The two-volume, over 800-page story covers a period of only six hours, written partly in a stream-of-consciousness style similar to James Joyce’s Ulysses—though some Finnish critics have argued that the stream-of-consciousness passages are neither as radical nor as extensive as Joyce's, and actually Kilpi's novel is closer in style and spirit to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
[1] The central narrative of Alastalon salissa describes a meeting of a group of wealthy men from Kustavi in the Archipelago Sea in Western Finland one October Thursday in the 1860s.
The men are trying to decide whether to invest in a shipbuilding venture proposed by one of their number, Herman Mattsson, master of Alastalo.
To mention only one of the difficulties, there is no English equivalent to the style of the Finnish ‘proverbs’ (real or imaginary) with which the main character Alastalo’s thoughts are so thickly larded.
Add to this the richness and, yes, eccentricity, of Kilpi’s vocabulary, and the unfamiliarity of much of the subject-matter, centred as it is on the interests of a sea-going community that hardly exists any longer, even on the islands, and you have a text that is full of pitfalls for the translator.