The Summer House by Philip Teir

Author:Philip Teir [Teir, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782833925
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2018-07-12T07:00:00+00:00

8

ANDERS NOTICED THE COOL summer air of Finland as soon as he stepped out of the airplane in Vanda. The air was drier than in Asia, the airport was emptier, everything was quieter, and he felt unpleasantly foreign and grubby as he walked through the clean and Nordically gleaming terminal, heading for the exit. While he waited for his suitcases among the weary Finnish families with young children, he had a feeling that he was returning to Finland after several years, even though he’d been away only three months.

The trip had not gone as he’d hoped. He’d spent all his money and suffered a breakdown one night after an evening of heavy drinking. He woke up on the bank of a river, surrounded by street vendors and staring tourists. He didn’t really know why he’d decided to go to Hanoi, but he realised the trip hadn’t had the positive effect he’d wanted. He felt defeated, like an example in some self-help book seeking to illustrate its moral: Don’t run away from your problems by creating geographical distance. Instead you should always first try to work things out for yourself.

Why had he decided to make the trip at all? Anders had been dreaming about it for a long time, yearning to be swallowed up by the Asian heat and feverish activity. He’d known nothing about Hanoi other than what he’d read on the internet, but he did have some idea what to expect: a city with a vibrant pulse and, above all, a totally anonymous place where he would be far away from his family.

During the first weeks he had walked around aimlessly, looking at the street vendors and their big piles of frogs, at all the chickens that seemed to be running around loose. He walked down alleyways and stared right into people’s living rooms, at the blaring TV sets and children clinging to their mother’s skirts.

He’d taken lodging at a hostel for backpackers, thinking it might be a positive way to start off his trip. Anders hadn’t bought a return plane ticket. Instead, he’d dreamed of travelling back to Finland by train, maybe via China and the trans-Siberian railway, but that was a plan he’d put off thinking about until later. His travel funds consisted of two thousand euros, money he’d mostly borrowed, and in his suitcase he’d packed a bunch of books: novels by Thomas Bernhard; Freud’s case studies; a few guidebooks about Vietnam; and Sönder, a novel by the Finland-Swedish writer Henry Parland. Anders had read the book at least ten times, finding in it his own general feeling of rootlessness in life. The novel, from 1930, had a splintered storyline that seemed to reflect life and his own mental landscape. A miscellany of fragmented experiences, nothing concrete that he could ever seize hold of. And that had also become his life’s motto – an acceptance of the splintered structure, instead of believing there was any such thing as a true core.

The area where he was staying

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