Literary History - TXT MSGS Revive Epistolary Genre

Here's the text of the article Katja sent a link to, translated into English by yours truly:

A novel will be published next week, based only on text messages. According to the publisher, this novel will make literary history worldwide. The Last Messages ("Viimeiset Viestit") is, according to publisher Tammi, the first work based solely on text messages. The story is built around a thousand text messages, ordered by time of sending. The book can be viewed as a new take on an extremely old literary tradition [i.e., the epistolary novel] in which the story is told through the exchange of letters between people. The Last Messages is an adventure story. Its protagonist is a famous CEO of a computer company, who, after resigning from his post goes on a trip around Europe and India. Slowly, the purpose of the trip unfolds, surprising the reader, and bringing him face to face with an old confucian maxim: If you know what is right, yet you do not do it, you are a coward. Worldwide, there are about 3 billion cell phones in use, and over 400 million new cell phones are being sold annually. In Finland, the number of cell phones surpassed the number of inhabitants in March, 2006. The first SMS text message in the world was sent in Finland in December 1993. Annually, Finns send 2.8 billion text messages, which averages to about 500 msgs/person a year. Text messaging is possible in numerous countries, but it can be surprising, that for example in the United States, the technology for text messaging was not adopted until 2003. Author Hannu Luntiala was born in Helsinki in 1952. He is a multiple award winner for his poetry and short stories, which have been published in anthologies and literary magazines. His first (stand-alone) published work, the short story collection Hommes, came out in 2006. The Last Messages is his second published work. Luntiala works as CEO of the Finnish Census Bureau.