Published in 1993, ‘Urwind‘ is a novel written in Swedish by Finnish author Bo Carpelan: it won the ‘Finlandia Prize‘ in 1993. Born and grown up in Helsinki, Carpelan was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author of poetry, children’s books, novelist, dramatist, critic and translator. Doctor of philosophy and head librarian of the Helsinki central library, Bo Carpelan always returned to the big questions in life: at the beginning, he wrote in a modernist style, later developing a more epic language. ‘Urwind‘ comprises fifty-three letters from Daniel Urwind, an aging bookseller, to his wife, who has left him for an indeterminate spell of greater freedom and study in the United States. The wife’s absence haunts the letters, which are often tales of Daniel’s daily rituals. Yet Daniel’s narration of such mundanities (changing the bookshop window dressing, or housekeeping) approaches magical realism; memories of his wife, fantasies, bad dreams, monologues, and dialogues with the living and the dead coalesce in a complex layering of experience, past and present. ‘Urwind‘ is a construct worthy of Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and a painful chronicle of the ending of a love.
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