Wurlitzer is the debut novel from Otto Lehtinen (1987–), a bioanalyst from Joensuu who currently lives in Helsinki. This 2016 Finnish novel (published in Helsinki by Gummerus) tells the interwoven stories of three gay men and one trans mtf in the Helsinki area. The trans character's story is told in a series of chapters with shifting narrators; as a boy, ze is named Nikolai (son of a Russian father and Finnish mother), and zir mental transition is figured as multiple personalities, a female self emerging who calls zirself Nastassja, and who eventually drowns Nikolai. The excerpts below consists of three chapters, with page numbers from the original Finnish novel: “Nikolai” (pp. 31–33), “Nastassja” (pp. 64–68), and “Nastassja” (pp. 159–63). A note on pronouns: The Finnish third-person singular pronoun hän refers to both human males and human females; the gender-neutral ze and zir are used here to reflect that.
Nikolai had...
