The Red Book of Farewells

The final book of an autobiographical trilogy covers the 1970s and 1980s. The narrator studies at the university, acts in the student theatre and tries for a place at drama school, while left-wing student politics run high. She discovers that she loves women at a time when this must be hidden, when being caught can mean a reckoning with her drama teachers, and when gay men and lesbians meet in secret in a wooden house on Kalevankatu, where an organisation for their rights is being planned. There is the woman with clown eyes who shows her another world, and later Havva, with whom she plans to have a child. Told in lyrical fragments by an older narrator who views her young self with gentle irony, it is also a book of many partings.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

298 pages in the original

Genres

Autofiction, Love, Politics (assigned by AI)

Set in

Finland, 1970s–1980s

First published

2003 by WSOY

Author's age

54 when first published

ISBN

9789510282373 (original)

9781949641462 (Two Lines Press, United States)

9780241730119 (Penguin Classics, United Kingdom)

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Wikidata