Suomenlinna
A story that contains no symbolic elements. That is no metaphor for the world. Rather the opposite: the world is a metaphor for this story.
A troubled teenage girl, freshly released from a juvenile correctional facility for committing a racist crime. A campaign to protect whale hunting. The Wicker Man movie, watched daily for months. The person who has seen The Wicker Man more times than anyone else in the world. Blonde, beautiful teenagers, blue eyes, braided beards. Finnish gods riding across frozen waters. Legends of the Far North recited by the Rune Singers of the Arctic Circle when nature itself was a troubled teenager. The island of Suomenlinna, in the Baltic Sea of the mind, off the coast of inland Finland, in the far North of the soul. A story of Odinists, white supremacists, Black Metal, the Kalevala, white faces with blue eyes mourning the death of the world’s beauty.
PRESS
«Calvo confirms that he is a highly gifted writer in recreating spaces, but above all in bringing to life ingredients as ancient as the demonic. It is in excesses that a writer’s quality is best measured. There, Calvo proves that he is. Enormous plasticity, devoted to an imaginative language, meticulously crafted.» José María Pozuelo, ABC Cultural
«Javier Calvo watches the new waves, but he is already part of the sea.» Patricio Pron, el Boomeran(g)
«A Javier Calvo so confident in his narrative mastery that he can leap from Barcelona to Finland as if by magic. A delightful (yet by no means untroubling) punk song, perfect in its three-minute duration, with hypnotic rhythms and echoes rich in associations. Thanks to the metanarrative voice that is becoming his trademark, but above all to the precise choice of ten suggestive sequences and a creative personality whose exuberance knows no bounds.» Milo J. Krmpotic, Qué Leer
«Barely 100 pages that leave us breathless, one of the finest portraits of the human soul and society I have read in recent times, written in prose as perfect and simple as a diamond, which, while avoiding poetry, manages to be profoundly poetic, at times recalling masters like Salinger and The Catcher in the Rye, and confirming this young author as one of the best and bravest writers in our country. Quite remarkable.» Manuel Astur, El Comercio
