The Human Part by Kari Hotakainen

In its opening paragraph, The Human Part’s octogenarian protagonist Salme dismisses the world of fiction in its entirety. Fiction means lies, lies are bad, the truth should be enough. However, after an unnamed author persuades her to sell him her life story so that he can mould it into a novel of his own, her truth is revealed to be as imperfect and subjective as anyone else’s.

As the novel jumps between the viewpoints of herself and her story’s other characters - primarily her children - the line between truth and fiction is blurred; we’re never sure how much of their tale is their own account and how much is the product of the author’s own extrapolations. The result is an intelligent and keen-witted examination of the nature of fiction and the ethics of roman á clef writing, as well as the nature of language itself.

It’s Salme herself that gives the novel an emotional pull to match its intellectual heft: speaking with the matter-of-fact simplicity of a woman whose ideas of the world have been solidified beyond scrutiny by eighty years of life experience, she makes an engaging and endearing narrator for an engaging and endearing novel.