I have always loved languages and I have loved to travel. My "first love" in this respect was England. I visited London for the first time when I was seven and since then wanted to return -again and again. With my interest in the country grew interest in the English language. I still remember the first book I ever read in English. It was The Turning Point by Arthur Laurents, and I was perhaps 13 or 14 years old. My English skills weren't very good at the time, but it was a novel about the world of ballet (I took ballet lessons at the time and dreamed about being a ballerina) and I absolutely wanted to know how the story ended. Somehow I struggled through the whole book, but I did understand enough to know what happened in the story. Let's just say that that experience was very encouraging and little by little I began to read more and more novels in English.
Next came Norway. Finland is a bilingual country with two national languages. Whereas most of us are Finnish speakers there is also a Swedish speaking minority and everybody learns at least some Swedish (or in the case of Swedish speakers some Finnish) at school. Swedish and Norwegian are rather close to each other and I had always been used to hearing Swedish spoken, but when I first heard Norwegian I really liked the sound of it. I was also very much into the Viking period in Norvegian history. I ended up spending a semester as an excange student in Norway studying the language and history at the University of Oslo.
But my enthusiasm with countries and languages did not end there. Italy followed. For five consecutive years I just had to get to Rome! And for three of those years I took evening classes in Italian. Then I got interested in the French language and for the past few years I have grown to love Paris and have tried to learn some French by myself. And now, my latest favorite country outside my own is Slovenia. Since my first trip to Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, last November, I have tried to learn more about this tiny nation. I find the Slovene language fascinating. It is a South Slavic language and totally different from any language I know. At the moment I know only a few words, but I would love to learn more Slovene in the future. We'll see how that goes... But lately I have also grown more and more interested in the history of the Balkan region as a whole, especially the disintegration of Yugoslavia and I have found some really interesting novels about the Balkans in the 1990s.
I started by reading The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic. I read this in Finnish for one of my two reading groups. It is a story of a group of young Yugoslav exiles trying to cope in a foreign country. Just recently I found the book in sale in a book store. They had it both in Finnish and in English translations, but the English one was cheaper, so I ended up buying that.
This summer I coutinued this one person reading challenge of my own with Stillness, an absolutely "must read" collection of short stories by Courtney Angela Brkic about how war affects people's lives and minds. It is a wonderful book that I know I will be returning to time and again in the future.
I now have two more novels about the Balkans on my to read list: Pretty Birds by Scott Simon and Sarabande by Marcus Fedder. I'll talk more about those later, but this time I want to write a few words about The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway. I started reading the book last weekend and since then I spent more or less every spare minute I had in my at the moment rather full schedule reading it. It is a story about three persons during the siege of Sarajevo. Arrow is a young woman enlisted as a sniper to defend the city, Kenan a familyman facing the difficult and dangerous task of having to go and get water for his family, and Dragan is an older man whose wife and son got out of Sarajevo at the last moment and now live in Italy. Through these individuals Galloway tells a powerful, amazing, heartbreaking, and very important story about the absurdity of war. The Cellist of Sarajevo is a brilliant book, absolutely brilliant. It's been many hours since I finished it, but the emotions I felt while reading are haunting me still. The Cellist of Sarajevo is no doubt the best book I have read this year and will probably be among my all time favorites! A highly recommended read!
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