Marketing labels it "The Road in Finland," and maybe the author deliberately imitated The Road. There’s hunger, cold, people mean and dying and a little boy, but that’s it, really.

There is something very well done in the telling of this peasant family leaving home and getting smaller as hunger grows on their way to St. Petersburg, where the Tsar might have bread. They join the whole of Finland hungry masses thrown on the road by hunger (this is the last famine the country knew in the 1860s), wandering in the snow, hoping to receive alms from churches and the bourgeois and getting sometimes charity, but mostly cold, hate, hunger, contempt, rape, beatings and death. 

In between the stories of this family, some chapters tell the work of doctors and a senator. The book tries to weave little and big history. « Only the big picture gives the details their significance,» as the senator puts it, but the story fails to do so, I think: references were lost on me (the unnamed senator, who is probably a known figure, or the seemingly important railway works, which had to be explained by Wikipedia to be grasped), and there is little interest nor investment in the stories of the senator and the doctors. Only the family managed to draw me in. 

Yet, read in a warm bed by a reader living in indecent abundance, White hunger is a frightful evocation. What to do when there is nothing to eat in a hundred-kilometer radius? The same thing one does when there is no more air to breathe: panic and fidget in a slow suffocation. 

(The book also introduced me to the interesting Peirene press, which translates and publishes short novels from all around the world.)