Being a teenager is often awful, sometimes amazing, but rarely, if ever, dull. The emotions are too huge. At least that’s how I – and Saisio – remember it. Vastavalo/Backlight tells it as a girl at the end of her teens sees it. She’s just graduated from high school, and is about to finally get away from her stupid parents and see the world. Or at least a Swiss orphanage where she can be Julie Andrews to a crowd of adoring little darlings. She’s read Heidi too, and while she was charmed, she knows Finland is better in every way – women got the vote there sixty years ago, while her Swiss sisters have to wait three more decades for theirs. Not that she knows that, yet. Two of her colleagues disappear “raspberry picking,” start wearing matching dresses, and seem to be up all night together. It takes her a while to work out why… or what (if anything) to do about it.
The idyll on the alm is sheltered from the storm of ’68. But when she leaves, she’s glad to be going back there, and she’s growing up.
I read Backlight backwards, in the sense that I read it third, even though it is the second part of a trilogy. This is also the order in which Mia Spangenberg translated the books into English for Two Lines Press, to critical acclaim. She began with the best-known one, Punainen erokirja/The Red Book of Farewells, which is set in adulthood. The child’s-eye view in Pienin yhteinen jaettava/The Lowest Common Denominator came next, and then Vastavalo/Backlight. Now all three books are out in the US, you can read them in any order you please. Penguin is publishing the whole Helsinki Trilogy in chronological order in the UK; the first volume is out in August.
Penguin cites Irène Bluche of rbbKultur on Saisio as “like Annie Erneaux, but funny.” And there’s plenty of humour here as the protagonist’s inner and outer worlds collide, whether she notices or not. Others compared her autofiction to Tove Dietlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy. It’s this part, about being young, starting work, discovering yourself and others, where the comparison fits best.
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
Very tempting
I’d like to know what you think!