What is a novel? Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin say that it is a epic of a lost totality, an unfinished genre, through which marginal forms of the carnival laughter of the common people have been able to penetrate the official language of church, state and science. Alex Matson, the first Finnish translator of James #Joyce’s #Portrait, published his influential Romaanitaide (Art of the Novel) in 1947,and asked precisely this question. The study had a major effect on later Finnish prose,not the least on Väinö Linna, who studied it while writing Tuntematon