Jansson

I still have a small pile of novellas to talk about (I’ve realised that it doesn’t necessarily take any less time to write posts on short books) but I haven’t yet written about Tove Jansson’s Travelling Light – which has leapt, as I rather assumed it would, onto my list of favourite books this year.

Regular readers of S-i-a-B will know that Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and a new translation of her work (this one by Silvester Mazzarella, with another brilliant introduction by Ali Smith) will get me into the literary equivalent of a tizzy. I have to be in the right mood for reading short stories usually, but when they come from the pen of Tove J, they race to the top of the reading pile. And these were no exception.

Unlike Jansson’s best known adult work, The Summer Book, these stories don’t share the same sorts of settings and characters. We range from familiar Scandinavian islands to mysterious woods to the cabin of a ship to – most innovatively – an almost post-apocalyptic town. Though the scenarios vary wildly, each is clearly the work of the same writer, for Jansson brings to each and every story a stirring and extraordinary insight in the workings of the human mind and – more especially – the interaction of people. These people often covertly clash with each other, or don’t let on everything they are thinking; they feel awkward, distrustful, inadequate. Characters often say things which are disconcerting because they are so unexpected, but also because they are so perceptive and true.
“Anyway, solitary people interest me. There are so many different ways of being solitary.”

“I know just what you mean,” said X. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. Different kinds of solitude. Enforced solitude and voluntary solitude.”

“Quite,” said Viktoria. “There’s no need to go into it further. But when people understand one another without speaking, it can often leave them with very little to talk about, don’t you think?”
That comes from ‘The Garden of Eden’, one of the longest and one of my favourite stories in the collection. The mid-length story is so difficult to get right – it doesn’t have the quick impact of a five page story, but also shouldn’t meander too much. ‘The Garden of Eden’ gets it just right in its depiction of Professor Viktoria arriving in a mountain village west of Alicante, and trying to create a truce between two warring women. There are so many layers to the story, none of them overblown, and the whole piece is wonderfully more than the sum of its parts.

But Jansson’s insights into human character don’t preclude her beautiful descriptions of the natural environment. I was particularly taken with this, from the same story:
At that exact moment the setting sun broke through a gap in the mountain chain and the twilit landscape was instantly transformed and revealed; the trees and the grazing sheep enveloped in a crimson haze, a sudden beautiful vision of biblical mystery and power. Viktoria thought she had never seen anything so lovely. She remembered once a set designer saying, “My job is to paint with light, that’s all it is. The right light at the right time.” The sun moved quickly on, but before the colours could fade, Viktoria turned and walked slowly back to her house.I don’t really read in a visual way, as it were, but this description really worked for me – and it’s typical of the beautiful images that Jansson places congruously alongside the interaction of flawed and interesting characters.

If I had to choose just one story as my favourite, it would be ‘The Woman Who Borrowed Memories’ – a deliciously, deviously clever story concerning the reunion of two women, and the disunity of their shared recollections. One is vampirically changing and appropriating the other’s memories – all shown very subtly, very believably. It represents everything I love about Jansson’s ‘touch’.

‘The Summer Child’ is about a disconcerting child visitor, anti-social but not malevolent:
When it came to giving people a bad conscience, he was an expert. Sometimes all he had to do was just look at you with those gloomy, grown-up eyes and you would instantly be reminded of all your failings.I wonder if Jansson was thinking of her own writing when she wrote those words. The human mind and soul cannot be held up to such close inspection without the reader glancing at their own. But although Jansson exposes so many home truths, entirely without sentimentality, Travelling Light is far from a depressing or distressing collection. Instead, it makes you marvel with fascination, soak in the wonderful prose, and be grateful that there existed someone with so precise, perceptive and unpredictable a view of the world.

Since most of the authors I like are dead, it’s unusual for me to wait with excitement for a book to be published. I can normally just buy the backlist from abebooks, and work my way through them… well, Tove Jansson is dead, but she also wrote in Swedish, so I’m having to wait for the wonderful Thomas Teal to translate them. Tove Jansson is one of my favourite writers, and I couldn’t wait for The True Deceiver to be published – it’s coming out in October, but I begged an advance copy because I just couldn’t wait any longer.

All my reviews of Jansson’s previous books are under this link, which will take you to my thoughts on The Summer Book, A Winter Book, and Fair Play. Those who don’t like Jansson call her books boring – and if you read books primarily for plot, then she won’t be the author for you. But if you choose your books for character, writing style, and atmosphere – I’ve never come across any better writer. As Ali Smith writes in her wise introduction, Tove Jansson is ‘the opposite of charming’. Her books do not charm, they are far too honest for that, but they certainly appeal. She does not believe that the opposite of charming is repulsive – the opposite of charming is truth. So many modern novels assume human nature is disgusting, and that the only significant acts are ugly ones – Tove Jansson’s writing quietly, mesmerically shows characters who are beautifully real.

The True Deceiver is a little different from the other Jansson books I’ve read. Still set in snowy Sweden, still focusing on the co-existence of two women (a theme found in The Summer Book and Fair Play), there is more of an edge to this novel. Katri Kling is blunt, friendless, and entirely honest without being malevolent. She is blunt not because of malice, but because she sees truth as far more important than etiquette, and isn’t encumbered by emotions. She loves only two things – numbers, and her brother Mats, ‘a bit simple’. Katri’s character is shown in the way she is said to speak: ‘Other people talk, you make pronouncements’. Living away from the village, in ‘the rabbit house’, is Anna Aemelin. She is a disorganised, semi-reclusive illustrator of children’s books (yes, Tove was the illustrator of the Moomin books, but the very opposite of disorganised). Anna’s talent is the depiction of the woodland floor, in great, caring detail. But she has to include rabbits in her pictures, and the rabbits are covered in flowers – all the letters from fans, young and old, ask her why they are covered in flowers, and she always makes up a different answer. She never works on these books in the winter, so her paintbrushes are hibernating, as it were.

Katri takes some food up to Anna’s house, and develops an interest in the lady… but why? She fakes a break-in at the elderly artist’s home, to persuade her that she needs companionship… and so, with her brother and her dog, moves in. The motives for her actions are mysterious; the unacknowledged battle for power between Anna and Katri continues silently and subtly. Who is deceiving whom? And what effects are the women having on the lives and personalities of each other?

Katri starts sorting out Anna’s muddled finances and contracts. A portion of each financial victory is set aside for her brother – ‘Every time she wrote a captured sum of money into her notebook, she felt the collector’s deep satisfaction at finally owning a rare and expensive specimen.’ She even perfects the forging of Anna’s signature, and her writing style. And yet her motives remain unclear.

“Attention,” Anna said. “Giving another human being your undivided attention is a pretty rare thing. No, I don’t think it happens very often… Figuring out what someone wants and longs for, without being told – that probably requires a good deal of insight and thought. And of course sometimes we hardly know ourselves. Maybe we think it’s solitude we need, or maybe just the opposite, being with other people… We don’t know, not always…” Anna stopped talking, searched for words, raised her glass and drank. “This wine is sour. I wonder if it hasn’t stood too long. Don’t we have an unopened bottle of Madeira in the sideboard somewhere? No, let it go. Don’t interrupt me. What I’m trying to say is that there are few people who take the time to understand and listen, to enter into another person’s way of living. The other day it occurred to me how remarkable it is that you, Miss Kling, can write my name as if I’d written it myself. It is characteristic of your thoughtfulness, your thoughtfulness for me and no one else. Very unusual.”

“It’s not especially unusual,” Katri said. “Mats, pass the cream. It’s simply a matter of observation. You observe certain habits and behaviour patterns, you see what’s missing, what’s incomplete, and you supply it. It’s just a matter of experience. Get things working as best you can, then wait and see.”

“Wait and see what?” said Anne. She was annoyed.

“How it goes,” Katri said, looking straight at Anna, her eyes at this moment deeply yellow. She continued very slowly. “Miss Aemelin, the things people do for one another mean very little, seen purely as acts. What matters is their motives, where they’re headed, what they want.”
Jansson’s talent lies in showing the great depths of human interaction in the most unassuming ways. Skim through The True Deceiver and it might seem that not much happens, but read at the gradual pace her writing deserves, you realise what an unusually talented writer Jansson is. I haven’t read anything better than her collected output, especially in terms of style, from the last fifty years. Of course I am reading at one remove, and I cannot praise Thomas Teal’s translation enough – though I can’t compare it to the original, the result is so perfect that I can only assume Jansson and Teal are on the same wavelength. A real treat, and I do hope desperately that Sort Of Books continue to publish further translations of Jansson’s novels – and in such beautiful editions, too.

I’ve talked so much about Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, without actually saying anything, that many of you will probably think Book Group was months ago. Well, I’ve just come back from it, and nine other people who had read Jansson’s book over the past six weeks. So here is my opinion of Fair Play, and what the group thought of it, so pile in with your feedback too, please! The cartoon is recycled, and not as appropriate to the topic for today, but I like it as an image of the bookish blogging community, and it’ll appear whenever I report back from my terrestrial Book Group.

I’ll start off a little defensively – I don’t think Fair Play was as good as Tove Jansson’s other works, those I’ve read anyway. Have a look at A Winter Book and The Summer Book by searching in the blog searcher, if you like – short stories and a sort of vignettey-novel respectively. Having said that, Fair Play was still a delight. Marketted as a novel, it is in fact a series of short stories/ideas/vignettes/snapshots featuring the same characters. Jonna and Mari live on the same, small Scandanavian island, artist and writer, and… well, that’s about it. Jonna rearranges Mari’s pictures; a girl obsessed with Mari’s mother comes to visit; they discuss their fathers; they watch an old film; edit one of Mari’s stories, and so forth. Each chapter has a small incident occur, and Jansson wraps her delicious prose around it. By the end she has provided a beautiful portrait of an unconventional couple, co-dependent and close rather than affectionate. Jansson doesn’t allow the narrative to become twee, but she does give beauty. This was especially true on my re-read (the first time in many years I have re-read a novel immediately) where I could just wallow in the prose.

So, what did the Book Group think? I must confess, I was worried whilst I was reading it. Plot is quite far down on my list of priorities when evaluating a book, but I know that’s not the case for a lot of people – Jansson’s novels are either viewed as beautiful writing, or just fairly pointless. One guy definitely took the latter view – just couldn’t see the point, engage with the characters, or be bothered to read on. A few others agreed to a lesser extent. That’s fine – I deliberately suggested one I hadn’t read already, so that I wouldn’t be too sensitive about people’s reactions. Most of the group found the writing to be very good, the novel to be gentle and evocative, and the characters intriguing, if slightly distant from a depiction of ‘love’, which the introduction suggested. Nobody loved it, desperate to read more (if only they’d started with The Summer Book!) but a few said they would if they came across some.

So, not a failure, not a success – but people were happy to have read something they wouldn’t otherwise have come across, and that is, after all, one of the main reasons that people join Book Groups.

Over to you! As far as I know, Curzon and Carole have read Fair Play – and of course anyone else is welcome to join in. Thoughts?

I was going to chat about all the books I read on holiday, but I’m too sleepy to do so. Have just come back from a village pub quiz, to which I went with my family. We managed to come first, and I contributed about eight answers, two of which were ‘Dolly Parton’. Worrying. And only one of which wasn’t already given by someone else on the team. No literature round, you see.

ANYWAY I’m supposed to be talking about books, aren’t I? So I’ll kick off with my favourite of the four, Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book. Cue picture.
As you may remember, The Summer Book was the first book to feature in my ’50 Books…’ (though that list isn’t in any particular order), and so I was merely exercising my civic/blogic duty when purchasing this publication from ‘Sort Of Books’ (an offshoot of Penguin, I believe). I worried a little that sunny beaches wouldn’t put me in the right frame of mind for a wintery book – but I needn’t have worried. The lack of sun was a dampener on parts of the holiday, but put me in completely the right position to read about chilly Finland. Finland? One of the Scandinavian countries, I can never remember which.

On the other hand, the contents belie the title anyway – this collection of stories, taken from various other collections, aren’t all wintery. Some of them are positively scorching – and Jansson is so brilliant at writing about temperature and weather, that you feel it. In fact, the term ‘evocative’ could have been invented for Jansson’s writing – perhaps because it’s a translation, but every word in this anthology has such depth, and feeling, and is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever read. Except for The Summer Book.

The stories are mostly from the perspective of Tove as a child, though some towards the end focus on old age. Each one is slight, with little of significance occuring – in ‘Jeremiah’, the child competes for the attentions of a foreigner collecting bits and pieces on the beach; ‘Snow’ describes moving house, and the consequent interpretations the child transfers onto the snowdrift; ‘The Iceberg’ concerns, surprisingly, an iceberg arriving at the coast, which the little girl can’t quite reach: “It lay there bumping against the rocks at the end of the point where it was deep. and there was deep black water and just the wring distance between us. If it had been shorter I should have jumped over; if it had been a little longer I could have thought: ‘What a pity, no one can manage to get over that’. Now I had to make up my mind. And that’s an awful thing to have to do.”

I get quite irritated by books which boast of how much you’ll learn about the nation, culture etc. When I read fiction, I don’t want a travel manual. But Jansson achieves something much better – the reader is immersed in the life of the child, country and all, and all sorts of local details flood in, without being obtrusive.

Perhaps it is underwhelming to end a review with simply “read it”. I’m sure Karen will do better when she reports back. But I’ve rarely had a more involving and beautiful reading experience than with Jansson’s short stories, and if I could have two books by the same author on my ’50 Books…’ list…

Second favourite short story writer. Can you guess the first?

1. The Summer Book – Tove Jansson
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I don’t think I’ll be causing too much of a literary storm if I suggest that Chaucer and Tove Jansson are odd bedfellows. But, nevertheless, they share the dubious acclaim of being the first authors to be heralded. And Tove is kicking off something I hope to continue intermitently for quite a while: 50 Books You Must Read But May Not Have Heard About.

Hopefully I’ll be able to bring a few to people’s attention, which they wouldn’t discover on the 3 for 2 tables, and of course I welcome recommendations – which will be ingested, and perhaps appear in this countdown (which is, I hasten to add, in no particular order) in the future. I played around with HTML for a while yesterday, but failed in adding a third column – so a list will be kept of the 50 Reads, down there somewhere on the far left.

I’m easing you in with The Summer Book, which I think has already done the rounds of blogs – certainly spotted it on Cornflower. Translated from the Swedish, and by the author of the Moomin Books, this falls between being a collection of short stories, and a fragmented-but-continuous narrative of the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother. More than anything else, it is a mesmerically beautiful evocation of Summer. Maybe it’s because it was originally written in another language, but there is an atmosphere of ethereality and airiness throughout this work. Finding it difficult to put my finger on why this book is so evocative, but I’m going to give up and just say: it is! Rarely have I left a novel, especially one not especially comedic, loving the characters so much, and appreciating the style of an author more.

Here’s the first line, to entice you:
‘It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, all the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.
“What are you doing?” asked little Sophia’
…

Do read on. And it’s a beautiful book to look at, which can’t be a bad thing. That’s right, folks, two days in and I’m already judging a book by its cover.

Anyone read it? Or The Winter Book, the sequel currently sitting on my shelf?
Countdown begins…