Iida Rauma: The Book of Disappearances – Synopsis

Synopsis of the Novel The Book of Disappearances by Iida Rauma

Plot

The Book of Disappearances is a ferocious tale about a young woman who is searching for and losing herself. The main character, who is also the first person narrator, moves with her girlfriend Sofia to the university city of Turku, which is new to the young woman and seems alien and hostile to her. In the new environment she struggles with the ghosts of her past, while at the same time seeking a direction for her future. Her father has disappeared without leaving any trace, and the family has no information as to his whereabouts or what may have happened to him. The shock of her husband’s disappearance has had a serious effect on the mental health of the narrator’s mother, who is a researcher. The mother withdraws into solitude, and is more interested in the atrocities of the Finnish Civil War than she is in her daughter.

The main character, depressed and confused by the perplexing and complex tragedy, which has befallen her family, is left to drift in the new city without friends or a place of study. She uses excessive amounts of alcohol and drugs, and is dissatisfied with the sex she has with her girlfriend. However, she eventually gets a job at the nearby home for the elderly as a cleaner and carer. In the care home she witnesses a new kind of disappearance, the disappearance from society. She sees how the elderly people, dulled with medication, gradually lose their grip on their lives, memories and selves as they change into institutionalised patients – mere diagnoses in standardized garments.

In the care home the main character meets Zorka, a Kosovan refugee who has given up her former life and disappeared to Finland. Zorka has not been in touch with her family for years. Little by little the main character begins to feel a sense of kinship with this mysterious woman, who also becomes the object of the narrator’s violent sexual fantasies. Although the main character does not want to lose her long-term girlfriend Sofia, the relationship is unsatisfactory for both of them and their hopes and desires no longer coincide. Instead, Zorka’s lack of restraint bubbling under a disciplined appearance makes her irresistibly attractive to the main character..

The main character is haunted not only by her father’s disappearance but also by the fate of her childhood friend Susanna.

There are several different time levels in the novel, covering both the narrator’s childhood and early girlhood as well as her present experience. In flashbacks the main character tells the story of Susanna, who was sexually abused by her brother and finally decided to take her own life – only at the age of twelve. Susanna was on the one hand an adventurous and happy girl, and on the other an impulsive school bully whose emotional and physical violence the narrator and Sofia, who were in the same class, both had to experience as children. However, Susanna had been the main character’s first love, whose loss she copes with by painting the girl’s portrait over and over again in her lonely house.

The main character seeks to escape from her memories and her shapeless future by disappearing in various ways. She drowns by turns in alcohol, in the secret taking of sleeping pills, and often also in sadomasochistic sexual fantasies, which offer a merciful oblivion. Her life undergoes the longed-for change when her girlfriend Sofia leaves her. The school violence, which has left its mark on their shared childhood years, has also determined the young women’s adult relationship in a suffocating way. Sofia succeeds in breaking free of the past, Susanna’s fate and her own experiences of bullying by beginning a new life with another woman.

At the same time, the main character’s relationship with Zorka has by itself slowly become closer. At the end of the novel, they decide to take their destiny into their own hands and go to Belgrade. The main character has suddenly discovered that her father is still alive. She receives a smudgy letter from him, bearing a Serbian stamp, and with its help she goes to look for him. Zorka, meanwhile, takes the daring step of visiting her homeland again after many years. The women offer each other emotional and physical release. For example, the main character’s long-nurtured violent sexual fantasies are finally realized in Zorka’s arms.

In Belgrade the women say goodbye and go their separate ways where they can rediscover themselves, or find themselves for the first time. Zorka returns to her home town of Pristina and the main character ends up experimenting with disappearance. She relinquishes her phone number, her name, her past and her identity, and turns into anyone and no one – just as her father did.

Themes

Iida Rauma’s ambitious debut reaches out in many directions. The novel tackles the everyday violence that takes place behind the doors of schools, health centres and care homes – a violence nowadays so routine that it is not noticed until too late. Institutionalized violence is quiet and discreet, even tacitly accepted. Rauma portrays realistically and movingly the anguish of the narrator and her friend Susanna in the school playground where Susanna’s exploitative older brother and his friends are threatening his sister:

“The break expands around us, the seconds will never reach the bell’s saving chime, the red-brick school building draws away and grows so big that I could never
manage to run to the front door. In the background loom the grey apartment buildings, in one of which Susanna lives. Her brother’s chums are beginning to get bored, someone starts a moped. The pebbles fly from under the rubber wheels, the rumble of the engine covers her brother’s voice. Susanna and I stand hand in hand in an asphalt desert where the teacher is always too far.”

The theme of incest and child sex abuse hangs oppressively and formatively over the entire novel, although Susanna’s life is never described in detail except as observed from the child’s point of view of the main character. Susanna’s parents and teachers have never discovered the reasons behind Susanna’s violent behaviour, and ultimately the root causes of her suicide. As at school, in care homes too there is no real interest in human beings, and the greatest violence is to look away.

With its open-mindedness and atmospheric intensity The Book of Disappearances also deals with themes of gender and sexuality. The main character, Sofia and Zorka are all women who love and who desire women. The lesbianism of the characters and Rauma’s unembellished descriptions of sex support a narrative in which the main character feels disconnected from the rest of society and everyday reality. She seeks oblivion in violent sex in order to escape an oppressive reality and to feel something, at least pain.

By talking about sex the main character also draws her own portrait as a seeking, lost young person. What is revealed is the unequal nature of her relationship with her romantically yearning girlfriend Sofia, whose sexual desires and wishes do not coincide with the main character’s own. When Zorka steps into the main character’s life and understands her secrets, the way to self-acceptance is opened to both women, who have lost their sense of self.

The Book of Disappearances is a reflection on what happens to those who are unable to “live a perfectly ordinary life”. While it focuses on disappearance that is dictated by external flight, the novel also examines those who leave voluntarily and without warning. For the main character and her father, disappearance from their own lives and from society is the only way to find themselves and attain their freedom.

Structure / Style / Language

The Book of Disappearances is a catching book with a forward-driving story that is hard to put down. Structurally the novel moves on different levels of time. The present tense of the first-person narrative slips from time to time into flashbacks showing the main character’s childhood and girlhood, and the stories of people who have gone missing. Iida Rauma skilfully employs a challenging present tense which blends history and present seamlessly together.

Stylistically the novel is a richly nuanced and interesting blend of intellectually challenging, almost metaphysical themes that often acquire form through the main character’s everyday appearance, spoken language and in some places even coarse expressions. For example, the main character is constantly “horny”. In the book these expressions recreate the bluster and anguish of a young woman in search of herself.

Iida Rauma’s solid technical skills are revealed in her careful and refined use of language. The narrator’s observations and verbal descriptions remove the masks from things, showing for example what loneliness, absence, violence and identity really mean. “I wonder how dangerous it is to see people as being consistent with what they are called. As Albanians. Care patients. Schizophrenics. Immigrants. Children. Straight A girls. Crazies.” In the book the main character herself doesn’t have a name.

The richness of the text increases Rauma’s ability to describe everyday small things and autumnal Turku in a way that creates the novel’s intimate, mesmerizing atmosphere. The oil-colour palette made by the father, the unexpected October thunderstorm, or the immersion of hands in the dishing water are observations and experiences just as important to the book as the proof of violence or the desertion of the beloved.