Many yeas ago I attempted to learn Finnish. The only thing that I remember is my struggle with the language's 15 cases, seemingly unfathomable to an English speaker. Something else stuck in my mind from that time. Finns are not the most communicative people. They are hard to get to know. Perhaps the language might have something to do with it, though many blame the long, dark winters for their insularity. Although Finnish as a language is lost to me, I still am fond of Sibelius' music. It seems so right for the country, and might even suit some parts of the Canadian landscape.

I note this because Hirvonenn, a journalist and documentary maker by profession, has brought her professional skills to this novel in which she indirectly highlights her country's great problems, mental illness and suicide. She employs sparse but clear prose—if the translation is as good as I feel it is—to reveal the emotional and exterior landscape of Finland through the book's narrator, Anna Louhiniitty, a freelance journalist.

We meet Anna sitting in a café trying to avoid a visit with her mentally ill brother, Joona, whom she loves deeply. Too late recognized, his illness made Anna take on burdens from early childhood that were not hers to carry, and gave her a perpetual sense of guilt. Ostensibly she has come to the café to read a book, Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, which looks at the lives of three different women inspired by Virginia Woolf and her character, Mrs. Dalloway.

But Anna's attempt to read is in vain. Her mind drifts to her own life, lived in the shadow of her dysfunctional brother, to her life with her lover, Ian, an American professor working in Helsinki, and to her parents. Her thoughts drift from the past to the more recent present and back again, as our minds tend to do. There is rare clarity and a sense of poetry in the manner in which Hirvonen has captures the essence of memory and reflection.

To understand Finland, which likes to tout itself as a social paradise, it must be understood that it has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, 26.2 per 100,000 as opposed to 13.7 in Canada. Roughly 25 percent of all Finns are considered to have some mental problem, with seven percent of adult Finns officially sufferers of mental illness and alcohol related problems. These are the leading cause for that country's high rate of disability pensions.

It seems a dismal subject for a novel, but Hirvonen has an ability to avoid self-pity and morbidity in her prose, which also is set against the background of three wars. Her own father, a Lutheran minister, lived in the shadow of an abusive father, who came home to his mother a changed man after serving as a soldier in WWII. Ian's father came home irrevocably damaged by his experiences in Vietnam. Both men suffered from mood swings, with Ian's father eventually ending up in an institution and dying there alone. And in the present looms the American invasion of Iraq and the resulting anti-American rallies taking place in Helsinki.

There are many guilt feelings in this book. Anna's own for hesitating to visit her brother, and for failing to complete a writing assignment. Ian feels guilty for having left his father in the institution although it was not his doing. He even has a sense of guilt for what is happening in Iraq. Anna's father suffers from thoughts that he may have failed his son.

It takes a good writer to weave the disparate elements of this novel into a book that ultimately leaves both Anna and the reader with a sense that all is not bad. Anna, by picking up the strands from the past ties them up into a bouquet of remembering, and thereby frees herself to face the future.