Tuuli käy heidän ylitseen by Pentti Haanpää is a collection of short stories written in the early 20th century. The book paints stark, lyrical portraits of Finnish rural life and nature, tracing drifters, laborers, and outcasts as they wrestle with poverty, drink, work, and brief flashes of freedom. Figures such as Remu-Eemeli the accordion player, the wanderer Närhi-Isko, and even a maimed crane embody resilience, fatalism, and the pull of the wild.The opening of the collection offers a run of finely cut vignettes: a bastard boy, Remu-Eemeli, is saved at birth, adopts the accordion under a ruined ex-official’s wing, drifts from dance to dance and card table to card table, and dies on the road, his instrument left to gather dust; two river-drive loggers savor an idle, sunlit lull before work grinds on, as the restless Närhi-Isko alternates between shirking and seasonal toil; Eenokki scrimps to go “home” in style but drinks away his savings and returns to labor with sacks tied around ruined shoes. Nature tales mirror human fates: a crane, wing-shot and shunned, survives winter in desperation, lashes out at a pursuer, and is finally taken by a night predator; a ram leaps the fence, winters in a haystack, and vanishes into a deadly bog to live truly free. Domestic sketches bite too: an old matriarch, stripped of authority, skirmishes with a taunting chore boy and finds solace in hymns; and a pensioner who lives for feats of strength enjoys staged wins over the village smith unti…
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