Elämä ja aurinko ['Life and the Sun,' 1916] is very different from all works published in Finland before that time and demonstrates [Sillanpää's] considerable literary talent. The attention and praise it received are deserved but have resulted in the inaccurate picture that Sillanpää's art is totally unrelated to all that was written before it. Tuomas Anhava has called Sillanpää a romanticist, and, vague as the term is, it does help us to understand the nature of his art. He believed in mysterious forces that govern man's destiny against his will, saw in every human being something unique, considered the inner man, the soul, more important than the body, and asserted that this soul remains pure no matter how much the body decays. He often animated nature, making it observe and take part in human actions…. [Sillanpää] had a tendency to overuse metaphors and similes; the...