Katja Salminen: Two Deaths of Sofia of No Name
(Greenleaf - Legolas 3/03)

Katja Salminen belongs to the group of writers who have achieved their wider  literary debut only during the past few years. She has, however, shown great promise in her texts. Her greatest achievement so far is winning the year 2001 Nova short story contest with her story Dragon Fragments. Two Deaths of Sofia of No Name reviewed here was originally published in the Finnish fanzine Legolas, and represents very aptly the style of Salminen, a painter of dark atmospheres.

Salminen's short story reminds one spontaneously of Neil Gaiman's story Snow, Glass, Apples (published in Finnish as Lumesta, lasista ja omenoista in Tähtivaeltaja 1/99). Like Gaiman, Salminen takes up an old fairy tale in her story, and recounts the real course of events that we only know as an embroidered children's fairy tale. Where Gaiman re-tells the story of Snow White, Salminen takes up Little Red Riding Hood.

As is proper, the naiveté of a folk tale has to give way for realism in the short story. In an unnamed town lives an apathetic whore called Sofia. The name is not her own, it's given by her neighbourhood to this woman who stays silent as a wall. Obviously Sofia has experienced something extremely traumatic in her childhood. Little by little the veil of secrecy is lifted, and before long the reader realizes what it's all about. Sofia is the grown-up Little Red Riding Hood, who bears much deeper scars from the episode at Granny's cottage than the version familiar to us lets understand.

After the disjointed Dragon Fragments, Two Deaths of Sofia of No Name is a rather pleasant surprise. Plot-wise it is a well-controlled whole, coherent from beginning to end. Salminen combines in her story the themes of both Little Red Riding Hood and werewolves, and creates a narrative loop that can only have one solution at the end. A more sentimental reader might consider Sofia's fate cruel, but in its way the story only finishes the narrative that the fairy tale did leave unfinished.

One of the central weaknesses of the short story I consider its shortness. The world of the story is presented and the story told altogether very allusively, and the reader misses more foothold for perceptions. It wouldn't at all have broken the beautiful narrative arch to illuminate the story's world or the background town at least a bit more, or to make some of the minor characters more multifaceted persons by giving them more space. Now the totality remains somewhat too thin.

Pasi Karppanen
(Translated by Liisa Rantalaiho)