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A Winter Book by Tove Jansson (view source)
Revision as of 16:20, 29 August 2020
, 16:20, 29 August 2020no edit summary
Tove Jansson's worldwide fame lasts on the Moomin books, written in the 1940s and later becoming television characters of the simplicity, naivety and sheer 'goodness' that would later produce flowerpot men or teletubbies. Simple drawings, simple stories, simple goodness. What is often forgotten outside of her native Finland is that she was a serious writer…that she wrote for adults as well as children…and that she had a feeling for the natural world and the simple life that not only informed those child-like trolls but went far beyond any fantasy of how the world might be.
Jansson's name came back to our attention in 2003 when "Sort of" Books had the wisdom to republish her Summer Book, which told of a six-year-old child's visit to the summer island of her aging ageing artist grandmother.
That the follow -up publication – exploiting the success of The Summer Book, but no less a joy for all the buck-making publisher-savvy that brings it to us – that this should be called A Winter Book is one of those marketeering master strokesmasterstrokes. Something so 'right' you just resent that it came out of the marketing department.
The point is that "The Summer Book" was part autobiography, part fiction, but was in essence about a single summer. The Book of 'The Summer' – one specific summer.
The Winter Book is not. It is a collection of selected stories. Again, one feels almost certainly autobiographical in essence if not in the event. Some of the stories do tell of northern Winters that we southern Europeans cannot begin to imagine…but others are from other, unspecified times of year. This is a compilation and not necessarily one that Jansson herself would have hung together in this way. It is, therefore, a Winter book in that sense too… a book put together in the cold aftermath of her passing… one extracted from what remains without her warmth to guide the selection.
What of the stories though?