Finna

"I’m going to confess a bias, which is that I was a Swedish consultant for Finna; but I still find it a delightful story. I just re-read it ahead of this session, and it’s still amazing. Ava and Jules are two people who work at a Scandinavian box store – it’s not IKEA, but it’s also not not IKEA – and they’re having a terrible time. Also, they just broke up with each other, and they’re trying to coexist at work when everything is sore and raw. Then a grandmother disappears into a wormhole in one of the showrooms – which the store has a routine for. Since Ava and Jules are the last ones to be employed by the company, it’s their job to go into the wormhole (in the store’s lingo this is a maskhål, which is Swedish for wormhole), and find the grandmother. And shenanigans ensue… It’s a wonderful story about living under the crushing weight of capitalism and trying to stay sane. It’s also a very refreshing story, because it’s not often that you get a story where the first thing that happens is a breakup, and we see what happens in the aftermath. And also there’s a multiverse. There are vicious blonde Scandinavian clones who are out for your blood. There’s swashbuckling. There’s basically everything you would want in a novel… all in 134 pages. It’s perfect. What Nino Cipri does, very cleverly, is allude to other multiverses at the same time as stepping into one. This book also has the best exposition mechanic that I’ve seen for a long time, which is that there is a VHS tape with an introduction to wormholes in this box store – in Swedish, but dubbed over with English really badly. And Cipri describes things without over-inflating the prose: they say one thing, and then they’re done, and they move on to the next thing. They trust the reader to remember it, and to do some thinking for themselves. I think it’s very neatly done."