Shelf Space - Finnish your troll

It's a bad night for Mikael Hartikainen. He and Martes just broke up. Of course Martes, unwilling to acknowledge his homosexuality, denies they ever had a relationship at all. Now this: Mikael (aka Angel, Michelangelo and Miguel) returns to his apartment building to find a troll in the yard. No, not an uncouth neighbor or a bad love prospect. An actual, honest to goodness Felipithecus trollius cub, holed up among the trashcans and surrounded by the same local thugs who mug gay men who go out alone at night in Tampere, Finland.

Is the abandoned baby troll an hallucination? A devil? A psychoanalytic doppelganger of Mikael's ... what? ... wildness? lust? rage? Or is he merely an endangered and often misclassified feral cat, anthropomorphic only through the same processes of evolutionary convergence that streamlined both dolphin and shark?

Johanna Sinisalo, who won the Finlandia Award for Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi (Troll: A Love Story, the novel's American translation is called), leaves the troll (and Mikael as well) an enigma, alternating first-person narratives by several characters with staccato chapters of "primary materials" on trolls: Web pages, encyclopedia entries, folk tales, essays on myth, scientific reports and newspaper stories.

Most of Sinisalo's characters are morally obscure (or, as Mikael speculates of the troll, amoral in their animal ignorance of right and wrong). The only unambiguous manifestation of evil is not the orange-eyed, black-pelted troll, but the pink-skinned man in the apartment below, who holds his mail order Filipino bride in abusive captivity.

"There are cities within cities," another scholar writes. For Mikael, there is a secret city of coded signals sent among gay men, outwardly ordinary enough to be ignored by others. Like the trolls, they must be furtive and hidden: the fate of those "too weird to be seen out before dark."

As Mikael nurses the troll back to health, Sinisalo takes us on a brilliant and sometimes horrifying multidisciplinary adventure through biology and belief, ecology, morality, myth and metaphysics, in a quest for a wild place where trolls can run free.

Troll: A Love Story, Johanna Sinisalo. Herbert Lomas (translator). 278 pages. Grove Press, $12.