Lowest Common Denominator

Lowest Common Denominator

For readers of Tove Jansson and  Eileen Myles , Lowest Common Denominator is an ecstatic coming-of-age novel by the Finlandia-prize-winning author of The Red Book of Farewells Writing in the wake of her father’s death, the narrator of Pirkko Saisio’s autofictional novel (translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg) transports us to the 1950s Finland of her youth, where she navigates life as an only child of communist parents. Convinced she will grow up to become a man, a young Saisio keeps trying and failing to meet the expectations of the adults around her. Writing with her trademark wit and style, each formative experience—with the Big Bad Wolf, a bikini-clad circus announcer, and Jesus Christ “who has a beard like a man but a skirt and long hair like a woman”—drives her further and further from her family and others. Struggling to understand her place in the world around her, it’s in language that she discovers a refuge and a way to be seen at last.  An ABA Indie Next Pick for November “Saisio beautifully captures the wonder and horror that can coexist in a child’s imagination…Pirkko finds in literature the space to explore conflicts of class and gender (“Everything that exists in the world is waiting for me to capture it in books”). Readers will be grateful to share in Pirkko’s discoveries.” —Publishers Weekly Praise for Pirkko Saisio and The Red Book of Farewells  Winner of the Finlandia Prize Winner of the Aleksis Kivi Prize “In Pirkko’s Helsinki, the personal and political are not collapsed but interlinked, and revolution is closely tied with sensuality. Idealistic young people rush, disguised in drab overcoats, to secret locations where coded knocks allow them inside to discuss the hot political topics of the day. And then, in those back rooms, private identities bloom… Long an object of study in Finland, Saisio’s work is beginning to gain more global recognition now, cementing her place in the canon of autofiction that also includes the Nordic writers Karl Ove Knausgaard and Tove Ditlevsen.” —Niina Pollari, Los Angeles Review of Books “A beautifully rendered portrait of a strikingly queer life—Saisio troubles any distinction we might try to draw between the personal and the political, the remembered and the invented.” —Morgan Thomas, author of Manywhere “This Red Book of Farewells is also a book of welcoming: to life, to love, to death, to art, to revolution, to our ever-changing identities. It is hilarious and heartbreaking and like nothing I’ve ever read before.” —Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra Pirkko Saisio (b. 1949) studied drama and completed her actor’s training in 1975. Her debut novel The Course of Life ( Elämänmeno , 1975) won the J. H. Erkko Award. Saisio has been nominated for the Finlandia Prize seven times, winning it in with The Red Book of Farewells (Punainen erokirja, 2003). She has, among other awards, received Aleksis Kivi Prize and State Literature Award. Apart from novels, she has written numerous plays and scripts for film and television and is a well-known theatre director. Mia Spangenberg translates from Finnish, Swedish, and German into English. Her work has been published in Finland and the UK, and appeared in journals such as LitHub and Asymptote . She holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian studies from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she resides with her family. I’ve seen zeppelins twice in my life.   The first time it was August. At the end of July I’d left the maternity hospital, carrying a small bundle that was to become my daughter in one hand and a flaming red gladiolus as tall as a sword in the other. The gladiolus refused to droop. Even in August, after Havva, my longtime partner, had left me, I sat on the sofa with an unfamiliar and mysterious child on my lap, staring at that conceited sword that refused to fall. And then a zeppelin appeared in the window above the sword’s tip, Goodyear splayed across its side. It floated across my field of vision like a nightmare in slow motion. It wished me a good year, and I couldn’t believe it was real.    Now it’s the first hot day of summer. The deep, black pond is covered in a thin crust of ice.  I’m just about to break it when a silent zeppelin appears in the violet-blue sky. The zeppelin hangs low, so low I could touch it with my hand. Then it plunges over my head into the pond, and I open my mouth to scream for help but no sound escapes. The zeppelin lies in the pond, and its gray, metallic roof sticks out of the water like the back of a great pike.