The book won the 2000 Finlandia Prize for best novel written by a Finnish citizen and was one of the winners of the 2004 Tiptree Award, apparently in the Owen translation. Which brings me around to Johanna Sinisalo’s book Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi, a Finnish book translated into English in 2003 by Peter Owen as Not Before Sundown and then again the same year by Herbert Lomas as Troll: A Love Story. These sort of things are rarely shown in most stories about humans and animals, but they’re a crucial part of the experience of dealing with a pet. You have to learn how to communicate with a creature that does not use words - but which may be surprisingly good at understanding emotions in a voice. You have to learn about (and sometimes worry about) diet and medical needs and what certain behaviour patterns mean. There’s a complexity of living with, and to an extent being responsible for, a non-human animal. (This is getting around to a look at a fantasy novel, and no the novel has nothing to do with cats as such, and yes I have a point.) I’d never had a pet when I was young, so I suddenly found myself dealing with a new range of experiences and emotions and found also that the depictions in most media of relationships between pets and their humans were notably lacking. A few years ago, a cat came to live with me under unexpected circumstances.
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