Name Veikko Huovinen Role Novelist | Movies Dog Nail Clipper Nominations Finlandia Award | |
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Died October 4, 2009, Sotkamo, Finland Books Veitikka, Tale of the Forest Folk Similar People Markku Polonen, Peter Franzen, Kari Sohlberg | ||
Veikko Huovinen (7 May 1927 in Simo, Finland – 4 October 2009 in Sotkamo, Finland) was a Finnish novelist known for his realism, pacifism, sharp intellect, and peculiar humor. He wrote 37 books.
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Apu veikko huovinen ja kai lehtinen kuvaustauolla
Early life
When Huovinen was six months old, his family moved to Sotkamo, where he lived until his death. As a child, Huovinen was known as well-mannered, yet he had a reputation for outlandish stories and occasional mischief. He went to high school in Kajaani, but his studies were interrupted in 1944 when he served as a volunteer AA gunner in the Finnish Army. He graduated after the war in 1946, enrolling in the University of Helsinki, from where he graduated with a M.A. in forestry in 1952.
Huovinen worked as a forester from 1953 to 1956, until becoming a full-time author. In 1999, he was awarded an honorary professorship for his services to Finnish literature. He was married and had 3 children.
Literary career
Huovinen started writing in 1949 when working in a fire watch post in Vuokatti. His first short story collection, Hirri was published in 1950, followed by the novel Havukka-ahon Ajattelija in 1952. Both of these concern the life and its peculiarities in the Kainuu region in Finland, written in a unique style of humor and characterized by their inventive use of language. The main character in Havukka-ahon Ajattelija, Konsta Pylkkänen, has since become ingrained into Finnish modern folklore as the archetype of a rustic, backwoods philosopher.
Huovinen's further works never strayed far from humor, but started to exhibit the author's pacifistic philosophies and later took a turn towards black humor. A good example of such is the trilogy, referred by the author as "Three devilish mustached men"; Veitikka – A. Hitlerin elämä ja teot, Joe-setä and Pietari Suuri hatun polki, concerning Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Peter the Great respectively.
Veitikka prompted some controversy at the time, as it portrays Hitler in a humoristic light. Huovinen countered the claims of impropriety by contending that by laughing at dictators, one strips them of their power to influence people. Veitikka is ostensibly a researched study into the character of Hitler, but the totally outlandish stories quickly betray the book as a work of fiction. The two subsequent books follow the same pattern of telling a ridiculous history of the dictators while letting the author lament the effects such people have on mankind.
Huovinen's 1980 novel Koirankynnen leikkaaja (translation: Dog Nail Clipper) was adapted into a 2004 film of the same name.