Alexandra Salmela

The novel Antisankari (”antihero”) is about cowards, apathetic erratics and frustrated little punks who, in the intoxicating night of magnificent Koro Novo, run into each other and into the dirty tracks left by a natural disaster that happened twenty years prior. At the time, many disappeared during the labour pains of Koro’s nature-socialist neighbouring country Utopia. The slow unfolding of the identity, history and motivation of the main narrator is the driving force of the novel’s plot.

Climate change, the crumbling of civilisation, wars are not a threat to us – we are already living a dystopia. What chance does a small group of (alternatively) thinking individuals have in the face of billions living blindly? Can the masses, those lemmings happily marching towards the edge of the cliff, be forced to fight for their survival or is the sovereignty of man really untouchable? Meteora is worried about what will happen to the trees; the once dead and resurrected Suunnanantaja (i.e. someone who gives direction) wonders if anything has any meaning, we are all just a tiny spec in space, after all.

The novel’s technique varies from linear narration and diary entries all the way to poetic form and textual collage. The work is very graphic and plays with different types of text, the forms of which are intrinsically tied to content. I want to investigate how the type of writing can replace/enforce the direct description of a situation or state of mind (for example, ”he read distractedly” à the size of the text being read wavers, the text disappears, a certain line is repeated etc. just as someone’s gaze would wonder).