I really need to start writing down where I hear about certain books, because once again, I can’t figure out who told me about Mikael Niemi’s Popular Music from Vittula, a quirky, intelligent, yet often vulgar novel that delivers vignettes from a child’s memories of growing up in a small Swedish town inside the Arctic Circle and right near the Finnish border. Niemi, who grew up in that same region, Pajala, has a quick wit and delves into the kind of issues that would surround people in that environment – a linguistic minority also coping with extreme weather and sunlight patterns – but sinks the novel with some stylistic leaps and overemphasis on gross-out humor.

Vittula is the colloquial and unprintable (in translation) name of the village where the narrator Matti and his best friend Niila live, experiencing adventures real and fantastical, forming an ad hoc garage band, drinking too much, discovering girls (and then having something vaguely resembling sex with them), and … well, puking and shitting and peeing all over the place, as it seems. It’s as if Niemi started out trying to write a fictional memoir that would be heavy on the magical realism, and then shifted partway through to write something the Farrelly Brothers might call ‘a bit much.’

Those first few chapters are the most delightful, as the kids are younger – which may explain why the memories veer into the impossible, which becomes less prevalent as they get older – and so many things are new to them. Music is a regular theme in the book; at one point the boys get their first record, discover the Beatles, and create that incompetent rock band with two other classmates, even staging a few shows before anyone but the guitarist (who has drunk deeply of Jimi Hendrix, even though the book seems to be set before Hendrix arrived on the scene) knows how to play his instrument.

There’s also an ongoing theme of language and linguistic identity, established early in the novel as Niila appears to be mute but suddenly is able to translate the words of a visiting African priest who tries a dozen languages before hitting on one Niila knows (I won’t spoil it, as it’s a pretty funny moment). The residents of Vittula are in linguistic purgatory, as they’re part of Sweden, but Finnish by descent, and speak a local Finnish dialect first and Swedish second. This deepens the sense of isolation already in place due to geography, while also fostering a keen sense of community among the older generations, some of who view anyone who leaves the Pajala region as a traitor. Niemi even loops in the Laestadians, a revivalist Christian movement that began in the Sápmi region, although I think some of his references to its tenets were lost on me.

The memories of Niemi’s narrator are colored, or I guess discolored, by bodily fluids, which seem to flow freely in every chapter. Adults and children alike get drunk on moonshine, rotgut, and beer smuggled over the Finnish border, and then piss or beshit themselves, or, if they’re still capable of standing, engage in competitions over who can urinate the highest or farthest. (This does lead to one of the few bits of bathroom humor I found funny, late in the book, when Matti wins such a competition in artistic fashion.) Men and boys are throwing up all over the place – the women and girls in the book rarely even get names and are mostly above this kind of wanton drunkenness – and Matti and Niila sometimes roll over unconscious adults to ensure they don’t choke to death. And then there’s the blood, albeit not human blood, which shows up in a chapter when a visiting writer offers to pay Matti a bounty for each mouse he kills at the cottage the writer is renting, which leads to a widespread muricide (by Matti), described graphically, that ends in disaster. It’s hard to square Matti’s delight in killing these rodents with the depiction of his character in other parts of the book, especially when he speaks as an adult in the epilogue.

There is some highbrow or at least not-lowbrow humor in Popular Music in Vittula, but there just isn’t enough of it, and once the drinking starts in a chapter, we’re trapped in a mire of people falling down and soiling themselves and yelling or mumbling or just whipping out their dicks. If that’s your cup of tea, you may enjoy this book a lot more than I did, but I found it a tougher slog the closer I got to the end, and that brief epilogue just felt so disconnected from the rest of the book that I wasn’t sure what I had just read.

Next up: Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry.