num_pages: 144
description: “Marriage kills love. That’s why people get married.” The unmarried and unemployed narrator of A Fool’s Paradise is seeing a married man and must, because of her social security, apply and interview for jobs she does not want. Her life is founded on unsustainable contradictions. As her lover considers recommitting to his wife and as her poverty becomes increasingly dire, she confronts the temptations and contradictions of conventional success, but she is also overcome by jealousy and dissatisfaction. She travels to Russia and spies on her lover’s wife. She takes a job that she hates. This precise and intensely personal novel describes the narrator’s growing sense that freedom becomes, itself, a kind of routine, and shows her burgeoning desire to break out of it.
language: English
title: Fool's Paradise
titlecomplete: Fool's Paradise (Coleman Dowell Finnish Literature)
genres: Finnish Literature
ratings_count: 36
awards: awardedAt: 568022400000
name: Finlandia Prize in Fiction, awardedAt: 599644800000
name: Valtion kirjallisuuspalkinto
publisher: Dalkey Archive Press