The Beautiful Pig Farm read online. Martti Larni - a wonderful pig farmer

Martti LARNIE

BEAUTIFUL PIG

Or Genuine and impartial memoirs of economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen, written by herself

Preface,

YOU SHOULD READ

One day in December 1958, in the evening - they had barely finished transmitting the latest news - my phone rang and an unfamiliar female voice called my name.

Economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen speaks. I want to talk to you about a matter that is very important to me. Could you come and see me now? In ten minutes my car will be at your entrance.

Twenty minutes later I was in Kulosaari in the luxurious mansion of a prominent businesswoman, also known for her charitable activities. I immediately recognized the mistress of the house, because for many years I had seen countless portraits of her on the pages of newspapers and magazines. She was a tall, stately woman, whose temples were slightly touched with gray hair. Her beautiful face expressed fatigue and was almost stern. She spoke Finnish without errors, but with a slight foreign accent.

I apologize for daring to disturb you. You are one of the eleven Finnish writers who have never applied to my Foundation for loans and benefits to continue their literary activities, and the only one I managed to catch on the phone. Please sit down! Whiskey, cognac, sherry?

Thank you, no need for anything.

Great, I don’t drink alcohol myself. But I’m not a writer, but a businesswoman, which gives me the right to some liberties. It’s not my custom to pound water in a mortar for a long time, so I’ll get straight to the point. I am leaving Finland tomorrow and, apparently, will not return to this country; Unless I'll pay a visit sometime while passing through. For the last two years I have lived quietly, alone, and during this time, using personal diaries, I wrote memoirs about some of the events of my life. I would like to publish these memories as a separate book, for which I need your help. Since Finnish is not my native language, there are naturally some errors in the manuscript. I ask you to correct any grammatical errors and then forward my work to a publisher. Then you will submit an invoice to the cash desk of the Foundation that bears my name, and your diligence will be paid. I will order that money be prepared for you. That's all I wanted to say.

She handed me the manuscript and stood up, preparing to take me into the hallway. I dared to inquire about her travel plans. She answered in her calm manner:

At first I thought about moving to the Canary Islands, but after going there to get acquainted, I immediately abandoned this idea. Living there is like moving to Korkeasaari! My secretary searched for a suitable place for a whole year and finally found it. So, I leave for the Galapagos Islands, where I managed to buy five thousand hectares of land. A marina for my yachts and an airfield are already ready there. An ideal place for a person who is tired of the company of his own kind. No radio, no television, no electricity, no police, no nosy neighbors. Today I transferred this mansion with all its movables to the management of my Foundation. OK it's all over Now. I hope you will fulfill my request and see to it that these humble memories become a book.

The audience lasted fifteen minutes.

And now I have finally fulfilled the request of economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen: her memoirs are being published. I didn’t change anything about them, although it was hard to resist; I gave fictitious names to only a few famous people out of reverence. However, I can assure you that the characters appearing in the memoirs are not figments of the imagination.

Helsinki, May 1959 M.L.

Chapter first

WHO AM I?

I never had close friends. As for my close friends, to whom I provided significant financial assistance for a number of years, many of them, as if wanting to show their gratitude, persistently urged me to write memoirs. I have always resolutely rejected this kind of flirtation, the sincerity of which can be doubted. Flattery is like perfume: you can revel in its scent, but you cannot drink it. For this reason, I am overcome with a feeling of disgust when my acquaintances admire my unusually well-preserved appearance, my collections of jewelry and the large sums that I donate to charity, and exclaim almost with tears in their eyes:

Oh, dear Minna! You should definitely write a memoir, you have such experience, you have seen so much and experienced so much... you are known to the whole world as an elegant and educated woman - a real lady!

After such outpourings, I usually pretended to be deeply moved - in life you constantly have to play all kinds of roles - and thanked my acquaintances for their attention, although I should have been honest with myself and told them: “By bye bye! You have smoked so much incense that my soul will soon be covered with soot. But your zeal is completely in vain, because in the cellar I have an almost unlimited amount of whiskey and good cognac, and my driver will immediately take you home as soon as you begin to stumble and lose your thoughts ... "

I understand very well people who, in a boring society, yearn for loneliness and retire for a minute to the toilet. The boredom of social life, or, better to say, social life, began to weigh on me three years ago. And I left in a timely manner. I felt like a real lady, but I was always afraid that one day they would call me Grand Old Lady - a respectable old lady, which would be terrible.

Lovely pig farm Martti Larni

(estimates: 1 , average: 5,00 out of 5)

Title: Beautiful pig farm

About the book “The Beautiful Pig Farmer” by Martti Larni

The satirical work of the Finnish writer Martti Larni “The Beautiful Pig Farmer” is dedicated to the theme of Finnish society in the 30s and 40s of the last century. The main character is not a downtrodden provincial girl, but a real businesswoman, making her way to the top of fame with her own work.

“The Beautiful Pig Farmer” is a kind of confession of the main character Minna Karlsson-Kananen, who has made a career as an economic adviser. The heroine’s life had many ups and downs, but she was able to achieve everything she dreamed of. And now, from the top of her life, Minna looks at her life, taking off her rose-colored glasses.

The book is the memoirs of the main character, filled with sarcasm and irony. The novel is the center of sparkling statements and aphorisms - it can literally be disassembled into quotes.

Readers familiar with the work of Martti Larni will definitely enjoy the work. It has depth, revealing new facets of the talent of the author, who turned out to be not only an excellent humorist, but also a subtle psychologist. The book ridicules bourgeois society, mired in all mortal sins.

Martti Larni writes in deliberately simple language, understandable to everyone. The author avoids pompous phrases and pathos, but does not miss the chance to make jokes in a critical situation, ridicule vices and point out the shortcomings of society. The writer tells how difficult it is for a woman to get to the top of her career, how much effort Minna had to put in, how she used men and her talents along the way.

The conclusions of the heroine of the novel “The Beautiful Pig Farm” in relation to men can be perceived in different ways, however, no matter how offensive the lines of the work sound, there is some truth in them. The heroine also makes fun of women. Minna made a career, but did not find personal happiness, and now she is ironic about this. She became the embodiment of the American dream, but not all wishes come true, no matter how you look at it.

The book “The Beautiful Pig Farmer” is a work that can brighten up a couple of evenings with a fascinating read of the career history of Minna Karlsson-Kananen. The lady is pleasant in all respects, endowed with a good sense of humor and a sharp mind. Satire and irony, running through every page of the novel, turn the work into something special. Something that will leave an imprint in the memory and will not be erased over time.

On our website about books, you can download the site for free without registration or read online the book “The Beautiful Pig Farm” by Martti Larni in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.

Quotes from the book “The Beautiful Pig Farm” by Martti Larni

I understand very well people who, in a boring society, yearn for loneliness and retire for a minute to the toilet.

However, the pure and simple truth is very rarely absolutely pure, and even less often - simple.

One day in December 1958, in the evening - they had barely finished transmitting the latest news - my phone rang and an unfamiliar female voice called my name.

Economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen speaks. I want to talk to you about a matter that is very important to me. Could you come and see me now? In ten minutes my car will be at your entrance.

Thank you, no need for anything.

She handed me the manuscript and stood up, preparing to take me into the hallway. I dared to inquire about her travel plans. She answered in her calm manner:

The audience lasted fifteen minutes.

Helsinki, May 1959 M.L.

Chapter first

WHO AM I?

So, as I already mentioned, my friends urged me to write memoirs. They insisted on this, apparently believing that I would not write anything anyway, since I would not dare talk about my past without consulting a lawyer, or that I was generally incapable of talking interestingly about cases that were in fact very uninteresting. This is what they thought, but this only indicates that their brains were hopelessly hardened and moldy. They do not know me well and do not understand that my good reputation does not rest on those actions from which I abstained. If I now, contrary to my previous beliefs, sit down at a typewriter and plan to write every word on a line (the line will be long, and unpleasant words will find their place in it), this happens for the following reasons: for some time now the horde of my emotions began to raise an insane cry, like a gang of hired instigators, and I want to declare publicly that I have not gone into my shell in order to talk privately with my guilty conscience, but I am simply running away from the envy of women and the stupidity of men; I want to show that a woman can also be socially talented, for example, an excellent character actress who plays all the roles so that people believe her and reward her with applause.

In recent years, I have read a whole bunch of various memoirs and sadly came to the conclusion that such concoctions do not require particularly valuable products. The authors of these works reveal the storehouses of their memory primarily because it is fashionable; Moreover, some of them consider their departure from the stage and the fact that future generations will know nothing about such irreplaceable personalities who lived in our advanced cultural state as an irreparable disaster. They lose sight of the fact that Finland's cemeteries are filled with the graves of people who also once believed that the world could not stand without them.

Those one and a half hundred volumes of memoirs, which I spent five hundred days reading, were delicately transported by the prudent curator of my library to the attic or sold to second-hand book dealers. These books were so similar to each other that they could well have been the works of the same author. Firstly, they are chaste, like Erkko’s poetry, and their creators... ah, and in our small country there could be so many unselfish, noble, tireless, gifted, educated, wise, philanthropic, modest, inconspicuous, selfless, patriotic and constructive characters ! If there had previously been an occasional ugly blemish on their reputation or a wart that irritated connoisseurs of beauty, then the broad strokes of memories in the end reliably covered them with a layer of paint pleasing to the eye. And although it is known, say, that the author was once in prison for high treason or for inciting rebellion, for tax evasion or for homosexuality, nevertheless, in the memoirs these small sins turn into civic virtues, for which the reader’s blessing is called upon.

OCR & SpellCheck: Zmiy ( [email protected]), January 19, 2004
“Larney M. The fourth vertebra. Beautiful pig farm": Lenizdat; St. Petersburg; 1990
ISBN 5-289-00666-4
annotation
The full title is “The Beautiful Pig Farmer, or the genuine, hard-hitting memoirs of economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen, written by her.”
The satirical novel “The Beautiful Pig Farmer” was published almost fifty years ago. The American Dream has captured the imagination of generations of disadvantaged people around the world. Rumors of a fabulously abundant country where a bootblack can quickly and easily become a millionaire are tempting. Larney, with inimitable humor, subtly ridiculing the naive and simple-minded admiration for everything American, showing America from the inside, in contact with this very American dream, dispels illusions.
A lot has changed in today's world. However, the author’s sparkling humor, caustic accuracy of assessments, and fearless satire are no less interesting and useful to the reader today. Judge for yourself.
Martti LARNIE
BEAUTIFUL PIG

or Genuine and impartial memoirs of economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen, written by herself
Preface,
YOU SHOULD READ
One day in December 1958, in the evening - they had barely finished transmitting the latest news - my phone rang and an unfamiliar female voice called my name.
- Economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen speaks. I want to talk to you about a matter that is very important to me. Could you come and see me now? In ten minutes my car will be at your entrance.
Twenty minutes later I was in Kulosaari in the luxurious mansion of a prominent businesswoman, also known for her charitable activities. I immediately recognized the mistress of the house, because for many years I had seen countless portraits of her on the pages of newspapers and magazines. She was a tall, stately woman, whose temples were slightly touched with gray hair. Her beautiful face expressed fatigue and was almost stern. She spoke Finnish without errors, but with a slight foreign accent.
- I apologize for daring to disturb you. You are one of the eleven Finnish writers who have never applied to my Foundation for loans and benefits to continue their literary activities, and the only one I managed to catch on the phone. Please sit down! Whiskey, cognac, sherry?
- Thank you, you don’t need anything.
- Great, I don’t drink alcohol myself. But I’m not a writer, but a businesswoman, which gives me the right to some liberties. It’s not my custom to pound water in a mortar for a long time, so I’ll get straight to the point. I am leaving Finland tomorrow and, apparently, will not return to this country; Unless I'll pay a visit sometime while passing through. For the last two years I have lived quietly, alone, and during this time, using personal diaries, I wrote memoirs about some of the events of my life. I would like to publish these memories as a separate book, for which I need your help. Since Finnish is not my native language, there are naturally some errors in the manuscript. I ask you to correct any grammatical errors and then forward my work to a publisher. Then you will submit an invoice to the cash desk of the Foundation that bears my name, and your diligence will be paid. I will order that money be prepared for you. That's all I wanted to say.
She handed me the manuscript and stood up, preparing to take me into the hallway. I dared to inquire about her travel plans. She answered in her calm manner:
- At first I thought about moving to the Canary Islands, but after going there to get acquainted, I immediately abandoned this idea. Living there is like moving to Korkeasaari! My secretary searched for a suitable place for a whole year and finally found it. So, I leave for the Galapagos Islands, where I managed to buy five thousand hectares of land. A marina for my yachts and an airfield are already ready there. An ideal place for a person who is tired of the company of his own kind. No radio, no television, no electricity, no police, no nosy neighbors. Today I transferred this mansion with all its movables to the management of my Foundation. OK it's all over Now. I hope you will fulfill my request and see to it that these humble memories become a book.
The audience lasted fifteen minutes.
And now I have finally fulfilled the request of economic adviser Minna Karlsson-Kananen: her memoirs are being published. I didn’t change anything about them, although it was hard to resist; I gave fictitious names to only a few famous people out of reverence. However, I can assure you that the characters appearing in the memoirs are not figments of the imagination.
Helsinki, May 1959 M.L.
Chapter first
WHO AM I?
I never had close friends. As for my close friends, to whom I provided significant financial assistance for a number of years, many of them, as if wanting to show their gratitude, persistently urged me to write memoirs. I have always resolutely rejected this kind of flirtation, the sincerity of which can be doubted. Flattery is like perfume: you can revel in its scent, but you cannot drink it. For this reason, I am overcome with a feeling of disgust when my acquaintances admire my unusually well-preserved appearance, my collections of jewelry and the large sums that I donate to charity, and exclaim almost with tears in their eyes:
- Oh, dear Minna! You should definitely write a memoir, you have such experience, you have seen so much and experienced so much... you are known to the whole world as an elegant and educated woman - a real lady!
After such outpourings, I usually pretended to be deeply moved - in life you constantly have to play all kinds of roles - and thanked my acquaintances for their attention, although I should have been honest with myself and told them: “By bye bye! You have smoked so much incense that my soul will soon be covered with soot. But your zeal is completely in vain, because in the cellar I have an almost unlimited amount of whiskey and good cognac, and my driver will immediately take you home as soon as you begin to stumble and lose your thoughts ... "
I understand very well people who, in a boring society, yearn for loneliness and retire for a minute to the toilet. The boredom of social life, or, better to say, social life, began to weigh on me three years ago. And I left in a timely manner. I felt like a real lady, but I was always afraid that one day they would call me Grand Old Lady - a respectable old lady, which would be terrible.
So, as I already mentioned, my friends urged me to write memoirs. They insisted on this, apparently believing that I would not write anything anyway, since I would not dare talk about my past without consulting a lawyer, or that I was generally incapable of talking interestingly about cases that were in fact very uninteresting. This is what they thought, but this only indicates that their brains were hopelessly hardened and moldy. They do not know me well and do not understand that my good reputation does not rest on those actions from which I abstained. If I now, contrary to my previous beliefs, sit down at a typewriter and plan to write every word on a line (the line will be long, and unpleasant words will find their place in it), this happens for the following reasons: for some time now the horde of my emotions began to raise an insane cry, like a gang of hired instigators, and I want to declare publicly that I have not gone into my shell in order to talk privately with my guilty conscience, but I am simply running away from the envy of women and the stupidity of men; I want to show that a woman can also be socially talented, for example, an excellent character actress who plays all the roles so that people believe her and reward her with applause.
In recent years, I have read a whole bunch of various memoirs and sadly came to the conclusion that such concoctions do not require particularly valuable products. The authors of these works reveal the storehouses of their memory primarily because it is fashionable; Moreover, some of them consider their departure from the stage and the fact that future generations will know nothing about such irreplaceable personalities who lived in our advanced cultural state as an irreparable disaster. They lose sight of the fact that Finland's cemeteries are filled with the graves of people who also once believed that the world could not stand without them.
Those one and a half hundred volumes of memoirs, which I spent five hundred days reading, were delicately transported by the prudent curator of my library to the attic or sold to second-hand book dealers. These books were so similar to each other that they could well have been the works of the same author. Firstly, they are chaste, like Erkko’s poetry, and their creators... ah, and in our small country there could be so many unselfish, noble, tireless, gifted, educated, wise, philanthropic, modest, inconspicuous, selfless, patriotic and constructive characters ! If there had previously been an occasional ugly blemish on their reputation or a wart that irritated connoisseurs of beauty, then the broad strokes of memories in the end reliably covered them with a layer of paint pleasing to the eye. And although it is known, say, that the author was once in prison for high treason or for inciting rebellion, for tax evasion or for homosexuality, nevertheless, in the memoirs these small sins turn into civic virtues, for which the reader’s blessing is called upon.
Many memoirs are like a lawyer's speech or a bathroom: both are specifically designed for cleansing. Memoirists imagine themselves as white as sugar, angels, whose unearthly thoughts and rosy thoughts are inaccessible to any external irritations. Their moral goals are lofty; they always do the right thing, not in the hope of eternal bliss, but simply from the consciousness that it is right.
To be honest, I don’t rise to such heights. I'm selfish; my egoism finds food for itself everywhere. I don't stop taking care of my feet just to wear tight shoes. I don’t notice the slightest signs of old age in myself and always think more about my appearance than about my health. I also have my own unshakable principles: for example, I am more willing to give than to lend, since both are equally expensive. I do not consider myself vicious, although my morality does not fit into Luther’s catechism. I do not have literary inclinations, like some authors of memoirs. For more than twenty years, my favorite book was the checkbook - in it I found the sacred poetry of a business woman for myself and for my good friends. My literary activity was limited to signing business letters, trade agreements and checks, as well as two love letters that remained unsent. I don't understand modern poetry and Picasso's paintings because their meaning needs to be deciphered.
As soon as I appear somewhere in society, the newspapers publish my portrait with a caption that begins, almost invariably, with the words: “Known for her charitable donations, an activist of the cultural front...”
I’m usually satisfied with the portrait, but the text makes me sick, and since I have a bad habit of swearing, I exclaim with a sigh: “Oh, damn, what disgusting!..”
“Famous...” That’s really it! “Everybody knows”, which, however, no one knows! They only know me because I waste money in front of everyone. Chance rewarded me with wealth, and my surroundings rewarded me with prejudice. Since it is very likely that after my death some skinny knight of the pen or a simple-minded recruit to the humanities will begin to cook up a description of my life, I now want to voluntarily and without the slightest selfishness offer dry firewood to the future cook of my biography. Because what else can he find out about me? Only what is written in the book “Who’s Who?” Yes, in two or three matrixes. But you can’t make soup with this. What do you say, reader? Please open Who's Who? on the letter “K” and you will find the following there:
Karlsson-Kananen Minna Ermina Ernestina, Economic Adviser, Helsinki. Genus. in Virginia (Minnesota, USA) 19.IX.04.
Parents: Colonel, restaurateur Boris Baranauskas and Natalie Gustaitis. Supr.: 1) manufacturer Armas Karlsson, 34 - 36; 2) mountain councilor Kalle Kananen, 39, development. - 40. Studied languages. Econ. advisor 46. Focus: travel. and collection precious decorations
I have hundreds of acquaintances who are burning with curiosity. They want to know about my past, supposedly in order to better understand my current life. Every now and then rumors arise around me, followed by nasty gendarmerie squads of suspicion. The worst spreaders of rumors are men, their thoughts revolve around speculation, theft and criminal offenses. But women feel much more confident in the areas of adultery, love affairs, extortion and abortion. The only person I know who has developed a kind of immunity against the chicken pox of curiosity is my old cook Loviisa, a great specialist in her field and a charmingly naive woman. Everything she wants to know in life, she finds in a cookbook.
However, I have almost nothing to hide. Everyone knows that in age I am still closer to fifty than to sixty. Without falling into narcissism, I dare to say that I am well “preserved.” Thanks to my height - one hundred and seventy-three centimeters - I look very slim, although my weight reaches seventy kilograms. My chest is round and firm, my arms are flexible, my neck is smooth and beautifully contoured. There is not a single wrinkle on the face yet, no signs of sagging. I am deeply grateful to Elisabeth Ardenne, Elena Rubinstein and Max Factor, whose tireless care maintains the attractiveness of a woman even at a time when her passions begin to calm down a little.
I don’t hide my origins at all. My parents were Lithuanians. My father served in the old Russian army, rose to the rank of colonel, was involved in some kind of bribery case and was dismissed. Then, still in the prime of his life, he emigrated to America. Thanks to his knowledge of languages, he got a job as a waiter in the tavern of the American Lithuanian Mr. Gustaitis, fell in love with the owner’s daughter, who became his legal wife two months before my birth. Therefore, I came into this world as one hundred percent American.
My mother's father was a sickly man: for many years he was tormented by asthma earned in coal mines and, in addition, by an occupational disease of tavern workers - quietly creeping alcoholism. As I was told, he had a special passion for Mexican rum, which often causes severe insanity. Grandfather imagined himself either as Abraham Lincoln or as Ivan the Terrible. Fortunately, the little court jester of God ended his earthly journey by Christmas 1904, and from then on the zucchini became the property of my mother and the disposal of my father. Two years later, the father received American citizenship, along with the first inconveniences of a critical age: he could no longer remain faithful to his wife. The parents' divorce process ended just perfectly.