Riikka Pulkkinen (True) challenges readers to form their own impressions with Enchantment, a striking novel about girlhood, perception, and death.
"The sun is setting and they're at the beach. The sky is soft mallow and bronze. It's the last summer of their youth." Pulkkinen, in an atmospheric translation from the Finnish by Tabatha Leggett, emphasizes this cinematic view. The next scene, almost a year later, is a forensic autopsy: Philippa Laakso, age 17, has been found dead in the courtyard of her apartment complex.
Philippa is the center of this novel; all gazes are directed toward her. Observations come in various formats: interview notes by police investigators, flashbacks, and descriptions of videos recorded by Philippa on her treasured Olympus PEN camera. Chapters take the close-third-person perspective of various characters, rarely including Philippa herself. Philippa is a perfect enigma to those left behind. These include a compassionate, poetic forensic pathologist; an elderly widower, whom Philippa befriended; the older men she met via dating apps; the boy she dated seriously and recently broke up with; Saga, her friend and double; and Philippa's mother, from whom "the girl had learned the art of being a matryoshka."
One of Enchantment's central concerns is the question of perspective, of what is possible to know about a person. Pulkkinen's dreamy novel delves into the line between truth and fiction, storytelling and self-creation. Philippa invented herself, and in the aftermath of her life, police investigate the question of her death, as everyone investigates how to view and remember her. She has "become a dream, gossip, stories," and readers are left to parse the enchantment that remains. --Julia Kastner, blogger at pagesofjulia