Year of the Bull

Prize-winning Swedish author Parland narrates events of a tumultuous 1918, between WW I and the Russian Revolution, from the viewpoint of six-year-old Riki in this strong, intensely imaginative novel. Barricaded on a Finnish farm in lovely, ghost-haunted countryside, along with parents, aunts, uncles and godlike Grandmother--whose thundered warnings from vengeful biblical texts create a frightening childhood mythology--Riki confuses Baal, devourer of children, with Bull, the lordly animal who bellows and rampages in a nearby field. Parland suggests the wartime brutality through Bull and the deaths of helpless creatures. A boy Riki's age drowns despite the dramatic rescue efforts of grownups. A pet pig prophetically named Jonah is slaughtered by Grandmother's decree, driving Kirsti, the maid who coddled him, to delirium and treachery: she invites Red soldiers to stomp through the house and pillage, then laughingly rides off with them. Entrapped baby mice and a slain pet bird reflect the overall violence, eliciting a fierce juvenile anguish, and Bull meets a terrible end. Gravely and sometimes whimsically, Riki imposes his own sense on a world where the pain of famine and the redness of spilled blood seem omnipresent. (Nov.)