Tango Volver

Finland, 1989: Seppo Moisseinen is staying on a small, isolated island with his colleagues. It’s one of those weekends where you fish and get drunk. For no reason, Seppo walks away from the group. He never returns. Hanneriina is only 11 years old when her father disappears. She has to grow up in an emotionally and financially weak family. As adolescence transforms her anatomy, the disappearance, like a subterranean wave, begins to undermine her. She sees her mother sink into the sluggishness of alcohol and the desire to commit suicide. The story evokes, in successive periods, the slow metabolisation of a particular traumatic event, that of impossible mourning in the absence of a body. Hanneriina Moisseinen’s pencil drawing sketches an ambivalent Finnish nature, as generous as it is hostile. Embroidery blends with the narrative to convey torment and elusive memories. The experience to which Tango Volver invites us is paradoxical. For the now adult author, the traces of her father have vanished and all that remains is the sensation of emptiness. This book is obviously a weapon in the fight against oblivion. For all that, it is a generous and dense story, a cathartic journey that Hanneriina Moisseinen shares with us.