Monika Fagerholm: THE AMERICAN GIRL

Monika Fagerholm, today's guest blogger and the author of The American Girl talks about how to read her new book. Is it a simple crime story? Yes and no. It is a human story and Monika explains why you shouldn't have to look for hidden meaning as much just experiencing the book.

The American Girl centers around an unsolved crime. A young girl from America, Eddie de Wire, drowns under mysterious circumstances in a lake in the countryside outside a big city; it is 1969, somewhere in the southern part of Finland. Even though the setting and the landscapes are real, it was important for me not to be specific with names and places, but to create a world of its own. I would like the reader to feel that the place, the landscapes and the events are his or her own. This is not a story about what happened in Finland some years ago, nor is it a traditional whodunit crime story. It’s about the universality that this could happen anywhere, that this might be happening to you, in your own landscape inside of you. Some kind of archaic thing; the places, the characters in the novel are figures from inside ourselves.

As a writer I detest mystification for mystification’s sake: I believe in absolute simplicity and in the concrete. Things, persons, events are speaking their own language, have their own rhythms, their own way of talking and talking to us. There is no narrator who moves us forward and gives us explanations, telling us what to think and how to feel about things. I wanted the experience to be somehow like going into the woods, taking a path and moving ahead. It is not strange nor difficult, in fact, difficulties may arise if you think too much or if you expect certain things—as we often do in an ordinary crime story. Trust me, things will open up along the way, just jump in. In the course of the story we will eventually learn more about what really happened to Eddie. We will get an answer to the question: Who Did It?

So in this way The American Girl can be read as crime fiction. But the main focus of the story does not lie in the solving of a crime, but what crime and death invoke in us, as human beings. How we are moved by it, changed by it, and also, how a whole place, a little rural setting on the outskirts of a big city, is forever transformed by it.

When I started writing this novel (the first book of a two-novel series), I had this idea that I wanted to write about and investigate how a crime (an unsolved, violent crime) turns into a story, into stories, clusters of stories, and finally, in the course of time, becomes a myth. And about the tremendous power of myths, which are both beautiful and frightening since myths also have a time span of their own: mythical time is a lot about the same things happening over and over again, patterns repeating themselves, playing the same tunes over and over (this is also a characteristic of the musicality in the text, in the form of different melodies, old folk songs and references to pop songs). The whole notion of time as something moving forward in a linear, rational way might be threatened by myths. As, of course, consequently is the whole concept of truth—myths can effectively blur the truth, make truth impossible to reach. How myth grows stronger than truth, becoming more real than reality, is a question I had in mind when I started writing these books. These questions are relevant for the times we are living in today with virtual realities, with news turning into storytelling (based on old mythical patterns).

The story is set mainly in the seventies. Music also plays a crucial role in the book. There are different tones in the text, there are also a lot of invented words, invented slang and such, and references to real music, old folk songs, and pop songs. Although the latter are not there to invoke nostalgia and place the narrative in a particular context. The reader will note twists in the lines and wrong interpretations of certain well-known songs and musicians (there are also invented songs and musicians). For instance, the lyrics are not cited correctly, some phrases keep changing, certain melodies keep returning, etc. These twists have a certain meaning. Because this is the way we take in certain songs, make them ours, brace them to our hearts, our bodies. This the way music lives in us: we put something personal in. To have music inside of you, to live with music, it’s not about citing something correctly. And in this same way, these girls (and the other characters in the book) also take the destiny of the American girl into themselves. And the stories that emerge from that, other stories, other destinies, emerge and create new stories, new meanings.

After all of this, how should one read The American Girl? Go into it, as if you were going into a landscape. There are no hidden meanings, everything is there, in the lines.

-- Monika Fagerholm, Author