I licked my fingers carefully, like I had been taught to do since I was very young: never drink water you haven’t tasted first. It was cold, far colder than anything I was used to. It moved against my hand like breathing, like an animal, like another person’s skin. I dipped my fingers in the water and felt its strength. My father urged me on, to the edge of the pond. I could see something that looked like a white stain on the rock wall above the surface of the water, and another lever in the wall further away. A narrow stream flowed from the pond towards the shelf of stone that the doorway we had come through was on, then disappeared into the ground under it. The surface trembled under the force of the movement. It twisted around the rocks and curled in spirals and whirls around itself, and churned and danced and unravelled again. Water rushed from inside the rock in strings and threads and strands of shimmer, in enormous sheets that shattered the surface of the pond at the bottom of the cave when they hit it. Noria’s father reveals a hidden spring of fresh water… Does she keep it secret – and therefore keep it out of the clutches of the military – or does she reveal her secret, on possible pain of death, to support a village that is slowly dying from a lack of purified and desalinated water? This choice, and Noria’s eventual decision provides the novel with a real sense of danger and tension.Īnd did I mention that the prose is beautiful?
Itaranta doesn’t shy away from the moral conundrum Noria faces once she becomes responsible for the spring. If the gorgeous writing doesn’t pull you in, the compelling story will. Emmi Itaranta took on the task of translating her own novel for its English-language publication. It’s worth noting that Memory of Water was originally published in Finland in 2012. One of which is knowledge of a hidden source of fresh water that used to supply the town but is now kept secret from the military. Noria Kaitio is learning to become a tea master like her father which comes with its own responsibilities.
The novel is set years into the future where global warning and rising seas has seen the destruction of cities, the takeover of Europe by China and the scarcity of fresh water.
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