Certain events belong not just to the country in which they occur but to the wider world, not only in imagination but in repercussion, and not only politically but on a personal level. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was one such event, the bombing of Hiroshima another, the My Lai massacre still another. In our own era, the Sept. 11 attacks have been felt throughout the world. We know this to be true, but it’s with an odd sensation of unexpected, wakening connection that you understand, as you read When I Forgot, a first novel by the Finnish journalist and filmmaker Elina Hirvonen, that 9/11 “happened” in Finland too.

Finland—that trout-shaped squiggle of a landmass between Sweden and Russia, birthplace of Sibelius and the Saarinens, of the Nokia cellphone and Marimekko—is 4,000 miles from New York. And yet, ask the Finns, “Where were you on Sept. 11, 2001?” and chances are you’ll get a precise answer. They were aware of our crisis; they felt implicated.

For Anna Louhiniitty, the narrator of Hirvonen’s novel, 9/11 was the day her psychologically disturbed older brother, Joona, whom she’d hoped was getting better, called her in a panic. ... (Read the full review)

“Life. London. This moment in June. This moment in April . . . How sad if someone were to kill herself without knowing that moments like this exist.” As she sits alone in a Helsinki café, Anna Louhiniitty, a young journalist, ignores the demands of her mobile and, as the words she remembers suggest, uses some free moments to review her life through the prism of a book: Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. It was her lover, the American Ian Brown, formerly her university supervisor, who put both the novel and its author her way.

Just as in Mrs Dalloway the flux of ordinary life is offset by the disturbed world of Septimus Warren Smith, so Anna sees her past and present thrown into constant relief by the chaos inhabited by her elder brother, Joona. An aggressive maverick in their adolescence, he is now a sectioned psychotic. As she sips Campari and picks at a mozzarella salad, Anna must decide whether to go to the hospital to see him. Wasn't she responsible for his last crisis? "Psychosis is a word. Suffering isn't. There's just an intolerable dread of existence: you'd DO ANYTHING to make it stop." Joona's sentences turn Anna into "the beautiful writer who walked into the water with a stone in her pocket." ... (Read the full review)

Elina Hirvonen is the first novelist of Finland's uber-cool, Nokia-in-the cradle generation to be translated into English, and her book When I Forgot begins on an appropriately modern note. Anna is sitting in a Helsinki cafe reading a novel—which seems to be Michael Cunningham's The Hours—and fiddling with her mobile phone. She has an overwhelming desire to flee her past: "Memory is one of life's burdens that we can do nothing about." Yet as she sips a cappuccino, or orders a Campari, she meanders through a chain of seemingly disconnected memories that revolve around Ian, an American scholar of Virginia Woolf who teaches literature in Finland.

Ian's New York childhood went from bad to worse when his father returned from the Vietnam war so demented that he could not recognize his own son. The years that followed were defined by mornings "when his mother's hand shook and the cereal spilled," and nights "when his father's screams split the air." The father ends up in a mental hospital, and this is where Ian and Anna's past lives overlap. ... (Read the full review)

What are you working on?

I am writing my second novel, a story about unconventional friendship between an African woman and a Finnish man, who have both lost someone they have loved deeply, and who are trying to rediscover who they are, how to live despite their painful losses. The novel takes place mostly in Zambia, in Southern Africa, where I live at the moment. I love writing about different aspects of Zambian life, and especially about the twinlike, almost magically understanding relationship my main character has with her childhood best friend, a cousin who grows up in the same village with her. At the same time, I think a lot about the problematic aspects of African representation in European literature, a topic I studied in college.

After my first novel, When I Forgot, was published, I decided that the next novel would be a bit lighter and funnier. Now it’s pretty clear that this will not be the case. My beloved characters are going through some extremely painful experiences, and I am sure that the book will not be described as funny. Nevertheless, I try to bring glimpses of hope, beauty, love and understanding to my characters’ lives.

What is a typical day in your writing life?

I have basically three kinds of writing days. ... (Read the full interview)