I’ve been holidaying for a couple of weeks,
hence the gap in posting. I visited my sister, among others, who lives in a small
country parish that nonetheless has a nice little library. The library was selling
old books with a very reasonable price: one could fill a plastic bag with books
for two euros; they provided the bag. Who could resist?
The selection wasn’t huge – it was a small
library, after all – but there were, for example, old leather-bound editions of
classics. They were tempting, but I knew I wouldn’t read them and I only have
so much room on my shelves. So, heroically, I resisted. My sister, a teacher,
wasn’t as strong and she filled most of our bag with material she thought she
could use in her teaching.
Since the bag was almost full now, it was easier
to concentrate on books that I would actually read. So I picked a book I had
loved as a preteen, but hadn’t come across since. My best friend had won a copy
on some school related competition and she let me read it; I, in turn, borrowed
it to my sister who remembered it fondly too. Unsurprisingly, as seems to be
the theme of this blog, it was a fantasy book, written especially for – maybe –
under-fifteen-year-olds. It’s by a Finnish author Aila Meriluoto and,
unfortunately, only available in Finnish.
The book Vihreä tukka (Green Hair), published in
1982, tells a story of Eintel, a girl with a green hair her grandmother dyes
and covers with a scarf so that no one in the country with an oppressive regime would find
out she has some fairy blood in her. She thinks she’s the only one of her kind
in the world, but then discovers the fairies.
It’s a very lyrical and beautiful fairy-tale, a
story of acceptance and a romance too; Eintel falls in love with a fairy boy.
Fairies are the good creatures in the story; Eintel's human world is that of
fear, so it surprised me to later learn that in general fairies are considered
creatures that can’t be trusted. The influence of the book was so strong, long
after I’d forgotten the story itself. I look forward to reading it again, to find
out if it’s as good as I remember.
We got other books too. My husband found The
Space Merchants by Fredereik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, which it turned out we
already had, but he didn’t mind. And I bought Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,
though I can’t really say why. Because it was there, perhaps. Maybe I’ll even
get around to reading it one of these days. But for now, I think I’ll read some
Jude Devereaux I also got, because – hey – it’s summer.
