Word: finnishness
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...standard formula for making a historical novel sell merrily nowadays is: violence plus sex equals success. Finnish Novelist Mika Waltari has his own way of handling the formula: double the quantities, double the result. Last year, U.S. readers got their first taste of the treatment in The Egyptian, a story of how a local fellah made good with the ladies in the 14th Century B.C. It sold more than 500,000 copies, held first place on bestseller lists for over three months, and still ranks in the top dozen...
Waltari's adventurer, Michael Bast, the bastard of a Finnish strumpet, has been brought up by a middle-aged witch who lies in bed at night and sighs with desire for the local hangman. In this school of adversity Michael learns little of life, grows up to be a sort of cross between Candide and Lanny Budd. He is the kind of young man who gets seduced time & again without quite realizing what is going on, who gives his money to rascals for safekeeping, who signs a paper which helps to prove his wife a witch because a nice...
Over the Czars. Stalin has had heart trouble for years, but so far as the West knows, he is otherwise in good health for a man of 70. The last outsiders to see him were members of the Finnish trade delegation which signed a treaty with the U.S.S.R. last month. Stalin, dressed in the grey uniform of a Soviet marshal, offered the Finns cigars, expressing regret that they were of Russian make and therefore no good, Russia having made cigars such a short while. Minister of Trade and Industry Sakari S. Tuomioja replied that they were not the best...
Finland's 84-year-old Jean Sibelius need not worry about dying in the poverty which has closed the eyes of many another famed composer.* Since the turn of the century, the Finnish government has guaranteed his board & keep. But this week Composer Sibelius let it be known (through Music Critic Olin Downes of the New York Times) that he has received "not a penny" in royalties from the U.S., a country whose performances of his music should have made him rich...
Died. Eliel Saarinen, 76, Finnish-born architect, longtime President of the Cranbrook Academy of Art; in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. A painter in his youth, Saarinen won his first success with the elegantly simple Finnish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1900, later designed the Helsinki railroad station and Finland's National Museum. An old friend of Frank Lloyd Wright and functionalism, Saarinen emigrated to the U.S. in 1923, designed (with his son) the Tanglewood Mass, music center and the Des Moines Fine Arts Center, worked unceasingly on his far-seeing city planning schemes...