© Jonne Räsänen / Otava
Historical Fiction | Petra Rautiainen
A masterful account of Norwegian Lapland in the 1980s, its Kven minority and their integration into the society, the inheritance of trauma, oil drilling and the early stages of marine protection.
Memory of Ocean (Meren muisti) 300 pages | To be published in Finnish by Otava in August 2022
Northern Norway in the 1980s: Aapa, a woman of Kven origin, returns to northern Norway to explore the Arctic oil reserves after a decade of absence. In the meantime, Norway has been enriched with oil, and nothing is as it used to be. Aapa faces the trauma of the past in her hometown, and little by little it becomes apparent that things are not exactly the way Aapa lets the reader understand. She proves to be an unreliable narrator who intentionally twists the past. But what has really happened to her late mother? A travel diary takes the reader aboard an Icebreaker in quest of oil in the Artic Ocean where the sun never rises. In a second plotline, an unknow narrator examines the changes caused by global warming in the Artic Ocean for a documentary and reveals that the biggest players of the oil industry were already in 1959 aware of their dangerous impact on nature and climate change. Instead of acting, the industry opted for a strong counter narrative. Like Land of Snow and Ashes, Memory of Ocean reads like a thriller and only at its very last pages reveals a baffling twist which overthrows all previous assumptions.
6
PETRA RAUTIAINEN (b. 1988) comes from a small town in Eastern Finland. She has a Master’s degree in History and Cultural Studies and is currently working on her doctoral theses on representations of the Sámi people in the Finnish media. She has also worked as a journalist and studied creative writing.
‘I know there is more than one way to die under the sea.’
