First of all, are you sure that you want to read this book?
“What do you mean” damn book ‘? “She asks bewildered and terrified literature professor, Mickel Backman, his student Pasi. To which the young man replied: “whoever reads it goes to hell .” In that moment of conversation in the middle of a class, the life of the two protagonists changed forever.
Pasi asked about a book that no one should speak. A dangerous and linked to the darkest secrets of Professor book, including a romance that kept twenty years ago, with one of his students included.
Pasi is a student without clear goals in life trying to survive in an environment that you crave hostile and depressing. Tired of his own existence, it has finally managed to find a motivation in an author known not so much for his work, but by they have poisoned a newly married couple socialite and a dozen guests at the wedding.
So, throughout the novel, the mission of Pasi becomes discover what’s in the manuscript that seems to hide between his verses a dark magnetism between who reads and manages to bring out the worst of every human being. Especially why Backman teacher does not want to come to light. But it is too late, the damn book has already begun to wreak havoc on campus.
When it seemed that there was little to be invented in the Nordic crime novel, comes this young author Kaj Korkea-aho, still unknown in Spain, with a fresh and provocative novel. Quedaros well with the name, for sure you’re going to hear more times.
In 2014 it was included in the anthology Granta Finland as one of the twenty best young Finnish novelists. His works of high literary quality, are considered an original combination of thriller and horror, in addition to gathering elements of satire, social criticism and tragedy as the highest suicide rates in the Nordic countries.
So the damn book is not just what its name suggests, it is also a review bitter to the so – called ‘welfare society’ in the Nordic countries and obsession with productivity of modern capitalism. In fact, even beyond half of the book, not the real mystery begins the event.
Until then you will find phrases with as much personality and cynicism: “while peers of the same age doing something, became someone and commenting on Facebook, more clearly I saw that ‘later’ was becoming ‘too late’ and I was going his way to becoming a humiliating ‘never’ or that ironic student activism to save the machine … maybe it was the result of his feeling of helplessness”.
If you finally dare to read it and, with the protagonists, you want to immerse yourself in those damned verses, you can read their front pages. The decision is in your hands.