Release date is 2026-01-19

Juhani Kärkkäinen and Tapio Riikonen

"Halveksittu mies" by Lauri Haarla is a novel written in the early 20th century. It charts a tough social coming-of-age in rural Finland through Veentaan Iivari, a fatherless boy derided as “houna,” whose clever hustles, wounded pride, and devotion to his mother crash against class contempt and the glitter of easy money. As he takes to the road with a peddler, his bright fantasies of gold and palaces meet humiliation, opportunists, and a society tilting toward commerce and display.

The beginning of the novel introduces Iivari’s sharp wits and bruised status: he builds contraptions, runs small scams on richer boys, dreams of a golden future for his mother, and violently defends her honor. A flamboyant traveling “agent” inspires his road-longing, and he soon becomes the liehtar (assistant) to a half-blind peddler, Vikruutin ukko, with whom he forges a wary, warming bond while glimpsing a broader struggle for money and status. Along the way, he sees models of hustle and ascent—the jaunty agent on the rise and the comic, self-made Hoppa-Kalle—while old schoolboy tormentors pass him with cold superiority. A torpan girl, Nilla, lures him into an aitta tryst, but later publicly snubs and mocks him at village festivities, where he is further humiliated by Hoppa’s bluster. At dawn he confronts Nilla with a silk shawl meant as a betrothal gift, recoils from her sudden greed, and walks away. By the time autumn rains set in, he moves through villages with a hardened smile, selling shrewdly, feeling ever more cut off from “respectable” people. (This is an automatically generated summary.)

Originally published: Helsinki: Otava, 1930