Things That Fall From the Sky by Selja Ahava – EUPL

The team behind the European Prize for Literature (EUPL) got in touch to ask if I’d highlight some of the winners of the prize over the past few years, and I was really interested in exploring the list of winners from across Europe. Even better, I got to choose which ones I covered – and one of the first that caught my eye was Things That Fall From the Sky by Finnish writer Selja Ahava. It was published in 2015 and was one of the winners of the EUPL in 2016 – I should note that the prize judges all books in their original language, though I am reading the edition translated by Emily and Fleur Jeremiah. It’s original title is Taivaalta Tippuvat Asiat, which Google translate tells me means much the same thing.

I’ll explain a bit more about the EUPL at the bottom of this post – but, first, my thoughts on Things That Fall From the Sky. Well, my instinctive choice worked because this is a really brilliant novel. Here’s the opening:

“What’s on your mind back there?” Dad asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

Our eyes meet.

“Nothing,” I reply.

We turn off at the petrol station. You go right here for Extra Great Manor, left for Sawdust House. These days we mostly turn right.

Adults are always asking what children are thinking. But they’d be worried if they got a straight answer. If you’re three and it’s a windy day, it’s not a good idea to stare at the horizon and say, ‘I’m just wondering where wind comes from.’ You’re better off claiming you’re pretending to be a helicopter. And when you’re five, don’t ask too many questions about death or fossils, because grown-ups don’t want to think about dying, or characters in fairy tales getting old, or how Jesus died on the cross. When I was little, I thought Mum’s grandma was a fossil, because she died a long time ago. But these days I know you can get fossils with ferns, snails or dinosaurs in them, but not grandma ones. Or human ones, for that matter.

Saara narrates the first section of the novel. She is a young girl whose mother has died – as we learn, through a freak accident. A block of ice fell from the sky, crashed through their roof, and crushed Saara’s mother. It sounds like a fate one might find in a fairy tale, but it has had a real and disastrous effect on Saara’s life – and she is scrabbling to make sure she remembers what her mother was like. Her chapters often end with a simple description – what her mother’s fingernails looked like, or her morning routine, or how she liked to garden. Saara is making an inventory of recollections.

Saara has been compared to the little girl in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and I think they have more in common than being Finnish. She sees the world with a vivid child’s eye – which has clear vision, but also has yet to form rigid expectations of reality. The details she picks up are a little surreal, like the sawdust that fills their home from all the building work, but she is matter-of-fact too. Ahava has captured a wonderful voice, and it’s that commitment to her voice that lets the reader accommodate the strangeness of the premise.

Saara’s mum isn’t the only woman in the family who has had something very unusual happen to her – Saara’s aunt has won millions on the lottery. This is a far happier piece of chance, of course, but its impact is no less confusing for the people involved. In the middle section, the aunt – Annu – writes to a Scottish man who has been struck by lightning four times, finding a kindred spirit in anyone who has experienced the statistically very improbable. These letters also reminded me of Tove Jansson, in Letters to Klara, and they are a delight that also has significant philosophical undertones.

The final section is narrated by Saara’s new step-mother, some time later. I think she is perhaps the least compelling of the three women who accompany us through the three sections, though this may be because she is the last. She has her own very unusual circumstances, but I won’t spoil them.

At the heart of Things That Fall From The Sky is how people deal with the bizarre – how their worldview can expand to give room for the extraordinary. And the prose and characters that Ahava has created seem both dreamlike and vividly real – I don’t really understand how that combination is achieved, but it is done with astonishing consistency and assurance. I loved spending time in this world, and the way Ahava balances genuine pathos with a fairytalesque surreality is truly wonderful. I was certainly moved by the novel.

I’ve got a couple other EUPL winners to read, and if they’re all as good as Ahava’s novel then I’m very excited for what I have ahead of me.

The European Prize for Literature (EUPL) is an annual prize that awards emerging authors from across 41 countries in Europe – see the video above for a bit about how it works.