Compartment No. 6 Book Report

I read the Finnish author Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6 which is the British translation of the original novel Hytti Nro. 6. Originally I wanted to read Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, but that book is not in any of Kuopio’s libraries. I found Liksom’s book by going to the English section at the City Library and looked for a book that looked interesting. I saw many sci-fi and fantasy books, which I like, but they were mostly quite long or part of a series. This book stood out because it was of the proper length and the book’s covers were laid out nicely. I also like winter, the snow and the moody nights. The book tells about the girl’s spring journey from Moscow to Ulan Bator in the same compartment with a Russian man. I concluded that the book is set in the late 80s. On page …show more content…
It is comprised of many colorfully illustrated events during the journey, which assemble in to a poetically beautiful story. The story is told concentrating on the girl, but by an omniscient narrator. The main characters are the girl and the man. They are travelling from Moscow to Ulan Bator, the girl to study archeological sites and the man to work at a construction site. The girl doesn’t talk at all for most of the book, and speaks for the first time on page 176, line 6: “Then she looked him in the eye and said, as Job said: ‘For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come to me, Vadim Nikolayevich.’“ In the beginning of the book, the man bothers the girl with rude suggestions, but through the journey they grow together as the man tells the girl stories of his fatherland and of his experiences. When the girl gets back to the man in the train from her adventures in the countryside, she feels safer when she’s with him. The girl and the man are the polar opposites of each other. The girl reads and quilts as the man drinks copious amounts of vodka and talks trash about his