| Sumario: | Arto Salminen wrote his six novels in the context of the neoliberal turn in Finland. They were a response to the rapid growth of the power of capital over labor. Salminen's thematization of neoliberal class difference and the supporting ideological conditions is intense. The aesthetic and literary representations (most notably, the figure of the dirty class) by which Salminen politicizes the world and subjectivities of the working class are ambivalent in their ironic tone, yet always compassionate on the deeper thematic level of his texts. Modifying the critical ethos of social realism with some naturalist and modernist influences of style, his novels are among the most important and original works of art in the field of the contemporary Finnish novel.
|
|---|