Bryta upp.

Schoolfield, George C.

In the United States ex-husband bashing, so it seems, has taken a religious (and subsidiary political) turn, as we learn from Sheila Rauch Kennedy's description in Shattered Faith of her former husband's mental, moral, and emotional shortcomings. In Finland the subgenre has long been a part of serious literature. Maria Jotuni's posthumously published Huojuva talo (1963) told the world - thankfully, both partners were dead, Jotuni in 1943 and her husband Viljo Tarkiainen in 1951 - what a fascistic wrong number the professor of literary history had been. With Arhundradets karlekssaga (1978) and other works that followed, Marta Tikkanen spread abroad the bad news of her gifted Henrik's drinking, jealousy, and egomania. (He replied with a laundry list of her faults; their publisher could only be delighted at their skirmishes, and the family that squabbled in print together staved together.) In 1981 Merete Mazzarella made no bones about her husband's inopportune fascination with cricket scores, as described in Att spela sitt liv. Happily, the divorce was amicable, and Sylvester has been treated quite nicely in later books.

This prelude is not meant to imply that Inga-Britt Wik (b. 1930), a distinguished and soft-spoken poet, is a member of the sharp-penned company, although, as the first wife of Jorn Donner, she has had exceptionally thankful material with which to work. In Ingen lycklig karlek (1988) the narrator - called Britt - told the story of how a simple Ostrobothnian girl, after an exciting "great trip" to the continent, came back to Helsingfors and the arms of Jens (i.e., Jorn), the gifted if moody scion of a great cultural family who (for the time being) had swerved radically left-ward: they married and produced little Joel. The dust jacket told browsers to buy the book because of its picture of the capital (and its university) in the 1950s, but purchasers also wanted to discover more about the first matrimonial venture of Donner, long since a central conservative figure in Finland's public debate.

In the present sequel, Bryta upp, Britt and Joel (who now has a little brother, Jon) have not changed names; the husband is now "Johannes" (Donner's middle name is Johan). Johannes is distinguished by his constant absences, his failure to participate in household chores (he does not want to "go around with a screwdriver in his hand"), his chilliness, his manipulations, his deceit. "There was a lifeless sector around him," and "He developed a word such as freedom, and thought a freedom without limits existed. For him." The narrator, to her credit, resists almost all her opportunities to be malicious as she walks down memory's lane - for example, when she describes Johannes's fear of obligatory military service. She does love him (or did) and, even some forty years later, demonstrates an admirable understanding for his productive selfishness. Johannes takes the way of alternative duty at a hospital, described in one of Donner's best early books, Pa ett sjukhus (1960); however, Britt learns that Johannes has spent his extraordinarily frequent leaves with "women in Stockholm" who are unencumbered by motherhood. The reader grows impatient, waiting for Britt's patience to run out; for whatever reason, Johannes wants to avoid the finality of a divorce. Meanwhile, neglected Britt acquires her own erotic attachment, which leads to an abortion. This inconvenience out of the way, she may have a smoother future with "Arne."

While mostly third-person, the narrative falls now and again into second-person self-address; after all, Britt is alone a great deal. At last, she gets her own lawyer, instead of Johannes's family counselor, and dumps the ever more invisible spouse: "You were glad you had gotten through it. You were not as strong as you thought you were, but you were tough. It was a good feeling to look into the future" - about which a third volume may tell.

George C. Schoolfield Yale University