Review: “Maamaa” by Stefanie Tuurna

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

At the beginning of Stefanie Tuurna’s debut novel “Maamaa” there is a reading instruction: “If you stö/ stöstö/ are disturbed by the way I rap./ DJ Kimura./ Väävääväärl/ his slowest rapper./ The deafest./ The one with the least sense of rhythm/ nne. / Stuttering is scratching.”

Like Jenny Jägerfeld’s recently published “Banjo Baby,” the novel is conceived as a sound recording. Narrator Akira records a kind of diary with a voice recorder to get around his severe stuttering. He no longer dares to speak to people at all, but things work better alone with the recorder. On long bike rides he talks about bullying at school and about his childhood with a Finnish mother and a Japanese father.

The text is full of repetitions, pauses and repetitions by the stutterer and it takes a few pages to get used to the choppy rhythm. Then you can’t put the book down. It’s a prime example of why I love fiction. There is no other medium that allows you to get so close to a wild stranger. Tuurna has succeeded in creating a narrator reminiscent of Holden Caulfield in JD Salinger’s The Savior in Need (1951) or even the cellar man in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Cellar Hole (1864). Akira is not just a bullied teenager, but a person with a rich inner life who sometimes speaks truthfully and sometimes fables. Everyday life is constantly spiced up with surprising and absurd elements of Japanese mythology, nightmarish beasts, unsavory ghosts and demons.

So does “Maamaa” also had the best conditions. Tuurna’s background as a pianist, composer, and music educator likely contributed to the musicality of the novel. The translation into Swedish by author and comedian Kaj Korkea-aho is also phenomenal. Korkea-aho stutters himself and acted as a stuttering consultant for the original Finnish edition. He managed to transfer the rhythm, the youth jargon and the subtle taste of Finland to the Swedish dialect.

In most books with protagonists who stutter, the stuttering is limited to short dialogues. For example, Vince Vawter’s acclaimed American young adult novel Paperboy (2013) begins with the narrator explaining to the reader that he is writing his story on a typewriter because he: “can’t speak. / Without stuttering.” There is a line break between the words talk and stammer. In other words, stuttering is portrayed as something that gets in the way of both speech and story. In Tuurna’s novel, stuttering does not appear as an obstacle, but on the contrary as a driving force. From this perspective, “Maamaa” is a justification for all stutterers in the world: Stuttering also means speaking.

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