Nordic Book Club discussion

Thank you to everyone who joined us last night at Scandinavia House! Below are some of the questions and themes we tried to tackle from the book, that won the EU Prize for Literature (2015), “Things That Fall From The Sky” by the Finnish author Selja Ahava. It was a great discussion, where at the end of the night we each pulled out our favorite quotes from the book and tried to recombine them into a new text of our own.

For those of you joining next month’s Nordic Book Club it would be great if each person brought their favorite quote from “The Summer of Ellen” to try our Florilegium practice again. To all of our online readers, please feel free to leave your own questions or favorite quotes below. We always look forward to them!

1) How was your reading experience? Did you enjoy reading the book?

2) What did you think of Ahava’s writing style? Which characters stood out to you? What other books and films have tackled this kind of plot? What style of writing in most conducive to writing about pain and trauma?

3) What did you take away from the book? What symbolism did you find? What parts resonated with you? Ex: The sheep, scissors, sawdust and growing pains.

4) How do you think Ahava chose the order of who gets to narrate? Why does Pekka never get to narrate what happened to him and his family?

5) What did you think about Aunt Annu and Hamish MacKay’s letters? Were they able to help each other and in what way? Can a positive attributed event isolate someone?

6) What did the sheep mean to Saara and Annu? Why does Ahava spend so much time bringing them up throughout the book?

7) Why do you think Hamish MacKay never left his home and kept going back out to sea? What was he most scared of?

8) Why does Krista often refer to Saara as “the girl” when she is thinking or narrating?

9) Why did the police officer come back to visit Pekka at the manor? Do stories help people heal?

10) What role does fairy tales play in the book?

11) What are the main THEMES you would use to talk about this book? Ex: coincidence/ chance, loss, cutting, fear, fairy tales, survivor’s guilt, structures, ghosts and obsession.

12) Why do you think Aristotle’s The Poetics is the beginning of the book?

13) “And that’s the end of that.” What do you think of the ending of the book? Were there any conclusions or resolutions for the characters?