[Sillanpää creates a profound depth of feeling] as if he were writing with two pens simultaneously, one of them dipped in ink depicting the simple actuality of event or scene, and the other following the outline with inexorable exactitude—identical in form but dipped in an invisible essence, to be read only by the inward eye. This sense of spiritual awareness, of spiritual intensity and suspense, and above all, of immense and eternal spiritual significance, infuses Sillanpää's novels with an almost intolerable poignancy. "The Maid Silja," which appeared in England under the more expressive title "Fallen Asleep While Young," is his supreme achievement…. (pp. 296-97)

Around the exquisite central figure rise the elemental heats of nature, the raw commands of life, the sensations of the flesh, the smells of the earth which nourished that flesh. They rise and are diffused into ethereal vapor. They dissolve into the...