Narrator in Saara Turunen's novel The Side Person is a young woman who is not the main character in anyone's life, hardly her own. She lives for herself, has gone through several artistic education, drilled into white classrooms as she says herself, and got a novel published.
But for her parents this is not much, she does nothing, just lethargic, can not support herself and the book Be Now Such There is nothing compared to the children her sisters produce. To a certain extent, she receives derogatory criticism in the country's largest newspaper, the reviewer has never read anything so stunningly boring, a story of how a female I become.
Just then, Turun's first , then award-winning novel was received, and now that she has written her second, from a single-eyed critic's point of view, it might look like yet another novel about how a female self becomes a writer. But read through the narrator's eyes it is a wonderfully fun and sharp touch with a society where it is important to say as little as possible while man - men! - exerts power in the silence and works by creating the shame of the person to be held on the carpet.
The narrator, who never gets a name, is constantly ashamed of her hair and body, of not having children and unable to cook her own bike, of being badly criticized. She is one who experiences standing by, caring for other people's children, writing alone, being outside the broad, manly center of literature. It is a bleak picture that is painted up, something it can withstand regrets, but more to be laughed at.
Turunen is not only a novelist, but also a playwright, and her ability to create small everyday situations and scenes that almost imperceptibly grow into father's is evident. The storyteller goes to a meeting in the housing association, she and a number of older men are there. One of the gentlemen wants to install a wheelchair lifting device; it will be a nuisance because some others claim that the stairwell is too crowded, but perhaps the proposer has shares in a wheelchair company for the lifting device being installed outside the gate and is never used since no wheelchairs can enter the house.
Only a poodle who lives on the second floor sends a shower of urine to the lifting device from time to time. Similarly, Saara Turunen uses her humor as a weapon against representatives of a petrified patriarchy, whether they come to install a washing machine or are female "literary people" who ask questions about the next novel project instead of wanting to talk about the book that exists and which is really worth talking about and enjoying.