Trilogy - Pentti Saarikoski

Saarikoski takes an extended, amused, bemused, and unpretentious look at some of the 'thousand things' previously side-stepped or unnoticed: the chores of the dailiness, in a way often reminiscent of Paul Blackburn's 'Journals' (another great 'last work'); his both familiar and unfamiliar -- Northern but Swedish -- surroundings; memories though long buried; the 'Masks of God' he is reading about in Joseph Campbell's three-volume work of that name, written -- and read by Saarikoski -- long before its author became a television personality. He also wanders through the labyrinth of 'events which we are characteristically predisposed to co-operate with, designing what happens to us' and speculates that if we can transform that sign, the labyrinth, with its implications of rigidity and claustrophobia, into another, that of the dance, we may be able to revive an older, more truly participatory sense of the world...