Dark Paradise

Rosa Liksom was born in Lapland in 1958. She is the author of six books, script writer, performance artist and painter. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York, Moscow and Reykjavik. She lives in Helsinki where she works as a bartender. Her short fictions have been translated into the major European languages - this is their first appearance in English.David McDuff is a British translator, editor and literary critic.

What are we to make of the title Dark Paradise? Addiction, madness, murder, suicide, and general sordidness suffuse the tiny character vignettes of which it consists. Grace flares only weakly in the general gloom. On Christmas Day, a man blunders up a hill—"perhaps there he would see himself more clearly"—falls asleep in an ice storm, and wakes with a lightened heart, somehow. The target of a failed rape takes her assailant home for sex; when he wakes, she's gone, and he leaves. A girl picks up a photo discarded on a beach and, in bed that night, kisses it. Those three sketches of meager satisfactions are as cheery as the collection gets. Like the rest, they are highly wrought, utterly nonjudgmental and noncommital; not a word is wasted, much less an emotion. So much for their darkness. Perhaps the advanced welfare state in which the poor, ill-educated, often stupid characters live and mostly don't work is the paradise of the title. If it is, then this is savage satire indeed, more misanthropic than antiliberal.