Mikael Niemi's 2000 novel Popular Music from Vittula is set in Pajala and the surrounding Tornedalen — the Swedish-Finnish border region along the Torne River — in the 1960s and 70s. It is one of the most successful Swedish novels of the 21st century, translated into dozens of languages, and it describes the peculiar world of this bilingual, borderland community with dark humour and exact detail.
Reading the novel before visiting Pajala transforms the experience. The churches, the river, the forests, the cultural divide between Swedish and Finnish sensibilities, the Laestadian religious tradition, the arrival of rock music in a community previously defined by total sobriety and strict religiosity — all of this is described by someone who grew up here and knows it in his bones. The book is short enough to finish on a flight to Sweden, and it provides a frame for everything you will see in the town and its surroundings.