Työkaluineen

Työkaluineen is a Finnish-language novella published in 2012 by author Liisa Koskinen. The title translates roughly as With Tools and signals a central emphasis on craftsmanship, materiality, and the relationships people have with their instruments of work.

The narrative is set in the small coastal town of Särkkä, where a group of carpenters, machinists, and apprentices faces economic uncertainty as a municipal project threatens to relocate manufacturing. Through a sequence of interconnected episodes and a core novella, the characters’ daily routines with their tools—saws, lathes, chisels, and drill presses—are rendered with precise detail, turning ordinary objects into agents of memory, identity, and communal life.

Form and style are distinctive for their blend of prose with short interludes in which tools are anthropomorphized and offered quiet commentary on labor and cooperation. The voice shifts between documentary realism and lyrical observation, and the chronology moves between past and present to illuminate how skill and tradition persist amid change.

Themes include intergenerational knowledge transfer, the meaning of work, and the political economy of small-town industry. Critics have noted its tactile realism and humane portrayal of workers, praising Koskinen’s ability to render technical detail without sacrificing empathy, while some readers find the pacing deliberately measured.

Työkaluineen has been studied in courses on contemporary Finnish literature and has been translated into Swedish and English, extending its reach beyond the original Finnish readership.