Popular Music from Vittula

“A blissfully eccentric, fiction-enhanced memoir … Niemi tells his stories with stoic wit and a dusting of magic realism, as if the extreme climate knocks the senses off kilter. (Or perhaps it's the vodka.) His prose buzzes with wonder, fearlessness, and ecstatic ignorance: the sensations of youth. Each chapter is an epic in miniature …”

– Hugo Lindgren, New York Times Magazine

“Haunting and glorious. Niemi's finest achievement is to have created a world poised between an adult's fantastic memories of childhood and a child's naïve dreams of his future. Graceless sentiments like disillusionment or regret are never allowed to trespass upon Pajala's icy rivers and twilit woods. The future remains a frantic hallucination, while the past is absurd and wondrous. With more than 800,000 sold, one out of every 10 Swedes own a copy; only one of every 30 Americans, by comparison, owns the latest Harry Potter book. Magic, it seems, does well. But enchantment does better.”

– Nathaniel Rich, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“An exquisitely beautiful novel, artfully translated.”

– Paula Luedkte, Booklist

“In British translator Laurie Thompson's hands, Niemi's language is a constant, fresh poetic surprise … Even the alphabet—'a scary army of sticks and halfmoons'—comes strangely alive in this marvelous book.”

– Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times

“An extraordinary novel: hilarious, ribald, obscene … I've never read anything like it.”

– Nicci Gerrard, Observer (London)

“Niemi’s entrancing debut novel is a coming-of-age story set in Pajala, Sweden, a remote district above the Arctic Circle. It is the early 1960’s, and Matti and his peculiar sidekick, Niila, are fascinated by their exotic corner of the world as by their newest discoveries: girls and rock music.”

– New York Times Book Review

“Matti’s narrative voice is as distinctive and charming as that of Huckleberry Finn. But, as with Mark Twain, the comedy is shadowed with melancholy -- even terror that will unsettle the reader sometimes. The book is filled with eccentric. Grotesque, even unsavory characters, but Niemi shows large tolerance, kindly spirit and even clear pleasure in these odd neighbors. They are human, too.”

– Minneapolis Star-Tribune