There is a peculiar clarity, at once peaceful and unnerving, about the nights of high summer in Finland, and in [People in the Summer Night] their strange pattern is faithfully portrayed. The events of a single weekend at harvest-time in a remote village are shaped into a pastoral poem. The themes are tidily balanced, the birth of a crofter's child and the senseless killing of a drunken peasant, hopeful young love and disillusioned middle age; Sillanpää notices flowers and animals as accurately as D. H. Lawrence, his peasants are observed charitably but not idealized. This rural life, evoked in a carefully cadenced prose, seems often to belong to an earlier century.