rachelmanija | Entries tagged with author: jansson tove

Tove Jansson was the author and illustrator of the delightful and deceptively deep Moomin books, about adorable (sometimes a little creepy or weird) creatures. Her significant other was the artist Tuulikki Pietila, and the inspiration for Tooticky in the Moomin books. They lived and worked together for over fifty years, and spent their summers on their tiny Finnish island.

Fair Play is about a writer, Mari, and an artist, Jonna, who live in separate rooms of an apartment building that are connected by a long attic, and also in a house on a tiny island. They’ve been together for forty years, and are now in their seventies. In chapters which are perfect little short stories that add up to a greater whole, they make their art, travel, have guests and students (both categories tend toward the eccentric, and Mari and Jonna always seem a bit relieved when they leave), squabble, make up, and balance the need for solitude in order to work with the need for each other.

It’s beautifully translated by Thomas Teal, who also did The Summer Book. The prose has a stripped-down, translucent quality, like the evanescent moments in time that Jonna keeps trying to capture on film; there’s always more than initially meets the eye. The relationship between people who have been together for forty years both is and isn’t like their relationship when they first met; you can see the young women they were, and though they know each other incredibly well, they’re not immune to jealousy or misunderstandings. But they are also clearly much better at getting past them.

A perfect little book about love and art. It’s funny, perceptive, and moving, with an absolutely wonderful ending. I highly recommend it, and also Jansson’s The Summer Book, which is similar in tone and structure but has different though somewhat overlapping themes, about a girl and her grandmother on a small island.

They never asked, "Were you able to work today?" Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected - those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.

When Mari came in, Jonna was on a ladder building shelves in her front hall. Mari knew that when Jonna started putting up shelves she was approaching a period of work. Of course the hall would be far too narrow and cramped, but that was immaterial. The last time, it was shelves in the bedroom and the result had been a series of excellent woodcuts. She glanced into the bathroom as she passed, but Jonna had not yet put printing paper in to soak, not yet. Before Jonna could do her graphic work in peace, she always spent some time printing up sets of earlier, neglected works - a job that had been set aside so she could focus on new ideas. After all, a period of creative grace can be short.

By the author of the Moomin books, which like many children’s classics are wise and strange, alternating comfort with manageable scares, and filled with the closely observed details of a world familiar to the author but alien to many readers. The same can be said of this adult novel, though the fears addressed are rather less easily manageable.

Jannson spent much of her life on a tiny island off the coast of Finland, and The Summer Book, which reads like a memoir regardless of its actual autobiographical content or lack of same, is set on a similar island. Sophia, a six-year-old girl filled with the irrational moods and passions of the very young, and her grandmother, filled with the layered experience and perspective of the very old, live on it along with Sophia’s father, who is a benign but occasional presence, and a great deal of wildlife.

There is virtually no plot, just a series of character portraits and incidents: a child visits to keep Sophia company and ends up annoying the entire family, a cat fails to live up to Sophia’s ideals, the grandmother creates sculptures in a forest, a family friend with an unnamed boat salvages floating whiskey and fireworks which don’t go off. Jansson gets more emotional mileage out of a flooded dollhouse than many authors get from a natural disaster.

Sophia’s mother has died, a fact which is mentioned exactly once, and her grandmother is in poor health; the submerged story is of mortality, of what it’s like to face the end of life and what it’s like to face the beginning. Both are frightening and require careful attention to the small details; both enable those details to be observed with crystalline clarity. Every word and image counts, the psychology of little children and animals is dead-on, and there’s a lot of dry, sardonic humor.

Some of my favorite books and shows and movies are in this genre, stories about people and places and the way things and jobs and ecologies work, with conventional plot either dispensed with or appearing as an afterthought: Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede, in which the day-to-day work of a nunnery is prayer made physical; Anita Desai’s Peacock Garden Desai Long Ago (no relation to the Godden book of the same name), in which a girl hiding from the violence of Partition within a mosque’s walled garden finds it a miniature paradise; the anime and manga Mushi-shi: The Complete Series, which do have plots but are really about the intricate and beautiful workings of an entirely invented magical ecology; the movie My Neighbor Totoro, with its soot sprites and the cat bus and spirits waiting with umbrellas; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, perhaps the prototype of all these stories of small worlds, of growing things and growing children, of life and death and profound spiritual revelations embodied in a single blade of grass.

Thank you very much,