Mika Waltari. Variazioni d’autore tra I noir e la storia

[Autom. eng. transl.] Characteristic of Waltari's novel is a petty-bourgeois setting in which everyone is concentrated only on himself, on his own great and small frustrations, but he never misses a chance to spy on his neighbor's door in the hope of finding that straw which by force of circumstances some part has to hide. There is no tragedy in the story, an atmosphere reigns in which the squalid impassivity is nothing but the other side of irony in which a passion forced to survive in the cold and the distance of Finnish land has crystallized. In this sense, Waltari's yellow climate anticipates already in some ways the atmosphere of the films of the fellow countryman Aki Kaurismäki, in which the same sense of distance, the impassive irony and at the same time both desperate and free is a sign of an awareness that it is not only a social denunciation, but also a calibrated and peaceful escape from reality in whose resignation yet lives the joy of the unexpected hope of the new. We are in 1939, at the dawn of the Second World War, and in particular for the Finland of the Winter War.