ABSTRACT

The chapter analyzes the encounters of human agency with nonhuman scales in the fiction of contemporary Finnish writer Maarit Verronen. Verronen's narratives involve characters who are obsessively preoccupied with nonhuman subjects, be they landscapes or animals. The analysis shows that Verronen's works evoke the nonhuman by employing the narrative strategy of enumeration. Moreover, the chapter introduces the idea of the monomaniac as a character that is attuned to the nonhuman world. By means of this character, two different psychological impulses are discussed: the need to move towards description that can express scales and numbers beyond human perception and to confront the nonhuman in embodied terms.