s homesick. At the orphanage no one understands her German, and away from home for the first time, she struggles to make sense of her suppressed queerness. In Backlight, the Finlandia Prize–winning author looks backward and inward, once again emerging, in Mia Spangenberg’s sensitive translation, with an intimate portrait of a life lived in language.
Praise
“Getting a child narrator right is no easy task, and Saisio executes it perfectly by painting the girl as a magnetic mix of precocious maturity and naive innocence, holding the potential for some surprisingly deep insights as well as silly hijinks. Humour, especially when a consequence of the mismatch between the narrator’s rich inner worlds and her ability to cogently communicate it to her loved ones, is a significant feature of the narrative, adding refreshing levity in between the heavy emotional punches.”—Areeb Ahmad, Asymptote
“[Saisio’s] fragmented bursts of prose make for a propulsive read. Full of snide humor, surprising turns of phrase, and insightful wit, Backlight is a dynamic joyride.”—Grace Harper, Mac’s Backs-Books on Coventry
Praise for Pirkko Saisio
Winner of the Finlandia Prize
Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize
“In Pirkko’s Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom… Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio’s work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen.”—Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books
“A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life—Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented.”—Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere
“This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I’ve ever read before.”—Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra
Additional Materials
Pirkko Saisio
Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor’s training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life (Elämänmeno, 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director.
Books
Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor’s training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life (Elämänmeno, 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director.
Mia Spangenberg
Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.
Books
Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote. She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family.
Excerpt
Her situation is this:
She’s a nineteen-year-old high-school graduate and she’s decided to become the director of a Swiss orphanage.
She’s familiarized herself with Heinrich Pestalozzi’s ideas about the caretaking of orphans.
In her case, familiarized means she’s read a saccharine article in Reader’s Digest about Pestalozzi villages that provide orphans with a homelike environment that’s more interesting than typical family life.
In addition to that, she’s seen The Sound of Music eight times, and she identifies wholeheartedly with the blonde and airy Julie Andrews, who gets to be stepmother to seven charming children who adore her without having had to give birth herself.
She wants to be adored.
Unbeknownst to herself, she thinks (and is right) that vulnerable children must be the most faithful devotees.
She’s familiar with Switzerland’s tranquil, open expanses from the helicopter view of Julie Andrews standing in a blooming meadow, opening her arms and her heart to the wondrous world around her.
And she knows Switzerland’s characteristic scent: it smells a little of library dust and a lot of edelweiss and goat milk—after all, she’s read Heidi dozens of times.
The setting sun casts a purple glow over the parks. The train has left Basel and chugs on to Bern.
Her suitcase is heavy, even though it’s made of faux leather.
She borrowed it from Father, and there’s a poorly scrubbed-off Stalinist Mosfilm studio logo decal on one side depicting an athletic man and an equally athletic woman defying capitalism and the wind, their hands held high.
She stands on the platform, her suitcase at her feet, and tries not be afraid.
Trains pull into the station.
The hiss of braking trains, the unceasing stream of people, and the conductors’ shrill whistles encase her in a suffocating dome.
She’s been traveling for three days, alone, mute, and sunburned, and she’s waiting to tell the person sent to meet her, Yes, Switzerland is a very beautiful country, but Finland’s nature is softer.
But no one comes.
No one looks at her expectantly, with delight.