Contents
This book contains 20 short stories from across Jansson’s career chosen by contemporary Scottish novelist Ali Smith.
The first 13 are from Jansson’s first published collection, The Sculptor’s Daughter (1968) which was translated into English in 1969. Since The Sculptor’s Daughter can be bought as a stand-alone book, possibly it would be better to buy that and possess the entire set of childhood stories, instead of just the 13 here:
- The Stone
- Parties
- The Dark
- Snow
- German measles
- Flying
- Annie
- The Iceberg
- Albert
- Flotsam and jetsam
- High Water
- Jeremiah
- The spinster who had an idea
After these 13 stories, this volume continues with a long story from 1971, one from the 1980s, and the remaining five appear to be from the 1990s, these latter all translated into English and published here for the first time.
Sort Of Books
All Jansson’s books for adults appear to be currently published in a uniform edition by Sort Of Books, based in London. A feature of the books is their stylish design, with foldover end-covers, beautiful cover images and a selection of photographs from Jansson’s own life sprinkled among the texts.
This volume features 19 atmospheric and evocative black and white photos – of the author’s mother and father, herself as a child cutting paper with scissors or standing prim in a child’s striped dress, as a stylish young woman, as a mature woman smoking a fag, along with views of the island where she lived.
A child’s eye view
The stories from The Sculptor’s Daughter are told from the point of view of a really small child, I’d say 4 or 5. Through her eyes we see the sights and sounds and smells of her parents’ studio in Helsinki. Tove’s father, Viktor Jansson, was a Finnish sculptor, her Swedish mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, was an illustrator and graphic designer, so it was a very artistic family, which encouraged music, storytelling and the young Tove to make and paint and draw and decorate.
The narrator remembers parties where her father played the balalaika along with his friend Cavvy playing the guitar. She finds a big stone which she’s convinced is made of silver and rolls it all along the pavement and across the road to their apartment. One day when it starts snowing, she has a fantasy vision of so much snow falling that it tips the whole world up on its side and people go tumbling out of their windows. She listens to her father playing with his pet guenon monkey Poppolino, which routinely swings around the room knocking over busts and chewing pieces of furniture before her father placates it with some liquorice and puts it back in its cage.
It is a world riddled with compulsions and necessities and superstitions and rituals. If people say anything about the iceberg it will go away. She needs to play this game with her mother, now. Her little friend Poyu must step just where she tells him, to avoid the snakes in the carpet (there are no snakes, it’s just a game).
All these rituals are to keep at bay the fear, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of the incomprehensible world of grown-ups, which the small narrator is very prone to.
Every story has to begin in the same way, then it’s not so important what happens. A soft, gentle voice in the warm darkness and one gazes into the fire and nothing is dangerous. Everything else is outside and can’t get in. Not now or at any time. (p.40)
Contrasting with these moments of fear are the childhood safe spaces, very often snuggling down in a nice warm bed, but best of all sitting in a parent’s lap. Where in the world is cosier and warmer and safer?
The prose is written with a kind of wide-eyed childish simplicity, punctuated by outbursts of childish dogmatism, the kind of pedantic insistence characteristic of the small. Everyone who reads it responds to the ‘innocence’ and simplicity of the style, but I think sometimes it can verge on the twee. It’s a fine line.
Actually soda water is dangerous. It gives one bubbles in the tummy and it can make one feel sad. One should never mix things. (p.31)
The narrator’s mind jumps all over the place. She’s thinking about the great dark shadow that comes out of the sea and stretches towards the town every night. Then how to pick stones out of your ice skates. Then how to avoid the ‘snakes’ she has conjured up in her friend Poyu’s patterned carpet.
Is this how children think, jumping from one thing to another. Is it a marvellous recreation of childhood? Or is it how we all think that children think? Is it in fact quite a sophisticated (and slightly troubling) act of ventriloquism?
‘Explosion’ is a beautiful word and a very big one. Later I learned others, the kind you whisper only when you’re alone. ‘Inexorable’. ‘Ornamentation’. ‘Profile’. ‘Catastrophe’. ‘Electrical’. ‘District nurse.’ They get bigger and bigger if you say them over and over again. You whisper and whisper and let the world grow until nothing else exists until the word. (p.39)
As the Sculptor stories progress the narrator becomes noticeably older. Her friend Albert invites her out in a rowing boat (from the island where they spend their summer holidays with her family) but they get caught in a thick fog and then, surreally, take on board a dying seagull. She’s older than 5 or 6 by this time.
Flotsam and Jetsam describes her observation of her Daddy and other men from around the islands rowing out to scavenge canisters of goodies (booze, maybe?) which have been washed into the sea, maybe from a wrecked cargo boat. She observes the dainty codes and rules governing what is, and is not, salvageable.
High Water is a short subtle story, also set on the holiday island (the same one, presumably, which features in her classic The Summer Book). Her Daddy the sculptor brings all his sculpting equipment and clay out to the island and converts Old Charlie’s boat-house into a studio – but then gets blocked and can do no work. He gets cross with everyone. Until one night there’s a really awesome storm which floods the island and carries off the jetty and – floods the studio and ruins all the clay. Daddy comes in to tell relate this terrible blow to his wife and she is beaming with pleasure and he is wreathed in smiles. Then he rushes off back out to help people try to save what they can from the storm.
So it is a story about how hard it is to be an artist, or how hard her father found it, and what a relief simple physical action in the outdoors is, compared to all that agonising about creation.
A spinster stays and becomes obsessed with building steps of cement up to the house, but she makes a right horlicks of it. Later she interrupts Daddy and Mummy making a plaster cast, usually a sacred moment, and natters on, poking about, until she accidentally discovers a way to make a small cast around a picture cut out from a magazine. She gets addicted to making scores of these, perfecting her technique, turning into quite a creator. But that doesn’t stop them being tacky, the narrator thinks. Eventually, the spinster leaves but young Tove treasures the picture cast she made for herself.
In The Boat and Me the narrator is 12 and Daddy has become Dad. The prose is quite a lot more mature. She is given a boat and decides to row it round the little archipelago of islets surrounding their island. Her mum helps her set off before her Dad can get up and prevent her going. There follow bucolic details of navigating the boat round little islands in the Gulf of Finland, and of encountering the rich summer tourists who her family despises, in this book as in The Summer Book. But eventually her Dad, having woken and discovered she’s set off, catches up with her in his motorboat, makes her come aboard, ties the rowboat to it and returns to the house. Tut tut.
Sad
The Squirrel represents an alarming, rather shocking break in tone. Now a third-person narrator beadily describes the behaviour of an apparently middle-aged woman living on her own on an island. This woman is consumed with obsessive compulsive disorder. Everything has to be just so: she must get dressed in just the right order; the wood in the fireplace must be arranged just so; each day must start with the same rituals including measuring the height of the sea against rocks.
It is sad to learn that each day also requires a morning tot of madeira, and then a work tot of madeira: ‘It is the only thing that helped’ (p.131).
She began sweeping, painstaking and calm. She liked sweeping. It was a peaceful day, a day without dialogue. There was nothing to defend or accuse anyone of; everything had been cut out, all those words that could have been other words or might simply have been out of place and have led to great change. Now there was nothing but a warm friendly cottage full of morning light, herself sweeping and the friendly sound of coffee beginning to simmer. The room with its four windows simply existed and justified itself; it was safe and had nothing to do with any place where you could shut anything in or leave anything out. (p.131)
Alas, poor Tove, I thought she was an embodiment of carefree happiness, but this story confirms the impression of the final few Moomintroll books that she sadly combated mental illness, an overpowering anxiety and worry that can only be kept at bay with rituals and routines, or else the day becomes ‘soiled with wrong thoughts and pointless actions’ (p.135).
So the story is ostensibly about how Tove feeds and supports the squirrel and it becomes a companion on the island. But the real impact of the text is to quite shock you with the extent of her unhappy, uncontrollable thoughts. She rearranges the log pile to make things easier for the squirrel then is devastated by feelings of guilt that she may have wrecked its home. She panics and goes to fetch lots of things to help a squirrel make a home from the cellar but then chaotically tries to squeeze a box which is too big up through the cellar hole and it bursts and stuff goes flying everywhere.
Next morning she sees a boat heading straight for the island. It is them. They have come to get her. She has a panic attack, first sweeping all her manuscripts into a drawer, then changing her mind and setting them back on her desk, then jumping out the back window and crawling off to hide in an inlet – then realising how silly that will look and sneaking back to spy on the boat. In fact it’s just three blokes on a day trip to any island anywhere who tie up their boat and get their fishing rods out, completely ignorant of the highly strung woman whose utter calm they have shattered.
Sadly, I realise that Jansson is not the great feminine super-mother, the centred, reassuring, calm presence of Moominmamma, as portrayed in the Moomin books. On the basis of this text, she is more like the hysterical Fillyjonk, permanently on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Correspondence
There follow a couple of lovely ‘sections’ based on letters.
Letters from Klara is a selection of letters from the same woman correspondent, but written to all sorts of people, relations, children, officials and so on, so that each one displays a different tone and aspect of the writer’s characters. It’s a clever effective technique.
Messages is a series of brief snippets, the opening phrases, from a very wide range of letters the author has received – fan mail, commercial propositions, letters from school children, parents, lawyers and so on, a cross-section of the non-stop bombardment of mostly rubbish which a writer has to put up with, but also a cross-section of ordinary people who, with greater or lesser subtlety, pour out their hearts to someone they’ve never met but feel they know through her writings.
The last of the three, Correspondence, consists of letters written to her by a Japanese schoolgirl, Tamiko Atsumi, about the Moomins, about her improving English and other schoolgirl concerns. Tamiko sends haikus and wishes Tove good health and a long life.
None of Tove’s replies (if there ever were any) are included here so, again, as with everything Jannson wrote, there is a powerful sense of mystery and absence. Instead, we follow as the Japanese girl gets more proficient at English and her letters more ambitious, and the text encourages us to guess and speculate about the personality behind these brief missives.
What do they mean?
What does anything mean?
Photos
- Tove Jansson in 1923
- The very small island of Klovharu where Jansson spent her summers for thirty years
- The hut on Klovharu
- A different view of the house on Klovharu
Credit
A Winter Book by Tove Jansson was published by Sort of Books in 2006.
Related links
Tove Jansson’s books for adults
Novels
The Summer Book (1972)
Sun City (1974)
The True Deceiver (1982)
The Field of Stones (1984)
Fair Play (1989)
Short story collections
Sculptor’s Daughter (1968)
The Listener (1971)
Art in Nature (1978)
Travelling Light (1987)
Letters from Klara and Other Stories (1991)
A Winter Book (1998)
Books & Boots 