Life and Sun was an exceptional first novel…. [Nothing] like this had been seen before. The novel portrays the experiences of a young man and two young women through a summer. With sensitive instinct [Sillanpää] has followed the events as they rose out of the flaming summer in nature and in youthful hearts, which surrendered themselves passively to "receive the world as a sensation." The poet employs surprising facets of his imagination; he appears to be studying human life first from a cosmic altitude and then from abysmal depths. It almost seems as if in some poetic way he had lived the theory of relativity…. [In his depiction of] Finnish country working folk [Sillanpää] strives to draw forth that "elemental man" which lurks at the inmost roots of their instincts. In his finer chapters he seems to experience an "inner time": to a lesser degree he employs the same "memories of the soul" which we meet, for example, in Marcel Proust and James Joyce. He sometimes aspires to an atmosphere of entirety accumulated in the temporary community of mankind in a way that recalls the "unanimism" of Jules Romains. Sillanpää is the first great modernist in Finnish literature.

The tragic experiences connected with Finland's war for independence and her final victory in the spring of 1918 laid the spiritual foundation for the grim novel Meek Heritage…. In this philosophic, almost unbiased social study, the author tried to free himself from the anguish that had gripped him during the struggles of his people. The temperamental lyrist had become the stern, objective historian. In this Finnish biography Sillanpää depicts a representative of the country's lower class, a feckless crofter who is drawn into the Red revolt. The author shows how Juha Toivola, the slow-witted human being whose life seems so drab and worthless, is forced to make a decision too difficult for his mental powers. (pp. 50-1)

If Sillanpää's early works had been events in Northern literature, his great novel Silja, 1931, created a European furore. It is a biography of two human souls, the story of a father and daughter, in whom the diminishing vital force of an old land-owning family puts forth its last flowers in an exquisite refinement of the spirit…. With the hand of an artist the author has sketched in a background of a village community in western Finland where old standards are beginning to disintegrate under the impact of new ideas. This is the stage on which the author shows us Silja Salmelus suffused with lyric radiance, in the dual light of life and death. The dimness of dreamy girlhood is transformed into bright morning, as young love, which in Sillanpää's eyes is the finest flower of life, is seen against a curtain of death, in a triumphant and yet poignant glow. The lofty creative power of the author has given Silja that unity and harmony which are the hallmarks of classic art.

Sillanpää's novel A Man's Road, 1932, studies life from a more earthy ground. Its principal character is a young farmer who forsakes the love of his youth and marries a wealthy, but ailing, wife. On her death Paavo Ahrola sinks for a time into dissipation and cannot rise again until he has joined his life to that of the strong woman whose profound selective instinct has dominated him from his youth. There is something in this free and powerful novel that reminds us of D. H. Lawrence; the sun and the moon shine down upon the yield of the earth and the fulfillment of love. In an even more mystic manner Sillanpää interprets his sense of all-powerful nature in his little masterpiece People in a Summer Night, 1934. These people seem to be the prisoners of the boundless summer night, of its enchanting and baleful light. The pressure of life which drives them hither and thither is "beyond good and evil," flowing from unknown cosmic depths.

Rarely has an author been able to evolve from one tiny germ—in this case a little village community—a life so complex, so boundless in its spiritual dimensions. Sillanpää has probably never been an epic writer in the same sense as the great masters. He is a poetic dreamer in whose writings fragrant lyrical moods alternate with keen intellectual analysis in a highly personal way.

We may say without exaggeration that no other Finnish writer has been able to catch in the same manner the quiet little happenings that take place in village streets, in cabins and hovels, at all times of day and night, on holydays and everydays. Nor do we exaggerate when we say that in all European fiction it is difficult to find anything to equal his peculiar psychological method of seeing. In that respect we may look at him as independent of his particular, limited field of subjects. Sillanpää's whole world constitutes an organic unity from which human beings seem to spring forth as vital as their own actions and as surrounding nature—everything in an unbroken, secret relation with everything else. (pp. 52-3)