The Listener (13 page)
Authors: Tove Jansson
It had begun to snow outside. It snowed thick and quiet. Winter had come. She put more wood on the fire and turned up the lamp. She sat down at the kitchen table and started to write, very rapidly.
On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a person at the landing place.
“
The Summer
Book
is a marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom.” Justine Picardie,
Daily Telegraph
An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other’s fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges – one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom,
The Summer Book
is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. This edition has a foreword by Esther Freud.
“As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last.” Philip Pullman
A Winter Book
features thirteen stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults,
The Sculptor’s Daughter
(1968), along with seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996). Drawn from youth and older age, this selection by Ali Smith provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer’s prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It is introduced by Ali Smith, and there are afterwords by Philip Pullman, Esther Freud and Frank Cottrell Boyce.
“So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm – and discreetly radical. At first sight it looks autobiographical. Like everything Jansson wrote, it’s much more than it seems …
Fair Play
is very fine art.” From Ali Smith’s introduction
What mattered most to Tove Jansson, she explained in her eighties, was work and love, a sentiment she echoes in this tender and original novel.
Fair Play
portrays a love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side by side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other’s creativity, we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.
“I loved this book. It’s cool in both senses of the word, understated yet exciting … the characters still haunt me.” Ruth Rendell
In the deep winter snows of a Swedish hamlet, a strange young woman fakes a break-in at the house of an elderly artist in order to persuade her that she needs companionship. But what does she hope to gain by doing this? And who ultimately is deceiving whom? In this portrayal of two women encircling each other with truth and lies, nothing can be taken for granted. By the time the snow thaws, both their lives will have changed irrevocably.
“Jansson’s prose is wondrous: it is clean, deliberate; an aesthetic so certain of itself it’s breathtaking.” Kirsty Gunn,
Daily Telegraph
Travelling Light
takes us into new Tove Jansson territory. A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish island is thrown into disarray by an oddly intrusive child; an artist returns from abroad to discover that her past has been eerily usurped. With the deceptively light prose that is her hallmark, Tove Jansson reveals to us the precariousness of a journey – the unease we feel at being placed outside of our millieu, the restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.
An elderly caretaker at a large outdoor exhibition, called Art in Nature, finds that a couple have lingered on to bicker about the value of a picture; he has a surprising suggestion that will resolve both their row and his own ambivalence about the art market. A draughtsman’s obsession with drawing locomotives provides a dark twist to a love story. A cartoonist takes over the work of a colleague who has suffered a nervous breakdown only to discover that his own sanity is in danger. In these witty, sharp, often disquieting stories, Tove Jansson reveals the faultlines in our relationship with art, both as artists and as consumers. Obsession, ambition, and the discouragement of critics are all brought into focus in these wise and cautionary tales.
The Listener © Tove Jansson 1971; first published as
Lyssnerskan
by Schildts Förlags Ab, Finland.
English translation © Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books 2014
All rights reserved
Thanks to Sophia Jansson for her encouragement and advice.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.
This English translation first published in 2014 by
Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL.
Typeset in Goudy and Gill Sans to a design by Henry Iles.
Sort of Books gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange
160pp.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978–1908745361