Life and Sun was an exceptional first novel…. [Nothing] like this had been seen before. The novel portrays the experiences of a young man and two young women through a summer. With sensitive instinct [Sillanpää] has followed the events as they rose out of the flaming summer in nature and in youthful hearts, which surrendered themselves passively to "receive the world as a sensation." The poet employs surprising facets of his imagination; he appears to be studying human life first from a cosmic altitude and then from abysmal depths. It almost seems as if in some poetic way he had lived the theory of relativity…. [In his depiction of] Finnish country working folk [Sillanpää] strives to draw forth that "elemental man" which lurks at the inmost roots of their instincts. In his finer chapters he seems to experience an "inner time": to a lesser degree he employs the...