In Pirkko Saisio's Backlight, the second volume in what is known as her Helsinki Trilogy, she continues her works of autofiction depicting her tumultuous emergence into adulthood as a queer woman artist in the latter half of the 20th century.
Backlight finds teenage Pirkko leaving her native Finland to work in an orphanage in Switzerland, grappling with both her sexuality and her aspiration to find her voice as a writer. Her travels mirror her internal landscape, as she longs for independence and struggles to make herself understood in German throughout her messy journey of self-discovery.
Saisio is a much beloved writer of literature and dramatic works in Finland, and her prose, translated in all three volumes with sensitivity and skill by Mia Spangenberg, is lyrical and unflinching, creating an intimate intensity that expresses Saisio's talent as a dramaturge. Backlight's narration alternates between describing the protagonist as "she" and "I," which nods toward the nature of memory and how, as time passes, people become characters to themselves in their own recollections. The fragmented, episodic structure reflects the often-disjointed nature of memory itself, forming an engaging and immersive narrative.
Readers who have accompanied Saisio (The Red Book of Farewells; Lowest Common Denominator) through her previous translated works will find Backlight an essential piece of her extraordinary literary mosaic. For first-time readers, it's a captivating entry point into the world of a someone who, like Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen, captivatingly blurs the boundaries between lived experience and art. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.