Kohtuuttomuus

Helsinki in the 1990s. A middle-aged journalist, cultivated and unsure of himself as husband and father, sees a stranger on Hakaniemi market square and feels something close to a religious conversion. The man is tall and fair, with startling blue eyes, dimples and a magnetic voice, and the narrator abandons his old life to serve him. As his researcher he helps him first onto the television screen and then into politics, until the idol is a household name and a cabinet minister, with the narrator at his elbow. Their partnership ends when crime and extortion threaten a scandal. Looking back with Dostoevskian severity, the narrator picks apart his own conduct but never answers the riddle: why was an educated sceptic so helpless before a manipulative narcissist?

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

583 pages in the original

Genres

Satire, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Finland, 1990s

First published

2008 by Siltala

Author's age

59 when first published

ISBN

9789522340009 (original)