A beautiful and decadent Russian princess with a scandalous past, a fog that engulfs everything, a murder, an explorer believed to have died in Africa returns to London... There's basically everything you need for a fun tale of mystery. The plot seems simple at first, but at the end there's a twist, and even after the conclusion the story spins once more. The first chapter's description of being lost in a fog is great, slightly oppressive, which alone would elevate the story even if the mystery itself wasn't good. A great bedtime story, actually.

Kuopion satamassa vilisee. On se aika vuodesta, jolloin tuoreet ylioppilaat lähtevät kohti uusia seikkailuja, ja Antti Ljunberg on yksi heistä. Hössöttävä äiti yrittää parhaansa mukaan huolehtia vielä viimeisen kerran pojastaan ja tämän vaatetuksesta, mutta sillä hetkellä kun Antti astuu laivaan alkaa uudenlainen elämä.

Aho kuvaa vähäeleisesti mutta tehokkaasti humalaista välietappia, joka lipuu kodin ja Helsingin opiskelijaelämän välillä. Antti uhkuu nuoruudenintoa, mutta itsevarmuus osoittautuu laadultaan pinnalliseksi, kun isän mielipide maakauppiaista on otettu kritiikittömästi vastaan ja laivalla mallia yritetään ottaa milloin kenestäkin Antin mielestä tyylikkäästä herrasmiehestä, koska "hän tahtoo näyttää, ettei hän ole nuori eikä kokematon". Naistenkaan kanssa Antti ei tule toimeen ihan niin kuin oli ajatellut, vaikka lapsellisesti kuvitteleekin itsensä Don Juaniksi. Entisestä elämästä on vakaa halu irroittautua, mutta jostain syvältä kumpuaa toisinaan ajatus siitä, mitä perhe kotipuolessa mahtaakaan juuri sillä hetkellä tehdä.

Antin vastakohdaksi päätyy Pekka, joka viinan sijaan juo maitoa ja on muutenkin hyvin pragmaattisen sekä varovaisen lukutoukan oloinen. Pekka hoivaa krapulaista Anttia, mutta Pekan kunnollisuus selvästi tuntuu Antista ainoastaan painolta, joka raahautuu uusista kokemuksista innostuneen nuoren perässä. Leppoisa ja helppo elämäkin vaikuttaa olevan Antin mieleen: "[h]äneen olisi tehnyt vastenmielisen vaikutuksen, jos sohva ei olisi ollut näin siististä sametista ja joka messinkiesine noin kirkkaaksi kiilloitettu". Horisontissa siintävät lokoisat kesälomat hienossa kartanossa. Antin yritykset esittää jotain muuta on ajoittain epämiellyttävää, mutta antaa romaanille monikerroksisemmat puitteet.

Siinä missä Yksin (1890) -romaanissa Aho kuvasi herkästi erään nuorukaisen kulkua Pariisissa, Helsinkiin tuntuu ehkä vieläkin modernimmalta. Ruotsalaisten ja suomalaisten erot ovat tapetilla laivan pöydän ääressä (esim. suomalaisten soveltumattomuus virkamiesaloille), josta päästään siihen, miten ylioppilaiden velkaantuminen ja höllä moraali puhuttavat, ja miten Suomessa pitäisi opiskella enemmän käytännön miehiksi kuin virkamiehiksi. Opintolainat, juhliminen, ja ylikouluttautuminen. Kuulostaako tutulta?

Epävarmuus, vapaudenkaipuu, "merenkäyntiä tyynessä vedessä"... Ahon tarkkanäköisyys ja taito päästä nuoren ylioppilaan nahkoihin on ihailtavaa. Joihinkin asioihin voi samaistua itsekin, kuten siihen miten ylioppilaaksi pääsy oli erään vaiheen päätös, mutta konkreettisesti olo ei tuntunut erikoisemmalta kuin muutoinkaan, eikä kukaan (onneksi) kohdellut jotenkin parempana ihmisenä. Antin kova hinku itsenäistyä on ymmärrettävää, koska onhan siinä oma hohtonsa kun pääsee lapsuudenkodista aloittamaan uudenlaista vaihetta elämässä.

Romaanin huumaava tunnelma on tarttuvaa. Antin saavutettua vihdoin Helsingin punaiset lyhdyt ja juhlien jatkuttua yömyöhään, jää viimeisistä sanoista haikea mieli. Miten meidän nuorelle ylioppilaallemme käy? Saavuttaako hän kaiken haluamansa vai sekoittavatko kaupungin huvitukset pään?

"Poskia lämmitti, ja jäsenet kävivät suloisen raukeiksi. Oli mahdottoman mukavaa tällä tavalla puhallella hienoa sikarinsavua ylös kattoon ja katsella, kuinka sen sitten avonainen ikkuna yhdellä henkäyksellä riipaisi pyöreään kitaansa...

...Hän on merenkulkija maailman aavalla valtamerellä. Hän on ja elää, nauttii nuoruudestaan eikä mistään huoli. Ei sillä väliä, mihin laiva laskee. Aina niitä on keulan edessä päinvänpaisteisia rantoja. Ja vähät siitä, vaikka karillekin kurahtaisi ja laiva hajoaisi pieniksi pirstaleiksi. Tottahan löytyisi joku tyhjä tynnyri hänellekin, jonka päällä kulkea kelluttelisi, mihin myötäinen tuuli puhaltelisi. Ihmisten pitäisi jo nuorina antautua onnensa ohjattaviksi! Mennä vain! Huilata huolimatta mistään!—"

Poetry is a funny thing. I don't read a lot of it, and most of the time it remains elusive and hidden from all understanding. I have had better luck recently, and clearly when a poem hits me, it hits me hard.

Coleridge. The language (which, admittedly, takes a bit of effort) has a rhythm that swallows you into the depth of the rumbling sea and covers you with the smell of salt. It sweeps you off your feet and makes you feel the weight of the albatross around your neck. The melody dances with the sea creatures and good spirits. When the sailors rise, it's time to go home, but the eeriness of the moment promises no happy ending. A ghost ship drenched in a slimy pale green colour is what I envisioned. A little too well for a 2am reading session.

What about the meaning of this all then? There are some obvious interpretations (one of them could not be spelled out more clearly at the end), and which one you choose might depend the most on what the poem makes you feel. I'd personally leave out the "albatross represents Christ" -thing altogether, because it ignores the overwhelming presence of nature.

I guess the conclusion we can draw from this is that I tend to be awestruck by poetry that moves me with its use of language and imagery, instead of being overly closed by metaphors and such.

I'm going to London in August (a girls' trip with mom; lots of pubs and food is expected), so I figured it would be fun to read a pile of books that are about or set in the city. Advance travelling so to speak. It's something that I've never done before, and should get me even more excited about the trip.

My first choice turned out to be not so great, though. Five Hundred Buildings of London is not bad by any means, but for me it was just very uninspiring. The cropping of some of the photos is not always so great, and colour photos would have made the architectural details pop out, but now the buildings look very muted and boring. The structure's a bit off as well: if I wanted to find out more about a building, I had to flip back and forth between that page and the index at the end. That said, there are some interesting and fun tidbits, and some buildings I really want to see some day (like the pink Gothic building!). Overall, though, I wouldn't go out of my way to try and find the book.

My only reason for picking this up was, of course, Joseph (here named John) 'Elephant Man' Merrick. I first became aware of him when I saw the heartbreaking Lynch movie, so naturally I couldn't miss a first-hand account from the doctor who took care of him. I didn't expect, however, the writing to be so vivid and engaging. I was fully prepared for dry-ish essays which would perhaps include a lot of medical details, but instead they are almost in a form of a short story.

There are twelve essays altogether. Treves mostly recounts his experiences with different patients and occasionally starts musing about varied things. Like with most collections, not all of the writings managed to keep me interested, but the overall quality was great.

The Receiving Room describes the age in the mid-19th century before ambulance service. The image is powerful: people who accompany the wounded move like a wave towards the London Hospital and have to be stopped by the porter, two drunken and brawling women covered in blood, one efficient nurse who can handle all kinds of things also likes swigs of gin now and then but is always extremely professional. The unhygienic conditions and the prevalence of sepsis make you grateful of the efforts of the 21st century.

A Cure for Nerves is the story of a woman in her own words, a woman whose situation was much too common back in the day. She is a neurotic woman. Her husband is unsympathetic. He claims her ailments are imaginary and that the illness is a grievance to himself. He's sick of her moanings, and that she's perfectly fine because he is fine (what a load of horseshit logic). All she has to do is pull herself together! He also humiliates her in front of their friends, so he's just an all-round perfect spouse. When she visits a doctor and later remembers the letter that he wrote to recommend her as a patient to another, she finds that in the letter the doctor completely undermines her. The beginning is incredibly depressing but eventually the woman is forced to face her fears and miraculously gets better. Not sure how I feel about that, but an interesting piece nevertheless.

Two Women continues with the sombre mood when Treves examines the traits of her female patients. One of them is a suburban woman who keeps her breast cancer a secret as long as she can to save her husband from grief. The other one is a Whitechapel woman, whose drunk husband beats her (but not much, because then she obviously wouldn't be able to earn a living and support her family). The husband ends up torching his wife during a heated argument, and just before she dies she claims it was an accident.

Now that I'm writing my review a couple of days after finishing the collection, I realize that there's a lot of sadness running through it. There is hope too, like when a patient recovers and personally comes to thank Treves for saving his life, but the melancholy that comes from death, injuries, and broken hearts can't be ignored.

A few times Treves goes into another direction entirely. For example, in one essay he describes a nightmare he once had in India (which reads like a proper horror story), and in another one he discusses the topic of afterlife and apparitions, and makes notes of astronomer Camille Flammarion's article "At the Moment of Death". It appears that Treves didn't believe in the supernatural, but instead leans towards thinking that apparitions don't appear to people that are healthy mentally and physically. He does admit, though, that a negative experience (not seeing anything that would confirm Flammarion's claims) is not an argument. He just simply hasn't seen anything yet.

Despite liking the other essays as well, the one I will remember forever is obviously The Elephant Man. Treves's attitude felt off-putting at first, since he doesn't shy away from constantly poking at Merrick's deformities, calling him "the most disgusting specimen of humanity" he had ever seen and "a perverted object". It's understandable that someone like Merrick might provoke a reaction of some kind from others, but it was uncomfortable to read it from Treves. The tone did change later, when Treves realized Merrick was actually a lot smarter than he seemed.

Never in all his life had Merrick anyone to talk to, but he longed for conversations. He also became an avid reader and ended up loving romances the most (he understood the type of Treves's house in the context of Jane Austen's Emma). The one thing everyone should know about Joseph Merrick, though, is his child-like adoration of things that were taken for granted by others. He went into the theatre and treated everything he saw as something that belonged to the real world, and enjoyed everything he did very deeply. He burst into tears when he met the first woman who had ever smiled to him and shaken his hand.

There is undoubtedly embellishment in all of Treves's essays, and in The Elephant Man he makes it seem like Merrick was a prison of sorts in the Mile End shop, when in fact Merrick himself proposed the owner that he should be exhibited. Still, the core of the story is inspiring. Merrick was taken care of for the rest of his life (thanks to an abundance of donations from the public) and he learned to function in the society. It's unclear what people really thought about him (whether he was still considered an oddity or even a pet), but he seemed to enjoy himself.

His last wish was to see the countryside. The image of him sitting on a field in the sun and gathering violets... That will always be how I'll remember him.

"It would be reasonable to surmise that he would become a spiteful and malignant misanthrope, swollen with venom and filled with hatred of his fellow-men, or, on the other hand, that he would degenerate into a despairing melancholic on the verge of idiocy. Merrick, however, was no such being. He had passed through the fire and had come out unscathed. His troubles had ennobled him. He showed himself to be a gentle, affectionate and lovable creature, as amiable as a happy woman, free from any trace of cynicism or resentment, without a grievance and without an unkind word for anyone. I have never heard him complain. I have never heard him deplore his ruined life or resent the treatment he had received at the hands of callous keepers."

The ending stops you right where you are, and it feels exactly like a sudden flash of light after you've been sitting in the dark. Greene conveys the atmosphere very effectively and the fear of the dark is palpable. It's amazing what is achieved with so few words. All short stories should be like this, and more importantly, all those who hate short stories should find stories like these to understand their appeal.

One of those short and nifty stories that you read and probably like as well, but which you'll forget in the months to come. Pushkin has a much lighter touch than his fellow Russians, and I think that is starting to be a problem for me. Not once did I actually feel the protagonist's greed, and the matter-of-fact ending abruptly wrapped things up.

Rossetti's paintings are out of this world. In his poetry he goes even further by describing intimate relationships. The sensuality was beautiful and it's easy to understand why the poems were controversial (a couple falls asleep after sex etc.), but in the end the purpleness and the excessive praise for love and beauty proved to be too much. Even in small doses.