LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR
by Pirkko Saisio
Translated from the Finnish by Mia Spangenberg
Two Lines Press. 312 pages, $23.
PIRKKO SAISIO is huge in Finland. The writer, director, and actress rivals Touko Laaksonen (Tom of Finland) as a national queer icon and has been honored in her homeland with numerous awards. With the rolling publication of her Helsinki trilogy in English translations, Two Lines Press is giving English-reading audiences a substantial introduction to Saisio’s work. Lowest Common Denominator is the first novel in the autofictional trilogy, which continues with Backlight and concludes with The Red Book of Farewells. The fine English translations by Mia Spangenberg, with their attentive rendering of ungendered Finnish pronouns, are an elucidating expansion of the queer coming-of-age bookshelf. While Saisio’s intricately remembered, poignantly conveyed story is largely situated in postwar Finland, her candid account of childhood identity formation, with both gender and sexual orientation in discovery mode, is highly relevant in the U.S. today.
Told in 25 chapters, Lowest Common Denominator takes place in the interval from when Saisio, a savvy world traveler, arrives back in Helsinki after a trip to Korea to the time, just days later, when her aging father dies in the hospital. Letting grief guide her into the past, Saisio reanimates meaningful episodes from her early life through the eyes and mind of a child. The throughline is the story of loss and grief, which continues in untitled chapters interspersed among poetically titled chapters that report back from childhood. The chapter “green cap; yellow airplane” introduces the narrator’s attractive young parents: mother in “a white lace blouse, even on weekdays,” father with “thick, curly hair,” as well as Aunt Ulla in the “gorgeous green coat,” and Grandma, Grandpa, and other relatives who make her childhood so lively that she doesn’t realize at first that she’s an only child.
“I would like to be a boy,” the narrator reveals. Responses from family members are mixed. Aunt Ulla says she used to feel the same way. Mother and Grandma throw curlers, ruffles, and florals at the problem. Grandpa tells her that “If [you]want to be a boy, then [you’re] a boy: simple as that.” He buys her a green cap decorated with a yellow airplane—a boy’s cap. She loves it and guards it fiercely. When she dons the hat in front of the mirror, she feels different. In this way, Saisio transports us into her childhood, where we experience how the adults in her life both supported and feared her emerging identity.
Taken in full, the Helsinki trilogy is a bildungsroman, but Lowest Common Denominator stays squarely and wonderfully in childhood. The young narrator is barely out of elementary school in its final pages. Nonetheless, her journey is profound. She pores over a Donald Duck comic about a conflagration, then fears that she has willed a landmark building to burn to the ground. She goes to the amusement park and instead of relishing cotton candy and the carousel, she falls in love with the alluring performer Miss Lunova. She reads Chekhov and, despite all the foreign details, discovers that the mood, the tone, “the sorrow” of the stories were the same as what she was experiencing in her own life. She has a crush on her cousin Helena and on her teacher Aira Hokkanen. Despite her parents’ atheism, she becomes fascinated by Jesus, who “has a beard like a man but a skirt and long hair like a woman. … Jesus is interesting.” As her nonconforming gender identity emerges, her family continues to support her.
Saisio proceeds with her tale, telling colorful stories about events in her life that revealed to her who she is. Details accrue and turn the book into a period piece about Helsinki, where the author lived with her parents, and the nearby village of Mellunkylä, where she spent summers with her grandparents. City life revolves around the Finland-Soviet Union Society, Vaillila Workers’ Theater, Eho Bakery, the Helsinki Hall of Culture, and eventually Saisio Imported Goods, the shop opened by her parents. Village life consists of Grandpa starting the fire in the sauna and Grandma grinding coffee on the front steps or serving “rhubarb soup and cardamom buns with butter.” Father’s prized second-hand car is the conduit between these worlds. “The BMW arrives in a cloud of dust,” Saisio tells us, “but even so, I can see Mother waving at me from the front seat.”
The vignettes come to us one by one, not in strict chronology, but in an autofictional progression that builds our understanding of the author’s creative force, of her working-class family’s storytelling heritage, and of her parents’ talents and ambitions, which launched young Saisio onto her artistic trajectory. Saisio shows us the people who nurtured her and how each one in their unique way both challenged and supported her. Along the way, in a compelling, sometimes dreamlike, associative style, she establishes the meaningful role of words, perspective, and ultimately writing in her life. _______________________________________________________
Lori O’Dea is a fiction writer and literary critic living in Chicago.
