The Saprophile

Nominated for the 2024 Finlandia Prize in Fiction!

A brilliant novel that dives deep into the human psyche, explores themes such as power, passion, and the world of Ingmar Bergman, and is a reflection on being human through art

An island.

An author. Two women.

Ingmar Bergman.

The main characters of a film who are planning to escape.

The Saprophile is a hypnotic treatise on power and writing. It is the autopsy of a novel, a hybrid that seeks to go where genres end. It is a novel about Ingmar Bergman's films, about a desire that refuses to obey, about an island, about how easy it is to lose yourself in another person, and how difficult it is to find your way back.

Like a saprophile, an organism that lives and thrives on dead or decaying organic matter, The Saprophile is like a literary organism that eats away at age-old concepts and structures.

PRAISE

“The Saprophile has everything I love in literature: a vibrant relationship with art, a changing form, and an energy that drives the text forward. The novel is incredibly rich yet surprisingly light to read. Reading The Saprophile is both unsettling and nourishing."

– Maaria Ylikangas, Helsingin Sanomat newspaper

“The novel is a clever but not dodgy construction, with the reader shuttling easily between the layers. Hakkarainen, who has previously written five story-driven novels, has produced an astonishingly ambitious artistic novel that rises to the level of international narrative art.”

- Hannu Harju, Suomen Kuvalehti