A pastoral novel; or more precisely, a series of pastoral vignettes of a river town in rural Finland. Nothing much happens; actually, there's one murder, with a surprisingly tame resolution, and it seems almost incidental to the flow of life in this place.

Sillanpää won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1939. If I may judge from the text of the Nobel Committee, he was awarded the prize precisely for writing like this.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/li... ( )