Roope Lipasti: The Neighbour – Synopsis

Synopsis of the Novel The Neighbour by Roope Lipasti

Plot

The Neighbour is an incisive, hilarious satire whose protagonist is middle aged history teacher living in the countryside in the county of Finland Proper. The man’s lonely summer holiday is given content and colour as he follows the comings and goings of the neighbouring family, who have six children. He becomes particularly interested in the husband’s hopeless building projects. Unlike his easy going and carefree neighbour, our protagonist is an orderly man. He lives in a tidy and empty house where he endlessly repeats the same everyday routines. He washes his coffee cup and puts it back in the cupboard immediately after morning coffee and cuts his lawn in straight lines. He follows the international financial markets and exchange rates with the same care he recycles his cardboard.

The protagonist is also a civilized man. He knows about the cinema, European military history and the secrets of old postage stamps. The protagonist has inherited certain mathematical gifts and a logical way of thinking which he is fond of pointing out to his careless neighbour. The most recent doomed building project of the neighbour is a sauna in his yard, although the area is still strewn with indescribable rubbish from earlier unfinished construction ideas. In addition, the neighbour’s six children run about amidst the planks and nails. As a creative man, the neighbour tries to cut down on building costs by fetching the materials from the nearby forest himself, right down to the moss to seal the wall timbers. For an after-sauna swim he digs a pond in the yard which he leaves to fill by itself with groundwater and rain. And the persistent neighbour is not deterred even when his attempts to save on expenses do not always work out. The neighbour is a spontaneous and disorganized man, but he has one good side: his beautiful and sensible wife, Emilia.

Day after day, the protagonist follows his neighbour’s arduous sauna project, sharing his opinions and expertise. But he never helps his neighbour as he has just changed into clean trousers or slept in a bad position the previous night so that his arm is a little numb. When the neighbour’s work has progressed to the stage where he is in bad need of an assistant, the protagonist decides to get hold of some binoculars in order to follow the erection of the sauna from further away.

More and more often, however, the interests of the binoculars are focused on the neighbour’s wife, Emilia. She has pretty hands and nice hair. She bakes buns for the family, looks after the flower beds and continuously takes the children to their hobbies and back. The protagonist is very pleased when the sauna project seems to be causing friction between the couple. He adds fuel to the fire by sabotaging the neighbour’s building project in many ways. Among other things, he writes anonymously to the local newspaper about the health hazards of do it yourself projects and squeals to the Inspector of Buildings on the neighbour’s unorthodox building materials.

Little by little, however, the reason for the protagonist’s obsessive behaviour is revealed. His memories (in flashback) show to the reader a rather uncertain man whose life used to be centered around his wife. The only blemish in their twenty-year marriage was the fact that the couple were unable to have children. After the death of his wife three years earlier the protagonist’s daily life has been made up of lonely mornings and long evenings.

Suddenly, after three years, the protagonist now begins to miss a woman’s sexual and emotional closeness once more. The neighbour’s wife lives close by and seems tempting to the protagonist. Lost in the murky stream of his own longings and deluded self-image the protagonist sees himself as a more suitable partner to Emilia than her husband. As the novel progresses, he lusts for her ever more openly and powerfully. Moral shackles don’t prevent the protagonist from sabotaging the neighbour’s sauna project nor hankering after his wife. He sees nothing wrong in his actions. Instead, he feels that the neighbour’s happiness belongs to him because he is a better man and a better person.

The climax of the novel begins when the neighbour builds the sauna roof without appropriate safety equipment. He slips and shoots himself in the stomach with a nail gun. While the neighbour is lying unconscious in intensive care, the protagonist decides to show Emilia that he would never be such a careless and selfish husband and father. He takes it upon himself to clean up the neighbour’s yard and, at the same time, to get to know the wife better. One evening the protagonist suggests that he and the wife meet at the neighbour’s new pond for a midnight dip. Emilia’s noncommittal response encourages the protagonist who goes home to await midnight.

In a confusion of excited expectation the protagonist looks for his swimming trunks, without success. He tries on the flowery bikini of his late wife but since it doesn’t go with his hairy legs he resigns himself to being naked. However, at midnight, Emilia doesn’t appear at the pond and the protagonist tries to tempt her out by throwing clods of earth at the bedroom window. When the neighbour’s wife finally wakes up, the protagonist presents his naked manhood to her rather self-confidently, to which she responds with a sympathetic “Oh dear”. The protagonist realizes his wooing expedition has failed catastrophically and he retreats to his home in humiliation.

As usual, the protagonist is able to explain this setback in a positive light. As if to make up for his foolishness he gets down to accomplish the sauna and to amend his relationship with the wife. Eventually the neighbour returns from the hospital and although there is the threat that all will be revealed life goes on just as it always has. And the neighbour – he begins to plan an outhouse.

Themes

Roope Lipasti’s The Neighbour is a hilariously funny novel whose sharp satire is directed at the protagonist himself (the novel is narrated in the first person). At the same time it is also an intelligent and sympathetic depiction of what happens to a person without somebody close and dear. Using dark humour, the novel deals with the basic themes of human life, such as loneliness, the yearning for love and the grief that follows the loss of a loved one.

When the protagonist three years earlier lost the closest person to him and, with her, his mirror, his world view began to turn more black and white and his self image more distorted. His neighbour, a man of the same age, lives a very different kind of life. He has an attractive and active wife and all of six children. Although the protagonist has always tried to control his own actions and environment the losses he has faced – childlessness and the death of his wife – have been uncontrollable. On the other hand, the disorganized and undisciplined neighbour who lives for the moment has everything. The neighbour’s active days give the protagonist a certain content of life but on the other hand he cannot refrain from showing distain for the neighbour’s rough and ready attitude in order to maintain his self-respect. The protagonist continuously exalts himself by imagining how he would have done things in the correct way if he was in his neighbour’s position.

Alongside the themes of masculinity and manliness the novel touches on the interesting sub-theme of queer. In the course of the novel the protagonist dresses in his deceased wife’s most intimate clothing: her panties and her bikini. The novel does not explore the issue of cross dressing but leaves it to the reader to reflect on the significance of his deeds. Perhaps, in his wife’s silk panties the protagonist is seeking his sexual identity in a masculine world where the neighbour always has a tool in his hand and mud on his knees. Or perhaps he simply wants to feel the memory of his wife against his skin.

Structure/Style/Language

The novel is narrated by the protagonist in first person and in present tense. However, the subjective narration delves in flashbacks into the protagonist’s past. On these occasions light is thrown on earlier events and especially on his marriage. The novel uses a subtle form of repetition, with each chapter revolving around a new observation on the sauna project. The recognizable structure, moving as it does from one chapter to the next, serves the plot and reinforces the idea of the protagonist’s unchanging days. However, the tempo of the narration accelerates till the decisive scene at the pond. The scene is an interesting exception in the narration since the protagonist experiences it twice: once asleep as a dream, and once awake as a nightmare.

Lipasti’s dramatic skills are seen in the novel’s dialogue. Although the protagonist comments in disparaging terms to the neighbour, the reader is given a very different picture of him through the dialogue between the two men. The neighbour is, in fact, a gentle person who relates to others, to the events of his life and to the setbacks he encounters with humour and a philosophical joy for life. Even the intrusive and supercilious protagonist he treats with understanding and friendship. Lipasti uses the dialogue between the characters skilfully, guiding the reader beyond the webs of the unreliable narrator.

Delicious irony appears when one of the characters (usually the neighbour) declares a world-embracing, optimistic stand: the next speaker then aims to shoot it down (usually the protagonist/narrator). Or the other way round: when one of them is really down and speaks of gloomy things, the other will find any reason at all to be hopeful. The world really isn’t absolutely black and white.

Having concentrated previously on children’s literature, the best thing about Lipasti’s new novel is its style, satire. The author finds insightful humour in tax inspectors, environmental activists, public officials, children and university researchers. He takes unashamed advantage of the stereotypes attached to them. The novel’s protagonist is himself an antihero in the real sense, a tragicomic history teacher who is an embodiment of obsessively pedantic views, uncompromising opinions, exaggerated self esteem and constant narcissism. Lipasti, however, plays with the objects of his satire tenderly and with understanding. It is impossible to dislike the antihero, even though he frustrates so monumentally.