Sonia O. Was Here

Sex, drugs, and . . . agitprop. The radical seventies revisited.


A young man's odyssey must be among the most explored themes in literature. Sonia O. Was Here presents a woman's reply. In the spirit of Bukowski, Miller, and Fellini, Snellman depicts a young woman's search for independence and freedom, her struggle to define her boundaries, and her encounters with the double standards of our society.


Sonia O. is the daughter of two war refugees who suffer from chronic nostalgia for their homeland. The past is constantly present, but only fragments of it are revealed and the rest is not to be talked about. Sonia learns to imagine the missing chapters, trying to adapt herself to secrets that run in the family.


In adolescence, she wants to break free from all of that. Her escape takes us through the streets of Helsinki, to the sticky floors of dance studios, the soft nights of St. Petersburg, the sterile corridors of a mental hospital, the stuffy lecture halls of academia, the hubris and discord of cultural circles, and the fiery ideals of student radicalism--until she finally cracks the code to her life.


First published in 1981, Sonia O. Was Here continues to be discovered by new generations of readers. The book remains the highest-selling debut novel in the history of Finnish literature. Still relevant, now perhaps more so than ever, the book raises the question: beneath the surface, how much of all the progress we seem to have made is real?