Iida Turpeinen, "Beasts of the Sea" (Little, Brown, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network – Iida Turpeinen on "Beasts of the Sea"

Date: February 2, 2026
Host: Chris Holmes
Guest: Iida Turpeinen

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Burned By Books on the New Books Network, host Chris Holmes interviews Finnish author and literary scholar Iida Turpeinen about her acclaimed novel Beasts of the Sea (Little, Brown, 2025). The conversation delves into the extinct Steller’s sea cow, the ethics and histories of natural history museums, the role of women in the history of science, and the possibilities of fiction for narrating the Anthropocene. Rich in archival discoveries, literary influences, and reflection, the episode is both a story of research adventures and a meditation on extinction, memory, and hope.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Allure and Tragedy of the Steller's Sea Cow

[04:37–08:54]

• Turpeinen’s Serendipitous Encounter:
  Iida recounts how, as a new PhD student, she discovered the sea cow skeleton at the Helsinki Natural History Museum. Reading that the animal went extinct just 27 years after scientific discovery sparked her deep research journey.

• Quote:

  "I saw the skeleton of this big, bulky animal... and read the little placard... that said this is the Steller's sea cow and this animal went extinct only 27 years after its discovery by science. For some reason, this brought up so many questions in me."
  – Iida Turpeinen (06:18)

• Human Appetite and Extinction:
  Holmes and Turpeinen discuss how the sea cow’s fate was accelerated due to its perceived tastiness and utility for food and supplies.

• Quote:

  "There was one seaman who said he had tasted both the tortoise and the sea cow. And the sea cow was far more tasty."
  – Iida Turpeinen (08:38)

2. George Steller—Science, Theology, and Vulnerability

[10:12–14:21]

• Complex Portrait of Steller:
  Turpeinen details Steller’s transition from theology to natural history and the era’s view that studying nature was another way of studying God’s works.
• Contradictions:
  Steller’s diaries reveal compassion for the animals he studied and consumed, set against the conventions of an 18th-century “gentlemanly code.”
• Quote:

  "Even though he would be very angry, very distressed, he keeps his calm in a way that makes it very difficult for a contemporary reader to get close to him... One day he suddenly stops and writes: 'I feel a bit sad. This has been a difficult day.'... Four of his assistants died that day."
  – Iida Turpeinen (13:08)

3. Unsung Women in Science’s Archives

[15:08–19:22]

• Invisible Labor:
  Turpeinen set out to find women’s stories in the history of science. Through archival research, she discovered Anna and Constance Furuhjelm, whose letters revealed deep engagement with Alaska’s colonial world and scientific collections.

• Quote:

  "They gave Constance the task of taking care of the natural history collection of the Governor's house. So in a way... she ended up being given a job as curator of a scientific collection."
  – Iida Turpeinen (17:53)

• Transformational Roles:
  The character arc of Constance shows how proximity to natural history collections opened new worlds for women otherwise marginalized.

4. Literary and Scientific Influences

[20:10–22:03]

• Not Conventional Novels:
  Iida found most inspiration in old natural history writings (16th–18th centuries), blending personal narrative with scientific observation.

• Quote:

  "They read like good novels on the natural world and science... their way of writing where personal experiences and observations mixed with the world of science and emerging empirical standards."
  – Iida Turpeinen (20:31)

• Poetic Language:
  Finnish contemporary poetry, for its attention to language, provided balance to her archival and scientific reading.

5. Time, Scale, and the Novel’s Form

[22:33–24:12]

• Novel as Vehicle:
  Turpeinen emphasizes fiction’s unique capacity to narrate slow, planetary catastrophes like extinction—turning “catastrophes without events” into emotionally resonant stories.
• Quote:

  "Maybe novel as a format could be quite a good way of trying to wrap our heads around what's happening, because there you can incorporate quite huge timescales into one story... The beauty of literature is that through concentrating on something quite particular, you can speak about quite big things."
  – Iida Turpeinen (23:01)

6. Blending Fiction and Historical Documents

[25:15–26:57]

• Documentary Interludes:
  The novel includes archival tables and lists (e.g., uses of sea cows), blending documentary material with narrative as a way to juxtapose different “ways of knowing.”
• Quote:

  "It was my play with different ways of knowing the world... I work with scientific materials and turn them into fiction in essays or short stories and so forth."
  – Iida Turpeinen (26:34)

7. Natural History Museums—Between Mausoleum and Hope

[27:46–31:14]

• Museums as Liminal Spaces:
  Turpeinen reflects on the beauty and eeriness of such museums, which both collect and inadvertently contributed to extinction.
• Change Over Time:
  She sees hope in museums’ evolving ethics, such as ending practices that harm species once those harms were understood.
• Quote:

  "If you are not looking at it as a beautiful setting or a work of art, and you start to think of the animals as individuals that once lived, suddenly this turns into quite a horrifying mausoleum of a weird relationship to nature... At the same time, I find that natural history museums are also a very good... They are quite hopeful places because the way we collect has changed so much."
  – Iida Turpeinen (28:40, 30:43)

8. Marking the Loss—Art as Witness to Extinction

[32:06–33:48]

• Extinct Species Acknowledgments:
  Turpeinen used her acknowledgments to list species that went extinct during the novel’s writing, discovering nearly 400 such losses. The act became a powerful, difficult reminder of unseen catastrophe.
• Quote:

  "Writing this text was actually quite a difficult task... even though I thought that I had followed the discussion on extinction very closely... I had maybe heard of three or four species on that list. It means that almost 400 species disappeared without us even noticing."
  – Iida Turpeinen (33:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Sea Cow’s Fate:

  "It seems like this was an extremely tasty animal, unfortunately."
  – Iida Turpeinen (08:47)

• On Empathy Across the Centuries:

  "Even though he [Steller] would be very angry, very distressed, he keeps calm in a way that makes it very difficult for a contemporary reader to get close to him."
  – Iida Turpeinen (13:09)

• On Women in Science History:

  "I gave myself the conscious task of finding them [women]. And what interesting characters I ended up finding..."
  – Iida Turpeinen (15:29)

• On Museums as Mausoleums and Sites of Hope:

  "This sort of a point between fascination and horror, it's something that has always fascinated me about natural history museums."
  – Iida Turpeinen (28:31)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & context: [01:07–04:35]
• Steller’s Sea Cow & initial inspiration: [04:37–08:54]
• Edibility and the tragedy of extinction: [08:54]
• George Steller, faith, and science: [10:12–14:21]
• Women’s hidden contributions (Anna & Constance): [15:08–19:22]
• Literary and scientific influences: [20:10–22:03]
• The challenge of time and storytelling: [22:33–24:12]
• Archival/documentary methods: [25:15–26:57]
• Museums as ambiguous spaces: [27:46–31:14]
• On marking extinct species: [32:06–33:48]
• Book recommendations: [34:28–37:01]

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Book Recommendations

From Iida Turpeinen:

• The Wall by Marlen Haushofer:

  "It's called the Feminist Robinson Crusoe... she learns to live with the forest, with the animals in the end... the way she talks about her relationship to the animals, I found it really magical." (35:04)

• Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes:

  "What a wonderful book about the difficulties of writing about historical characters." (36:30)

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Tone & Style

The conversation maintains an inquisitive, reflective, and deeply humane tone. Turpeinen’s warmth, humility, and sense of wonder shine through, balanced with Holmes’s thoughtful questions and enthusiasm for literary history and ecological engagement.

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Final Takeaway

Beasts of the Sea stands as a profound work bridging archival history, extinction narratives, and the transformative power of literature. Turpeinen and Holmes’s discussion urges both a close reading of the past and an ethical reckoning with the present, using fiction as a means to make loss visible and to imagine hope.

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Transcript

[Ida Turpanen]

Hello, everybody.

[Marshall Po]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Chris Holmes]

I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter earnedbybooks. Let's start the show. The Steller sea cow was once one of the great behemoths of the ocean. Weighing in at up to 10 tons and at an astonishing length of 30ft long, the Steller sea cow was a marvel of peaceful marine life, with a territory stretching from Alaska to Russia in the Bering Sea. The sea cows had few natural predators until they were discovered by humans. And in a story all too familiar, that interaction spelled their doom and ultimate extinction. It is the sea cow, or rather the reconstructed skeleton of a sea cow, that serves as the connective tissue between the stories of naturalists and explorers in Ida Turpenning's debut novel, Beasts of the Sea. In the tradition of Andrea Barrett, ITA pulls historical figures into a fictional world that places them in the context of a vast natural ecosystem into which they bring chaos and violence, even as they propose classification and study. We meet Captain Bering, the Danish explorer for whom the Strait is named and stellar himself, a naturalist obsessed by the sea cow and with his role as historian of the great beasts of the sea. But as soon as one figure comes on the scene, they are ushered off to make room for another, a tiny dot on the great length of the planet's timeline. And so Steller is replaced by Georges Cuvier, a scientist with a twisting doubt and guilt at the contradiction between his biblical faith and the clear evidence of the loss of species to something he calls extinction. But in Ida's telling it is very often lesser known or unknown women who take up the proper work of documenting the species living and lost. An adventure story in which the animal protagonists have mostly non speaking roles, Beasts of the Sea reframes the story of human naturalistic studies across the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st centuries to understand the drive and conviction to study the animal world and its unimaginable costs. Ida Terpenen is a literary scholar writing a dissertation on the intersection of the natural sciences and literature. Her short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals won the JH Erco Young Writers Competition in 2014. Her 2023 debut novel, Beasts of the Sea was published in Finland to wide acclaim, won the Helsingen Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel, and was a finalist for Finland's biggest literary award, the Finlandia Prize. Translation rights have been sold in 26 territories to date. Ida is currently writer in residence at the Helsinki Natural History Museum, writing her second novel, not far from the Skeleton of the Sea Cow. Ida lives in Helsinki, Finland. Welcome to Burn by Books. Ida, wonderful.

[Ida Turpanen]

Thank you. So happy to be here.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you for for coming on the show. In a story that spans centuries, it is Stellar sea Cow, an enormous, nearly mythical ancestor of the manatee that is the star of the all these centuries of stories. Long extinct, the sea cow lived millennia largely undisturbed by human interventions. But Beasts of the Sea fictionalizes the discovery of herds of these giants by George Steller, a famed naturalist. In what will be the beginning of the end of this species, can you tell us how the sea cow came to be so important to you and how its story of great thriving and then extinction became the heart of this novel?

[Ida Turpanen]

Well, as it often happens, the you encounter the things that become very important completely by chance. I had just. It was 2016 and I had just started my journey as a PhD student, I work as a part of a research group where we study how scientific thinking has affected literary experiments through time and through the work of my group, I completely fell in love with history of science. And I felt like this is something I want to work with. And my own topic had nothing to do with history of science whatsoever. I'm studying contemporary literature, so I had this great urge to do something with my newly found love. And at the same time, I had long dreamed of writing a novel about our relationship to nature. These two are, these are huge topics. These are not themes for a book. These are these huge worlds of ideas that I wanted to explore. But what I was missing was a point of entry and that I found completely by accident from here, from the Natural History Museum in Helsinki. I went there originally to see an art exhibition that was held there. And after seeing the exhibition, I just wandered to the bone collection. And there in the corner, I saw the skeleton of this big, bulky animal that I couldn't quite recognize. And I got curious and went closer and read the little placard place in front of it that said that this is the Steller's sea cow and that this animal went extinct only 27 years after its discovery by science. And for some reason, this brought up so many questions in me. I was like, I need to know the story behind Descendants. What happened here? Why did our encounter with the species go so wrong? And I ran straight to the National Library, started borrowing materials related to this animal. And pretty soon I realized that this is the story I've been looking for. This is the story that lets me talk about all the things that at the moment interest me. But at the same time, I was pretty terrified because I knew nothing of this animal, nothing of the people that had discovered it, nothing of the century that this novel took place. And so it became this seven year journey through the archives. But at the same time, that was the most intriguing and wonderful sort of journey of expedition in itself.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, it sounds like a wonderful adventure story of discovery and discovery of something that really pulled you in. I mean, the, the extinction, which happened so quickly after, after that first contact. You almost suggest that it has a lot to do with the fact that the sea cow tasted delicious and that it's, you know, that it's, it's fat and, and blubber were incredibly useful and appealing in a culinary way. Is that part of the extinction story?

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, it is, it is. It was, it wasn't only edible, but it was so edible they described that it. Well, the other animal that was known among the seafarers to be extremely tasty was the Galabagos giant tortoise. And there was one, one seaman who said that he had tasted both the tortoise and the sea cow. And the sea cow was far more tasty so far. It was.

[Chris Holmes]

My goodness.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, it seems like this was an extremely tasty animal, unfortunately.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. Such a bad, bad luck to appeal to our tastes. There's a very. In a kind of contradictory story that's. It's very American. Ted Turner at some point grew very worried about the fate of the American buffalo. And one of his ideas for saving the buffalo was to in fact make them more appealing as food so that they would be cultivated in this way. And. And so there were restaurants called Ted's Montana Grill that were all sort of buffalo themed. But it's those two ends of that same story of the tragedy of appealing to human taste. So Americans who have visited Alaska or parts of the west coast will recognize Stellar's name from its attachment to the enormous sea lions of the Pacific. Stellar, who you fictionalize, is vulnerable, fragile even. And his relationship to the sea cow is one of veneration mixed with the assurance of dominance over the natural world. In one beautifully rendered scene, you depict Stellar in conversation with the skull of a sea cow. Tell us about Steller, the historical figure, and then about your attempt to understand his nuances and contradictions in Beasts of the Sea.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, Steller is quite an interesting figure. He. Well, he died quite young, so he didn't. He had great plans as a scientist, he as a natural historian. He wanted to discover new species and to write a natural history of the animals of Kamchatka and Alaska. But none of that came to be. But he was originally from Germany. He was a son of a. Of a pastor. And initially he went to study to be the theological faculty at the University of Hull. So he started as a priest, but doing his studies, he got more and more drawn towards natural world. And in that time, we are now in the 18th century, the move from studying theology to studying zoology or botany, it wasn't such a. Such a big leap because in the thinking of that time, it was just that he was studying the work of God from a different perspective. But for him, studying nature had this sort of a theological idea behind it. And you can see it in the way he describes nature and in the way he thinks about nature. But at times, what makes him very interesting, that he's quite an independent thinker. Thinking of the time, it was thought that, well, the world is made for us, the world is created for men, the animals are here for us to enjoy and to use as we like. And that was the order of the world. But it's very interesting when you read his diaries. His diaries from the island have survived. And you can see that sometimes he has hard time in living with that conviction because it's very interesting. At the same time he thinks that men are here to dominate the beasts of the earth and sea, but at the same time he is quite compassionate towards the animal that these animals that they slaughter and kill and eat and study. So he's quite an interesting figure.

[Chris Holmes]

And it's that that skull of the sea cow is. Is better company to him than. Than the sailors that she's with.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yeah, he wasn't. He had a. You could say that he had a bit of. A bit of trouble with authorities, but certainly was a very independent thinker and wasn't shy of telling his mind even to his superiors, which wasn't always appreciated. And this is what ended up so of course, in his life in the end, which is sort of. He's a fascinating character. But what made it very sort of fascinating to try to think how he has to sort of imagine his experience and the way he thinks is that even though I have his diaries from the island, these are diaries of an 18th century naturalist. So the gentlemanly code here is so strong. Even though he would be very angry, very distressed, he keeps his. He keeps calm in a way that makes it very difficult for contemporary reader to get close to him. For example, one day he writes, and this is extraordinary, typically he just records the events, the fauna and flora of the island in a very matter of fact way. But one day he suddenly stops and writes. I feel a bit sad. This has been a difficult day. And I was like, okay, this is something else. Something quite dramatic must have happened. And I went to read the logbooks of the expedition and the little difficulties they encountered was that four of his assistants died that day.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh my God.

[Ida Turpanen]

So the gentlemanly code here is quite strong. So that lets quite a lot of room for imagination. And at the same time you really have to use your imagination to get behind that sort of calm demeanor that he.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, well, you're doing a wonderful job of that because you balance, like making him, you know, the calm gentleman with others. But then in his, his private lives and thoughts, you give him a vulnerability that I find very, very appealing. You, you have a. A wonderful sleight of hand in how you bring naturalists and scientists and curators on the scene in the novel and then reveal them to be minor characters in relation to others, often women who assisted their work in monumental and often unheralded ways. Will you introduce us to these women and Talk about them as historical. Historical figures and fictional women crucial to scientific discovery in the novel.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, with pleasure. Because one of the things that I decided, even though I. When. At the time when I had no idea where this story was taking me, I re. When I realized that I am now actually going to write a novel about history of science. And I've read a lot of those novels. And what always keeps bugging me is that it feels like in these novels women are just non existent. It sort of makes sense because in the world of science, well, women had no access to that world. But at the same time I felt that surely there were women that had some relationship to this animal or to this skeleton that ended up here in Helsinki. And I gave myself the conscious task of finding them. And what interesting characters I ended up finding the first one. It's always when working with the archives, it's always a surprise what the archives gives you. But my first wife find was the Annapturiam. Yes, Annafurielm. At first I thought that this was going to be the story of the governor of Alaska, Hambusfourialm, who was the character who brought the skeleton that we now have here in Helsinki. This very rare specimen brought it here. But it turned out that her, his wife, turned out to be a way more interesting character. Because what I ended up finding was that every single letter that Anna Thorium had written from Sitka had survived. And so I. Yes, so I had this sort of a. And she.

[Chris Holmes]

Treasure.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes. And she wrote so many letters, three to four letters a day. So I could almost hour by hour follow her journey in the distant colonies in Sitka. And how she sort of unraveled because she went there with great hopes of them civilizing Alaska, bringing culture and education and all of these beautiful things that the. That the European people could give the indigenous people of Alaska. And it turned out that this was a task quite beyond her skill. And she ended up sort of renouncing her role as this. Sort of. This mission civilisatrice, as they called it, sort of shutting down. And what was really interesting, another person, another woman showed up in her letters. Her sister in law, Constance, who was sent to Sitka as to keep her company. And it turned out he didn't get along at all. Costan's Forum was this. She was quite sickly. We don't know. We don't have any diagnosis. But she had some kind of a condition that made her unable to, for example, leave the house. And she was. Wasn't presented to society. And Anna despised her. So what ended up happening because Anna wanted to get rid of her. What ended up happening was wonderful. They gave Constance the task of taking care of the natural history collection of the Governor's house. So in a way, because Constance wasn't to Anna's liking, she ended up being given a job as a curator of a scientific collection. And I couldn't believe my luck when I was reading the. Reading the letters because this was such a. Such a lucky find.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. And you give Constance such a. A wonderful discovery of, of skills and, and feelings that she never knew she had and, and things. You know, she lived a very like constrained life and all of a sudden it was opened up by this ability to be next to and be involved with the natural world. And I love her character.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, it's wonderful to see how in the end Anna actually becomes quite jealous of the natural history collection because now Constance is dedicating all her time to the collection, clearly enjoying her time there. So in the end Anna is quite jealous of the animals and of the specimens there. And I think that is such an interesting arc.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, absolutely. So the, the novel has always been in dialogue with the natural world from its earliest incarnations. You can even look to something like Tale of Genji and see how much the natural world influences characters and plots and formations there. But your work falls into a very particular category of novels that revisit crucial moments in the history of the Anthropocene and humans interventions into the natural world, often with catastrophic consequences. But I'm very interested in. In who your influences were and, and in, you know, writers who you have found a similar love and interest in the literary history of the natural world.

[Ida Turpanen]

Well, I have. This might be quite a strange answer, but I. When I wrote this novel, the books that I. That felt most meaningful to me actually were from the world of natural science, but from the world of natural science before the ways we write literature and science were like demarcated so old, let's say 16th, 17th, 18th century natural history works where they read like good novels on the natural world and on science. And I found that their way of writing where sort of the personal experiences and observations mixed with the world of science and the emerging empirical standards. That was where you could suddenly have a theologist who suddenly decides to express his findings in the form of the poetry. And I found these works so inspiring and wonderful that those were the kind of works that I kept going back to time and time and time again after. And also which, well, for the, for the English speaking audience is not going to be a Very sort of a useful answer. But at the same time I felt that as I read a lot of scientific material as a counterbalance, I read a lot of Finnish contemporary poetry because I felt that in there, the way they used language and the sort of the beauty of language and the importance of language itself was very important to me. So I read a lot of old scientific research from, from history, a lot of poetry, and I think those both have influenced this book quite tremendously.

[Chris Holmes]

I love that in Beasts of the Sea you show the possibilities of the novel form taking advantage across a wide swath of human and natural existence. When we consider our planetary crisis, it's often the problem of scale that defeats us. We cannot understand human impact on the Earth because it's drawn out over epochal time. How does time function in your novel? And how does it relate to the problem of telling the planet's story?

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, this was exactly why I wanted to write a novel, because as a humanist, I felt that, like we have such issue, issues in narrating climate change or the sixth mass extinction, because they are, as we call it, they are like catastrophe, catastrophes without an event. They are not like some particular catastrophe that we could react to. We could go and see, like you don't see extinction. It doesn't. You can't go to the street and say, hey, look, that's extinction, let's react. But these are events that take place gradually everywhere, and you don't often see them before it's too late. And I felt that maybe novel as a format could be quite a good way of trying to wrap our heads around what's happening, because there you can incorporate quite huge timescales into one story. Like here we move across centuries. And I felt like that maybe in focusing, because the beauty of literature is that through concentrating on something quite particular, you can speak about quite big things. So I thought maybe in focusing the story of one species and its disappearance and the ripple. Ripple effect that this had might make the whole the sixth mass extinction a bit more tangible and at the same time as something that we could live through, experience and have an emotional and intellectual response to. As we read through the extinction, it becomes an event that we can actually experience through literature.

[Chris Holmes]

That's the. That is the power of fiction. I think you've put a fine point on it there in terms of creating events that we can experience emotionally and intellectually when so often talking about an extinct animal feels deadened to us because of our separation from it. But here you don't allow that separation and you and you bring us up close and you and we, I, I, I, I found myself really taken by the, the sorrow of the, the gigantic sea cow as humans finally discover how to capture it and kill it. And thinking about that as an individual creature whose life would go on to have a much more dramatic meaning.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, absolutely. And I think here, literature is such a good tool to counter this crisis. We need better politics, we need a lot of science, we need activism. But I think art has its role to play as well, and we can be a good ally.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, agree.

[Ida Turpanen]

This big task.

[Chris Holmes]

So there are moments in the narrative when we are party to what feel like historical documents that have been massaged into the, into the fiction. On a number of occasions, you offer lists and tables, for example, how the bodies of sea cows were used, quote, killed and consumed immediately killed for immediate consumption, but wasted. Killed and carried on board as provisions. Killed for provisions, but wasted. What is the status of these documentary moments and how does their historicity give a kind of power to your telling?

[Ida Turpanen]

Well, it's one of the reasons I wanted to incorporate these documents to the novel was just show, show a bit of the archive, to let the archive sort of blend in with the story and show the kind of materials I'd been, worked with, I had been working with. But at the same time, it was my play with the different ways of, you could say, different ways of knowing the world. For example, here we have this statistic of this, of how the sea cows were hunted. It is quite a striking image with huge columns getting bigger and bigger, and then the extinction and no sea cows left. What I wanted to try was to write, open this raft and write a story based on it. So what I often like to do is that I work with scientific materials and turn them into fiction in essays or short stories and so forth. And I think it's my, my kind of play with the different, different ways we can describe the world. It's just something that I personally enjoy.

[Chris Holmes]

Hmm. Yes, absolutely. You begin and end at the Natural History Museum of Helsinki, where you're now a writer in residence. This is, this is a book that both rests on the kind of historical record and archive that such museums preserve, while also critiquing the early forms of naturalism that they took advantage of, that disrupted and violated the natural lives of species in order to document them. How do you feel about natural history museums? And I, I mentioned to you off air that I worked at the one in Philadelphia as a, as a teenager, so I have my own interesting relationship to them. And, and why is this one of the anchors at the beginning and end of the story.

[Ida Turpanen]

Well, I. Natural history museums have always been. Have always fascinated me because aesthetically they are. They are so very pleasing. There is something very soothing in the way they present nature to you. And it's. Maybe it's that the only place where you can. For example, I. If I would walk through the door, open the door here and walk out, I could come to a hall where we have the Finnish nature in one great hall, compiled there in a way you could never encounter it in nature. You have all of it here. It's neatly organized, beautifully presented. There is something very satisfactory about it. But at the same time, when you start thinking about what you're actually looking at, if you are not looking it as a sort of a beautiful setting or a work of art, and you start to think of the animals as individuals that once lived, suddenly this turns into quite a horrifying mausoleum of a weird relationship to nature. So this sort of a point between fascination and horror, it's something that has always fascinated me about the natural history museums. And now that I work here, and I have the keys to the archives, which here, I can tell you, are quite different from the archives we have at my department of humanities. When the archive is compiled of animals, of real animals, skins, bones, all of that, it is quite an uncanny feeling. And to be working on top of this mausoleum being beneath me, it is fascinating in so many ways. But at the same time, I find that natural history museums are also a very good. They are quite hopeful places because the way we collect has changed so much. We don't. The Natural History Museum were at first places where there were. So when they realized that their attempt to increase their collections ended up causing and driving species to extinction, what they did was that they stopped. That's why I wanted. One of the reasons why I wanted to include the story of the Egg Museum, the story. And I remember when I phoned my editor, I said that, hey, we need to postpone the publication of this book. Because I found there was a secret museum in Helsinki called the Egg Museum, and I wanted to want to incorporate it into the novel. They were quite confused. But the egg collections were such a good example because at first, collecting eggs was taught to be your way of showing your love to nature, a way to get to know nature. It was taught to boys at school because it was taught. It was a way to. It was an important way to make them love what they were collecting. But at the same time, this hobby drove so many bird species to Extinction. And when they realized this, they stopped, even though it meant that their collections could not be enriched anymore, even though it was a very financially, a very lucrative hobby. So these days the naturalists don't go about shooting animals anymore. They have changed their ways and I think that is quite hopeful. So in a way these are places where you can sort of see how our relationship to nature has also how it has changed for the better. So that's why I find these places. In a way, they are now places of hope for me as well as of remembrance.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh, that's so beautifully said, Ida. I love that you probably know this. It's both comic and horrific. But a huge proportion of the animals in, in American natural history museums were killed by President Teddy Roosevelt, who was a big, a big game hunter and, and just killed hundreds of thousands of animals and that. And he is responsible for many of the, the skeletons and, and replications of those animals.

[Ida Turpanen]

Oh yeah, that, that's the. Yeah. It is so funny to see how these great hunters are so present here at the collections as well. We have this very famous Finnish artist who was. And many of the collections bear species in the collection bear his name. And I found this very. I don't know what to think of it. It's. Yeah, well, it was the sign of the times. Let's, let's.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, that's very generous of you. So your ending acknowledgments in this book are singular. They thank the species that went extinct during the writing of Beasts of the Sea. What did it mean to you to mark your book in this way?

[Ida Turpanen]

Well, I, I wanted to find a way to show that the sea cow wasn't an isolated incident, but one link in the long chain of human caused extinctions. And I wondered what could be the way of making this very tangible. And I had this very naive idea that maybe I could write a little eulogy, do all of the species that went extinct during the seven years I worked on the novel, like surely there were some species. Then when I went to see the Red List, I found out that there were almost 400 pieces.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh God.

[Ida Turpanen]

Oh God. That was quite, quite a bleak moment. And writing this text was actually quite a. Quite a difficult task. It was the most difficult text to write in all of. All of the text I wrote for this book. But at the same time it felt quite important because even though, and it's so telling now, even though I thought that I had followed the discussion on extinction very closely during those seven years, I had maybe heard of three or four species on that list, it means that almost 400 species disappeared without us even noticing. And that is a huge issue because if we don't even see this catastrophe happening, how can we react to it? How can we ever learn to act differently? So it was quite an eye opening, eye opening moment for me and quite a key text.

[Chris Holmes]

I think this is why you must read Andrea Barrett because she, she comes at this from the same direction as you and the need to, to mark the loss in, in art and in, and in the everyday, in our everyday lives. And I was incredibly touched by your acknowledgments and they reminded me that I need to, I need to be able to mark those passings in order to do something to make them stop. Yes, I would love to end our conversation today, Ida, by hearing a little bit about some books that you've been reading and loving recently that you might like to share with my listeners.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yes, with pleasure. And I, as background in literary studies, my, my examples won't be very up to date because I like to read a bit about older literature. But I hope you enjoy this as much as I did because I just finished. Extraordinary book. It's from the 1960s and it's by an Austrian writer called Marlen Haushofer. And it's called the Wall.

[Chris Holmes]

Oh, I love the Wall.

[Ida Turpanen]

Yeah, it is such a beautiful novel. It's called the Feminist Robinson Crusoe because it tells the story of this woman who gets isolated in the forest behind this mysterious wall that he cannot, cannot cross. And she survives there with the animals. And unlike Robinson Crusoe, who sort of ends up trying to build, rebuild sort of British society on that island, she learns to live with the forest, with the animals in the end and realizes, and this, I think it has to do quite a lot with the fact that he was at women in the 1960s. Austria, which was quite a conservative place, realizes that the modern society probably didn't offer that much for her. And she ends up being quite happy in her own way in that, in that little cottage of hers. And the way she talks about her relationship to the animals, I found it really magical. And this is a novel I cannot stop thinking about. It was really quite extraordinary. So I, I highly recommend that. And another wonderful novel I read, I think this is from the 1980s by Julian Barnes. I read the Flaubert's Parrot. Finally I managed to read this book that's been on my reading list for such a long time. And what a wonderful book about the difficulties of writing about historical characters. It is such fun, fun and wonderful novel about the difficulties of writing about the lives of those who have lived before us. And I think it was wise, smart, funny and sad at the same time. And then of course, there was, there is the carrot, the natural history specimen that is being tracked there. So it's sort of, it was my book in so many ways. So that's the one I would really recommend everyone to get their hands on because it was a wonderful book. So those are the two books that I've, the two latest ones that I've read and I really enjoyed them both. I can highly recommend them to any of them.

[Chris Holmes]

These are wonderful, wonderful choices. I want to so much encourage my listeners to go out to their independent bookstore and get Beasts of the Sea by Ida Turpinen. And you will just be wrapped up in the natural history, in the historical world of naturalists and scientists and people who thought deeply about the meaning of human existence on the natural world. And I can't recommend it enough. And Ida, thank you so much for coming on and talking to me today.

[Ida Turpanen]

Thank you. It was my pleasure.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, that's all for me for now. My great thanks to Ida Turpanen for coming on to talk about her international bestseller Beasts of the Sea. You can find links to purchase Beasts of the Sea and all of Ida's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books. Sam.