In the Library
Seven Brothers
Aleksis Kivi, 1870
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Alex Matson (1929)
- Chapters
- Chapters 14
- Length
- Length 113k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Jukola Farm, in the south of the province of Häme, stands on the northern slope of a hill, near the village of Toukola.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
Cervantes also built a comic masterpiece out of stubborn men who will not be talked out of their own view of the world, but Kivi's heroes are seven brothers and a forest.
£1.99
Growth of the Soil
Knut Hamsun
Hamsun also follows people clearing hard northern land, but Kivi's pioneers are loud, quarrelsome and funny, and they fight the clearing as much as each other.
£1.99
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais
Rabelais also lets appetite, brawling and bawdy speech run riot through a comic epic, but Kivi turns that energy on the backwoods of Finland.
£1.99
About the book
The alphabet is the enemy here. Juhani, Tuomas, Aapo, Simeoni, Timo, Lauri and Eero, the orphaned brothers of Jukola farm, flee the parish clerk's switch and the reading primer for the wild slope of Impivaara, where for ten years they clear the forest, besiege themselves on a boulder against a herd of furious bulls through a whole day and night, and nearly burn to death in their own sauna on Christmas Eve, running naked into the snow. Aleksis Kivi wrote the first great novel in Finnish when the educated of his country still spoke Swedish, and he filled it with the brothers' bragging, their tall tales by the fire, their brawls and their sudden, startled piety under the northern sky. The comedy is enormous, and the tenderness beneath it is bigger: Kivi loves every one of these stubborn, ridiculous men, and lets the forest slowly make them gentle. He died poor and broken in mind not long after a leading critic savaged the book. Finland now reads it as its own face looking back from the lake.