How Finland rebranded itself as a literary country (2018) | Hacker News Reader

How Finland rebranded itself as a literary country (2018)

theparisreview.org

50 pointsmacbookaries52 comments

Wow, didn't know you could get advertising copy published in as an article in the Paris review, guess you find advertorials everywhere.

Because this article certainly gave up any pretence of being a neutral account about halfway trough.

I enjoyed the piece because I love these types of feel good national narratives, but yeah the hypemanship here is hard.

It's an essay published in the "Arts & Culture" section of a literary review. It's not "hard news". It's not supposed to be neutral.

I think what the OP takes issue with is not the opinionated nature of the article, it is the fact that the Paris Review (long famed for its rigorous editorial policy) gave space to blatant advertising.

Please don't post shallow dismissals. If you don't like an article, there are many others to look at. Posting just to complain like this lowers the quality of the threads, especially because indignation attracts upvotes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> In Finland, we’ve been known only for Nokia phones.

What about Linux?

Wasn't Torvalds already working abroad by the time Linux became a major phenomenon (as opposed to a hacker's curiosity)?

It depends where you want to set the goalposts for a major phenomenon. Linus moved to the US in 1997 to work for Transmeta, while Linux hit 1.0 in 1994, and Red Hat got its start in 1993. The dot com boom was in full swing in 1999 when Red Hat went public. The rise of Linux really does parallel the rise of the public internet, which first became public in 1994.

Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that

Linus perfectly embodies the Finnish spirit.

http://staefcraeft.blogspot.com/2013/07/linus-torvalds-there...

Finnish sauna is better than Swedish sauna.

His mother tongue is Swedish, but he is (or at least was) a Finn. Finland is a bilingual country. Well, if you don't count the Sami. If you do, you get more languages.

> His mother tongue is Swedish

Which is the definition of being an ethnic Swede. He's part of the relatively small Swedish minority in Finland. I was never contesting his Finnish nationality.

Most Fennoswedic families moved ~400 years ago from Sweden to Finland. According to that logic, Americans would actually be native Britons? Sounds wrong to me.

The Finnish context and the American one aren’t really comparable. The USA is an 18th-century project where there was little emphasis on ethnicity. Modern Finland, on the other hand, is the project of 19th- and early 20th-century nationalism where the independent nation would be a home for specifically the ethnic Finnish people, while still providing rights and recognition for the ethnic Swedes (and, by the late 20th century, for the Saami). Complicating matters still further, some of the ideologues of an independent Finland for Finns, were ethnic Swedes who "switched sides", as it were.

wassenaar10’s two posts above are quite reasonable and on-topic, though I can understand how they might sound odd or offensive to people unfamiliar with Finland.

I am pretty sure that "Linus is an ethnic Swede, can't have that" was destined to sound offensive also to a fair number of people familiar with Finland, and that this was a predictable result. You also in passing manage to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state while revealing a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history. Please join wassenaar10 in resisting the impulse to visit your parochial resentments upon us and most certainly do not do so while appealing for tolerance under the banner of our 'unfamiliarity' with Finland. We are familiar enough with trolls and do not need to know any more than that.

> cast aspersions on the legitimacy of Finland as a nation-state

I don't know where you got that from. Finland is no less legitimate than all the other European countries whose independence movements arose in the 19th century, like Poland or those which emerged from Austro-Hungary. Finland is a fairly typical European nation-state.

> a comprehensive lack of familiarity with American history.

Ethnicity did not play the same role in the American War of Independence as it did in the 19th-century European independence movements, for the simple reason that that new notion of ethnicity did not arise until the age of Romanticism and the years immediately preceding 1848.

> your parochial resentments

I don’t share the resentments to which wassenaar10 may allude. I am not saying that he is correct, only that his view is one that exists in the Finnish context.

> We are familiar enough with trolls

"Troll" has a very specific meaning in internet parlance and is not merely anyone that you think is wrong.

Culturally Swedish speaking Finns are much closer to Finns than to Swedes, 90% of the time. Add to the fact that a majority of them are fluently bilingual, and I'd call it somewhat of a stretch to characterize them as "ethnic Swedes". Source: live in Finland, speak both languages.

There’s a big difference, though, between Finland Swedes from Uusimaa who are well on the way to total assimilation, and e.g. those from Nykarleby whose contact with the Finnish language is limited and who still look to Stockholm in certain ways.

Yeah, that's definitely true. Iirc Torvalds belongs to the former, though.

Linus seems to disagree:

Question: You were born in Finland, but your mother tongue is Swedish. Do you call yourself a Finn, or a Swede? What is it like to be a Swede in Finland?

Torvalds: Oh, I’m a Finn, definitely. When Finland beats Sweden in ice hockey, it’s a national holiday, and Swedish-speaking Finns are celebrating. I only speak Swedish; there are no ties to the country of Sweden. And don’t say “Swede in Finland,” it’s really “Swedish-speaking Finn” (“finlandssvensk” in Swedish, “suomenruotsalainen” in Finnish).

https://www.linux.com/news/interview-linus-without-linux/

And SSH and IRC.

Pirate Bay is the ultimate literary critic. "Nobody steals bad books", says Palahniuk, the most fleeced author of all times.

Finland has only one author at that level: Sofi Oksanen.

In comparison, Sweden has Hundreds and Norway has about three.

Edward Dutton, an Englishman living in Finland has had some success. But the book was about Islam, and it was leeched like crazy, probably millions. Then the book was banned from Amazon and removed from PP. Baddest of the non-bad books.

Sharing frequency (Pirate Bay) is a measure of popularity. If popularity and critical success were the same best seller lists would be topped by literature Noble prize laureates.

It's also popularity... among bittorrent users, which is a fairly particular subset of the population.

Why should one care about critical success and Nobel prize?

I could float some ideas, but it doesn't seem to pertain to the discussion.

If you posit a thesis that critical acclaim is a better measure of whether a book is good than popularity, it makes sense to explain why.

I'll back GP's thesis.

The global median reader has poor reading comprehension skills and has read few other books. Their main concern is entertainment. Entertaining as many readers as possible in order to be popular requires writing about broad-interest subjects using surface level knowledge.

Dedicated literary critics have read many more books than average and are better at extracting meaning from what they read. They're looking for "quality," which is nebulous but distinct from entertainment value, and they're less likely to be put off by abstract concepts or complexity. Specialized critics are better; if you want a sci-fi book you ask a sci-fi reader.

As anecdotal evidence I submit the sales figures of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Just like with any other media, popular and good aren't always the same, despite there being a fairly close relationship between the two.

The reason for why critical acclaim is a better measure of whether a book is good than popularity is because critical acclaim is explicitly and directly concerned with assessing the quality of the product. As opposed to popularity, which has zero explicit relationship to the quality, it is only concerned with the raw demand numbers.

Just because mcdonalds is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) restaurants in the world, it doesn't mean that the quality of food there is better than that at a random much less popular Michelin star restaurant.

In the same vein, Transformer movie series is of a pretty terrible quality, but it is insanely more popular than something very critically acclaimed like Parasite. Just looked up numbers, and the first Transformers movie alone (from 2007) had about $700mil in worldwide sales, as opposed to about $250mil for Parasite. And mind you, Parasite wasn't some unknown indie movie that was critically acclaimed. It was one of the most popular critically acclaimed movies out there.

You misread. I didn't say that critical acclaim or popularity are measures for whether a book is good, whatever that means. I said that critical acclaim and popularity are distinct.

This is actually a fair question. I think both of these things aren't necessarily worth caring about, though they can be indicators of quality. And that's the question--is it critical reception or popularity that proves a book's worth?

But here's a deeper question for you: is a book great if it was only popular in its era?

Most people seem to agree that the greatest books are the ones that outlive their authors, which means that popularity and even critical reception in the short-term matter very little.

At a glance "Pirate Bay is the ultimate literary critic." makes sense, but it's not the whole truth. But there are bunch of things that should be also considered such as number of books available on Pirate Bay, type of books available, and then the cross section of Pirate Bay users that are interested in those books.

> “Nobody steals bad books”

The popularity of something has nothing to do with its quality.

More than that, if you’re indeed going by the MC Donalds way of measuring things, you’re bound to be much more interested in:

> “Today Finland’s literary exports have tripled in size...”

Than how many people steal your books. Popularity that you can not turn into profit is completely useless in any professional sort of way.

“Quality” in this context simply means popularity - among literary critics. There’s no objective standard of measurement for literature.

Popular books aren’t better or worse than “good” books, they’re a different product. Could Michael Crichton have won the Nobel prize? Or could the Nobel prizewinner for literature write - and sell - a massive hit like Jurassic Park?

As the article points out, popularity is requires talent and promotion. Sofi Oksanen is both talented and works so hard in promoting his work.

Sweden has so big lead in the tradition and skill in marketing that it's not even funny. There is this romantic idea that if you do good art, it will be recognized organically. But people want to read what others read. Good writer must be popular to sell books.

> Sofi Oksanen is both talented and works so hard in promoting his work.

Her.

Context: the Finnish language has no gendered pronouns so confusing he/she in English is a common mistake.

Yes. I have to make a mental pause before saying or writing he/she in English. It feels weird to have to think about gender so explicitly when talking and writing.

I don't see any evidence that you can promote genders equality meaningfully by changing the language, but I believe there is some truth to the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the theory that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality).

They/them works if you don't want to think about it. A very few people take offence because they assume you're taking a political stance; a few more are unaware singular they has a many centuries of history in English and may correct you.

It may seem odd to some in English in contexts where the gender is well established and/or obvious, but they'll get over it.

>They/them works if you don't want to think about it.

Except that's it's typically used a plural. Referring to one person as multiple is weird, awkward and clunky. Or, you're making a multi-personality joke. I thought we were at the point where poking fun at mental illness was a no-no? That's micro-aggression behavior there on your part. So sure, if you don't think about, it works. Just like saying apple instead would work if you don't think about it.

Yes, languages differ. Why anyone still uses accent marks is weird too. Oh well. A few people forcing their own ideals on the masses isn't right either. Two wrongs don't make a right.

>Why anyone still uses accent marks is weird too.

I consider it a lot weirder that letters are pronounced differently depending on which word they are used in.

Yet the world keeps spinning just fine since it was adopted as the main language of the world. French has its own insanities and it was the lingua franca beforehand. Looks more like the more weird a language is, the more likely it will be internationally adopted. Every language has its quirks. The mere concept that a handful of people should have the dictative right to alter any of them in their own image, with force adoption by all, is far more insane than the quirks themselves. If you learn the history of the standardization of spelling, most of the fuckups we groan about to this day you can find roots in some authoritative asshole going, "You know, English needs to be a lot more like XYZ language." You see this is many words where they try to formalize English spelling using Greek and Latin spelling principles or word origins. Even if the English word was never derived from Greek or Latin, but it made it look better. Off top of my head when I read about this long ago, the word island. It's like isla or isula for Latin that relates to the concept of an island. So someone thought that English speakers saying, "iland", should add an s in there. The whole English spelling issue is a far more deep rooted and complex problem than your hand-wavy comment gives it credit for. In truth, folks with your attitude are what led us to the current mess because, "they knew better than all those low lives".

As I pointed out, singular they/them has been well established in English for centuries (it dates to the 1300s)

Trying to cater for people who get worked up over singular they/them is not worth the effort.

And how do you feel about the use of "he" as a generic pronoun in reference to an individual of undetermined gender? That has also been well established in English for centuries.

I think "they" is better because it also works even when referring to a specific person whose gender may be known, such as the Finnish author mentioned earlier. Minimal cognitive processing.

I have no objections to it personally, but in the context I proposed they/them, where the point was to not have to think about it, it is not applicable as you then need to consider the distinction between an unspecified person and a named person of unknown gender, where 'he' is not generally applicable, and often comes across as rude and presumptuous if you get it wrong.

> but the book was about Islam

Talk about burying the lead

Googling him leads to his wiki article

> Edward Croft Dutton (born 1980) is an English anthropologist and white supremacist known for authoring controversial racialist articles for fringe far-right journals such as Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych.[1][2] Dutton is associated with the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative.

The NYTimes bestseller list is sort of an indicator what you shouldn't bother reading. Extrapolate as appropriate.

Could you try to explain Palahniuk to me?

I was a young kid in the 80s in Italy and somehow someone mentioned Palahniuk to me. I kept hearing this name for the next several years.

However, I never really understood what's so special about him (not to say that there isn't anything, just admitting ignorance), but also failed to find a news piece or a blog post that would clearly explain it.

Palahniuk got his fame almost solely by pirated copies of the "Fight Club". I remember first stealing it from a Russian FTP-site "Deep Repository" in 1996. Pirate Bay came years later.

Literary critics did not get the modern references like "I have constructed my life from Ikea-catalog". And they truly hated misogynist Jordan Peterson - style analysis of man's life "men are all brought up by women" and "everyman lives his days in quiet desperation".

Thanks!

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