'White Hunger' by Aki Ollikainen

In the great winter famine that struck rural Finland in 1867, a woman abandons her dying husband and sets out with her two children towards St Petersberg, where people say there is bread. The book bleakly shows how thin the veneer of civilisation is, and how easily it is thrown aside by crisis. Their encounters with other transients and with the people whose villages and land they pass through break down the social barriers that usually keep people from harming each other, and the increasing familiarity with hunger and death reduce the afflicted to merely going through the motions of their own desperation. The book ends with some hint of the possibilities inherent in the social and technological transformations resulting from Finland’s nineteenth century industrialisation, but, in the context of the famine, these possibilities are beyond hopelessness.

December 2015