Amanda Sthers, a solar soul lost in the boreal forests of her imagination, confides that literature has shaped her ideal Finland. Rather than verifying it in person, she chooses not to encounter it to preserve this dream, like one protects a secret correspondence. With humor, she invokes her fear of the cold and mischievous elves: it is better to keep the magic intact than to face a journey too rootsy. A free and romantic impetus, where the compass remains that of books.
Between confidences and winks, Amanda Sthers recounts how literature has shaped her idea of Finland, to the point of choosing not to confront it to preserve the charm of the imaginary. In the course of a summer on the Baltic, amid amused fears of frosty elves and a decisive refusal to camp, a self-portrait as a paper traveler emerges, free like her books — from Paris to Los Angeles, from the stage to the sets, with a new novel, C., expected on October 1st from Grasset. She embraces the delicate art of “not going there” to continue dreaming about it, conjuring a fantasized Orient-Express, a stop in Vierzon read in Amélie Nothomb, a jazz-filled New Orleans, and a reimagined Notre-Dame.
For her, Finland is not a destination; it is a chapter. Its pages smell of birches, sauna, and skies pierced by auroras that hiss like celestial neon lights. “Going there” would be like opening a novel fearing that it ends too quickly. So she moves like a tightrope walker on the thread of fantasy, convinced that some geographies are better loved from a distance, soaked in ink rather than rain.
At the beginning of summer, she nevertheless headed to the baltic coast, her heart vibrant as if to a clandestine appointment. Boats, sea spray, Danish ports on the horizon: she chose the edge, the margins, the outposts — that specific point where reality offers a foretaste and leaves the rest to dreaming. A decidedly solar soul balancing on the brink of a polar forest.
The imaginary has its unwritten laws. In her, Nordic novels and fjord sagas have woven an intimate tapestry. Unraveling this weaving through a too-raw confrontation with the cold would seem sacrilegious, like turning on the light in a room where a film has been shown forever.
She is sometimes offered the opposite of her inclinations. A “great outdoors” kayak-camping circuit in Denmark? She laughs: yes to the fresh air, no to the tent. She confesses outright that assembling a Swedish piece of furniture already exhausts her — so a night debating with rods and stakes is definitely not for her. The folklore of bivouacs is not her folklore.
As for the large gap of destinations, she has this delightful twist: “If you want to push me to the extreme, send me to Las Vegas — or to a Nordic country, with its drafts and hurried elves.” She smiles while exaggerating, of course, but this hyperbole expresses her program: she prefers the intimate over the flashy, inner landscapes over casinos and blizzards.
Her trajectory is nothing hesitant. Quite early, her third book — a play that became an international success — found itself studied at Harvard. Since then, her work has been abundant: playwright, novelist, biographer, director, lyricist… She enters no box; she draws them. In 2016, she crossed the Atlantic and set up her life in Los Angeles, without giving up the French language or the hexagon that saw her write her first scenes.
On October 1, she offers herself a new literary beginning with C., to be published by Grasset. An enigmatic title, a promise: the art of opening windows in walls. The journey, always, but guided by the compass of sentences. She claims this way of “visiting” the world as a voracious reader, exploring it with the patience of a character who turns a page instead of clicking “book.”
There is in her a tenderness for railway mythologies, those tracks where the imagination whistles before the locomotives. The mention of the Orient-Express 2025 is enough to trigger a mental tracking shot: wooden rooms, trembling porcelain, corridors of secrets. And here the continent opens like a serialized novel.
The “not going there” is not a refusal of the world; it is another way of entering it. She lets herself be guided by cities that are already dancing within her. The New Orleans vibrates to the rhythm of paragraphs: brass, rocking chair porches, sweat, and gospel. In Paris, even when one does not climb the towers, the shadow of Notre-Dame is enough to lift the chin.
The books themselves trace tiny stops that grow on the map. Who has not dreamed of getting off at Vierzon because Amélie Nothomb puts up a memorable sign there? The power of evocation has its priority tickets. And sometimes, a detail — the elegance of a “sea uniform” glimpsed in the press, that of Leonor of Spain — is enough to give birth to a thousand imaginary maritime itineraries.
Let’s return to the North. In her “inner Finland,” the lakes resemble wise mirrors, the mist lowers the world’s sound, and wooden houses smoke gently. She imagines passing from a sauna to the snow as one passes from a burning chapter to a blank page. The reindeer — which she prefers to cross on paper — slowly traverse the scene, like collected extras.
She imagines following the Carélie and the Åland archipelago, but in reality it is the sentences that embark, like night ferries. This is called the pleasure of the ellipse: cutting the light before the end and keeping the warmth. The itinerary ends on the edge of a milky silence. Literature, undeniably, makes it snow there without cooling the heart.
Choosing not to “meet” Finland is to protect the delicate glassware of a dream. One can walk to the quay, feel the iodine, listen to the ropes creak, and then turn back with the certainty of having traveled. Sometimes, it is enough to have a book placed on the table, a window open, and a ghost train — perhaps the Orient-Express — for the whole world to gently knock at the door.
