Skuggas
(A Heart with Two Minds)
by Ann-Luise Bertell
reviewed by Michael O. Jones
During the Finnish Continuation War of 1941-44, some Soviet prisoners of war were assigned as helpers on Finnish farms to help women whose husbands were fighting in the war. As can be expected with lonely women and men very far from home, intimate relationships sometimes developed. Unfortunately, these relationships did not make for exceptionally gripping reading.
Ann-Luise Bertell's fourth novel is another work of historical fiction to follow up the author's Botnia (Bothnia) trilogy. This one takes place entirely in Ostrobothnia, Swedish-speaking Finland, the same region the characters in her other novels hail from. ‘Skuggas’ is the name of the family home. Once more, the author brings the area to life with believable people of her grandparents’ generation, and the farms, villages, and even the occasional giant boulder have history, character, and traditions specific to the region. However, whereas her Botnia series was a collection of interwoven diachronic family sagas involving characters and places around Ostrobothnia and Canada, this is a straightforward, linear tale.
The main character in this one is a woman in her early forties named Rut who takes in a Soviet prisoner of war while her husband is fighting somewhere in Karelia. The prisoner is a young Ukrainian man named Anton, and as anybody who has so much as read the blurb knows, a romantic relationship develops between the two. This is the main focus of the novel, a departure from her earlier works, which focus on mother-daughter relationships, emigration, poverty and other topics. It is also a lot simpler than her other works, focussing in the main as it does on one summer and a romance between two characters.
This novel was a bit of a let-down after having read and enjoyed her three previous novels. There is little in the way of actual plot in Skuggas, and the characters rarely seem to have goals they are striving towards. While it is novel to be granted an insight into what life might have been like for those left behind, the characters show little initiative or proactivity. Events happen and people react to them, but the only characters who are proactive and show real initiative are Rut's husband, who signs up to try to take back the land the Soviets stole, and her son Finn, who also enlists and disappears from the story.
As such, Rut or Anton were not of especial interest to me as characters. It was also to the novel's detriment that the only proactive characters were mostly absent from the story and both ended up unceremoniously dead. This being the case, I came away from it feeling as though I had read a light romance dressed up as historical fiction which occasionally reminded me of Mills & Boon. Some ethical issues of their relationship are also completely neglected, such as the fact Rut is in a position of power over the prisoner of war Anton and is perhaps ever-so-slightly predatory.
Another criticism is also applicable here: locations and landscapes are not described in much detail, so it was often a task to visualise things. Some Finland-Swedish, especially the local Vörå dialect, would also have been appreciated to add extra flavour and authenticity.
Skuggas
Förlaget, Finland, 2025, 216 pages
Foreign Rights: Elina Ahlbäck Agency
Ann-Luise Bertell is a Finland-Swedish fiction author, poet, and playwright. Skuggas (A Heart with Two Minds) is her fourth novel. Her 2016 novel Vänd om min längtan (Longing, Botnia #1) won the 2016 Svenska YLE Literature Prize and was turned into a successful musical which premiered at the Wasateater, Vaasa, in 2023. It was reviewed in SBR 2017:2, and an excerpt from the novel was published in SBR’s Finland-Swedish Special Issue.