By Monika Fagerholm; tran. by Katarina E.Tucker

A member of the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, Monika Fagerholm first rose to prominence with her 1994 novel Underbara kvinnor vid vatten. 2004’s The American Girl, translated by Katarina E. Tucker, is first in a two-part series that centers on an area of rural Finland known only as The District, a watery, woodsy place that is a vacation haven for some, and a land of mystery and buried secrets for others.

Set in the 1970s, The American Girl follows Doris Flinkenberg and Sandra Wärn, two lonely girls with morbid interests and dangerously perceptive imaginations. Sometimes calling themselves Doris Night&Sandra Day, or Sandra Night&Doris Day, they bond over hidden knowledge discerned in marshes, abandoned houses, an empty swimming pool, in yards of colorful fabric, and in things left unsaid. To a pair of girls on the brink of adolescence, living in an era of uncertainty, the world can be understood as a game. The whereabouts of Sandra’s mother, for instance, and, of course, Eddie de Wire, a lost American girl who becomes the third sister Doris and Sandra construct between them, the teen in the red raincoat who left behind only clothing and a homemade record singing Look, Mom, what they’ve done to my song. They’ve destroyed it.

This novel follows Sandra and Doris as they navigate a society that, like them, is struggling to understand its own anxieties and sexuality. The American Girl has been called a “radioactive fairy tale” that views the tragedies of a small Finnish town through the lens of a child’s dark innocence.

But still, though you did not hear what the girls were saying to each other there where they were in their private shade off to the side in the garden, did you not discover, just by looking at them and their facial expressions, something muffled and alarming so to speak, something nevertheless a bit terrifying in the middle of all the light, summer, and fun? Something at least a bit ominous, which cast somewhat longer shadows in the bright day than what was normal.

Maybe so. Just tell the girls. In fact, it would have made them proud and interested to hear it.

Their story is suffused with a gothic surrealism, from “the house in the darker part of the woods” to a boy’s obsessively detailed neighborhood maps, complete with a female figure at the bottom of a lake.

The structure of The American Girl expands on this otherworldly quality. Though non-linear, the movement of the plot comes as close as possible to mirroring the organic evolution of an individual’s life. The narrative is peppered with fragments of songs, nontraditional grammar, and unusual spellings. Thoughts, events, and ideas (like the telephone number that doesn’t exist and the glitter scene) recur time and again, as something new recalls something old. The way we process and base our perceptions of the present, after all, comes from our experiences, sensations, and remembered fragments of the past. (When parting ways with a friend, perhaps forever, Sandra realizes that what she just said “sounded like a sentence out of a Hemingway novel. It was a line out of a Hemingway novel. The last line in The Sun Also Rises.”) Despite its expansive scope – following not only Sandra and Doris but also several acquaintances and family members and the unfolding of an era – Fagerholm skillfully maintains her focus and manages to build an atmosphere of compressed intensity and emotional intimacy.

Widely regarded back home in Scandinavia as being at the forefront of Swedish-Finnish literature, Monika Fagerholm’s introduction to English-speaking audiences is overdue. The American Girl is a bold and ambitious endeavor that will enthrall any reader looking for style, substance, and Scandinavian mystery.

Reviewed by Eileen Fay

The American Girl by Monika Fagerholm; trans. by Katarina E.Tucker
Other Press, 2010
Paper, 528 pp, $15.95
ISBN-13: 9781590513040