Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
From the Absurd to the Sublime, 10 Mar 2004
This book is incredibly funny! The opening chapter must be one of the most striking in the history of the novel. Just imagine the main character (Matti), on a spiritual trek through the Tibetan mountains. He kneels down to reverently kiss a metal plaque with budhist prayer script (he assumes), and promptly freezes his tongue to the metal. There he is, stuck with his rear poised upward, and the experience triggers, Proust-like, a rememberance of having got his tongue attached to a sub-zero metal object in the far north of Tornedalen, Sweden as a small, disadvantaged working class child. What to do, one asks? Well, in Tornedalen they don't raise no wimps. He decides, very non-spiritually, that in order to save his sorry Finn rear from certain death of exposure, he is going to have to thaw his tongue, and the only solution seems to be to urinate (on all fours) in his drinking cup and... pour it over his tongue!!! And from there it takes off. The novel continues with a hilarious, sad, poignant, and very REAL story about his young man's life up until the point of "Tibetan arrest", and it is always, ALWAYS funny! And how about THAT for an opening chapter!!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Funny with substance, 3 Jul 2004
Popular music from Vittula is both funny and with a good amount of substance. The prologue catches you in an instance with its funny description of the narrator's unlucky mishap in the Himalaya Mountains. Matti, the head figure of the book, looks back at his childhood and youth years growing up in Vittula in the most Northern part of Sweden, bordering Finland. Here the people have little to do, except drink, fight and hold sauna contests. This amounts to numerous funny incidents (rarely have I laughed this much), but not only that, it is at the same time a heartfelt story about the people living in this rugged and remote part of the world. Niemi himself grew up here and the book and the people you meet in it is treated with much warmth and love, even though many of the characters in the book are a bunch of sorry individuals.
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by Muriel Spark
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