Sexuality is, of course, a recurrent theme in many traditional fairy tales, especially in the original versions. It's a fascinating story, with a strong sexual tensions - it certainly is a love story, as the English title has it.
Add to the mix a Filipino mail-order wife living downstairs and couple of other characters and it all gets rather interesting. A bond, relationships starts to form between Mikael and the troll, and soon things get complicated, when primal forces mix with modern world and culture meets nature. It's a troll, and Mikael takes it home and adopts it. The story is about Mikael, a young photographer, who finds something strange in his backyard. The book switches with the story, told by different narrators, and all sorts of fragments of literature (web sites, nonfiction, fiction) about trolls, written as if the trolls were a natural thing, an animal amongst the others. The book starts with a simple assumption: trolls exist. Let's start with the book first and I'll deal with the background later. I'll come to the origin of the title later, it's a fascinating thing in itself.
The English title is more straightforward Troll : A Love Story, a direct translation would be Not before sundown (which is the title of the first English edition of the book) or something like that. It is Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi by Johanna Sinisalo. I was first going to pass the carnival, but then I came up with the perfect book to introduce to the readers of the carnival. This is my contribution to the 12th Bookworms Carnival, themed on fairy tales.
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