Read Popular Music From Vittula (2004)

What do You think about Popular Music From Vittula (2004)?

Detta är en väldig nöjsam bok, som utspelar sig i Pajalatrakten under 1960-70 talet. Boken baseras på Mikael Niemis egen barndom, reflektioner och händelser, men bör betraktas också som en konstruktion av påhittade utsagor. Läsarinriktad både mot ungdomar som vuxna, och som jag ser det, en tidig klassiker i den svenska litteraturvärlden. Rolig och overklig i vissa sammanhang, där memoaren har fått en berättelse. Boken hoppar fram i huvudkaraktärens liv under etapper och väver in Tärendöområdets historia. Mitt betyg har även en nostalgisk värde i sig, eftersom jag befann mig just i området under sommaren, medan jag läste boken. En första bok för mig av författaren och har därefter följt läsningen av han litterära verk.
—Mika Harjula

I didn’t get this book – at all. Everyone from the New York Times to Entertainment Weekly waxed poetic about its beauty and prose that “buzzes with wonder, fearlessness and ecstatic ignorance.” Um. I didn’t get it.Translated from the Swedish, Popular Music from Vittula is a “novel” that actually seems more like a memoir – or a series of loosely connected short stories – because if there was a narrative thread here, I wasn’t seeing it.The main character and narrator is Matti and we meet him as an adult “in a fix in the Thorong La Pass” (which is on Mount Annapurna, Nepal) where he finds himself 17, 765 feet above sea level, with his lips stuck to a Tibetan prayer plaque. I am sure what happens next is meant to be comical but, sadly, I didn’t laugh. And I didn’t laugh at any of the other crazy escapades Matti finds himself embroiled in from the age of five straight through to his teenage years.Matti and his friend, Niila, meet at the neighbourhood playground and their friendship is cemented during a nose-picking session. The rest of this story traces their frienship, particularly their love for music, for the next decade or so. Their otherwise straightforward lives are touched by elements of magical realism. (Did these two five year olds really manage to get on a plane and fly all the way to Frankfurt?)Matti’s story dips in and out of his life, giving the reader a chance to experience the first time he ever heard Elvis Presley sing (in his sister’s bedroom), the first time he goes to school, his first kiss. I wish I could say that the book was more than the sum of its parts, but for me I just didn’t get it.
—Christie

Matti grows up in a tiny town in the remote north of Sweden in the 1960s and 70s. The chapters in this book are more like little short stories about different aspects of his childhood and adolescence, chronicled with humour and the occasional forays into strange, magical realism-inspired fantasy sequences. The inhabitants of his town and the surrounding areas seem to be either deeply puritanically religious or Communists, not caring for the trappings of religion at all. The gruff and peculiar inhabitants are set in their ways and far too prone to alcoholism. There's the story of Matti's near-mute best friend Niila, whose father, a lapsed preacher, is so domineering and abusive that neither of the many children of the family speak much, and Niila first learns to speak in Esperanto, through lessons he overhears on the radio in Matti's house. We hear about Matti and Niila's childhood discoveries of rock music, with the hits of Elvis Presley and the Beatles making a huge impact on their lives, inspiring them to form a band. There's the friendly rivalry of adolescent boys, and the organised warfare with airguns that the teens orchestrate in the neighbourhood. There's the summer when Matti is trying to make enough money for a guitar of his own, and engages in devious and gory rat extermination to keep the cabin of a visiting German author vermin free. Because the book is occasionally a straight-forward coming of age narrative about boys in a rural area in the 60s and 70s, but then all of a sudden veers into some dreamlike sequence where a boy gets trapped in a furnace for a winter and starts growing roots, or there is a cross-dressing witch in the woods who can exorcise ghosts, it's hard to pinpoint what the book is actually trying to be. As such, I found the book more frustrating than satisfying. The jumps in narrative, where the story will in one chapter talk about Matti's childhood, then his teens, then back again to earlier in his life, in very strange, seemingly unconnected episodes (all with the common denomination that they're set in Vittula, where he comes from) made the book confusing and while I appreciate the writer's skill, this book just didn't really work for me.
—Malin