A masterful and sometimes brutal tale of an anonymous woman who dotes on her very different brother. She emerges as a sort of anti-hero, an almost ugly character who is bound compulsively to her desires, while her brother is described as a handsome dreamboat. She doesn’t manage to fit inside the norms of the day, while her brother more clearly does. If someone were to look at her, they might see a loser who binges on sweets, devours soap operas, and trails her brother like a shadow but whose manic narration forces one to stare, to look more closely.
To My Brother is an absurd bildungsroman germinating from internalized self-hatred, one that takes place at the fringes if the center is a multi-part mirror.
Original title: Veljelleni. Teos 2021, 288 pp.
Foreign rights: Helsinki Literary Agency, helsinkiagency.fi
