Tove JanssonResenhas

85000

A series of vignettes, tied loosely together by the twin threads of love and work, the work being that of an artist. Tove is the perfect writer for this kind of material, her light touch precisely what is needed.½

Sophia und ihre Großmutter verbringen den Sommer auf einer winzigen Insel im finnischen Meerbusen, wahrscheinlich in den 1970er Jahren.
Sophias Mutter ist gestorben (was nicht weiter fokussiert wird). Sie sprechen miteinander, schwimmen und unternehmen kleine Ausflüge mit dem Boot. Die Großmutter ist recht alt, wirkt schon sehr gebrechlich. Beide können sich gut akzeptieren, in Ruhe lassen, aber auch aneinander reiben.
Das gefällt mir eigentlich am besten: Dieser schöne, selbstverständliche Umgang mit dem Kind. Nicht sentimental oder verzärtelnd, ernst nehmend.
Das Buch wird ja sehr gelobt. So großartig hat es mich jetzt nicht beeindruckt, aber ich habe es gern gelesen.½

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Finland

This is a series of short stories that form a memoir of Finnish author Tove Jansson’s growing up in Helsinki in the 1920s. This is her first book for adults and is a sweet, at times nostalgic, look at her childhood as the daughter of a sculptor and an artist.

Jansson captures beautifully the child’s perspective, including the mystery and wonder of life, mixed with the innocent wisdom of childhood. Jansson was part of the Finnish minority of Swedish speakers and her writing also reveals aspects of the culture and traditions. Her writing is magical, understated, luminous and exquisite. Her books are definitely worth exploring.

I read this entire book in one sitting, in the waiting room at the oral surgeon for my oldest kid (wisdom teeth) and it was perfection. (The book. Not the waiting room.) An absolute delight. Everything I wanted and then some.

Do you want thoughts on how to fill a day, how to live a life, how to balance the creative and emotional needs of two people who have been life partners for decades? Do you want depctiions of the kind of relationship where you can have a circular argument about unresolved issues from years ago that goes nowhere, but also understand each other so well that you can silently arrange to salve unexpressed disappointments for the other? Do you want women who take their art, their careers, their legacies seriously? Do you want boats and islands and attics that connect the artist lofts and homes of the two? Do you want a series of vignettes that depicts a relationship that closely resembles the author's own? All depicted with a hand so light and matter of fact that it almost hides how skilled it all is?

This might be my new favorite Tove Jansson. It was so wonderful. I am still reeling.

Written in the style of a male adventurer's memoir this is an entertaining account of Moominpappas younger days in a foundling house and seeking his fortune elsewhere before settling in Moominvalley. He writes in a comical self-important way and we get some interesting and nonsensical back story.½

Another one from my quest to read a load of Moomin books around the time we visited Finland and Moominworld. In this a mysterious hat is the central storyline and all the usual characters bobble in and out. It's excellent of course.

Surprisingly funny and inventive, you can see why it's a classic. The sexism is also classic, unfortunately. I can see that Jansson was subverting the Snork Maiden's feminine weaknesses by having them save the day once, sure---I'm positive that when it was written, that was actually subversive. But at the end of the day she and Moominmamma are still the only female characters, Maiden and Mother to a fault. Feels Bad, Man. The characters (other than the parents) are generally so ungendered that it feels like it'd be so easy to just change some pronouns....

3.5/5 rounded up, perhaps.½

A lovely book about coming of age (both for the child and the grandmother) over the course of a summer spent on a tiny island.

Quando Moomintroll descobre que um cometa vai passar pelo céu, ele e seu amigo, Sniff, vão para o Observatório nas Montanhas Solitárias consultar os professores. Ao longo do caminho, vivem muitas aventuras, correm perigos... Mas a maior aventura de todas os aguarda: eles ficam sabendo que o cometa está se dirigindo para seu amado Vale dos Moomins!

Be warned, this book has no Moomins. The other characters of Moominvalley watch and wait for them, but they are gone. Its a melancholy book about change and disappointment and pushing forward in the face of missing people. Its also a kids book. A thing of beauty.½

Read this one to face my childhood fear of the Moomins, haha. Beautifully illustrated with a gorgeous cover, this is a quaint story about Moomintroll waking up during hibernation to experience his first winter. Love Little My!

De fleste kender Jansson for den dystre børnebogsserie om Mumi-troldene, men hun skrev også en lang række bøger for voksne. En af de mest kendte er Sommerbogen, der på godt 150 sider kondenserer et barns sommerferier med sin farmor. Det hele foregår på en lille ø i den finske skærgård.

Hvert år sejler pigen Sophia, der omtales som seks år, selvom tiden er ubestemt og nogle ting gentager sig år for år, ud på øen sammen med sin far, der sidder og arbejder meget af dagen, og farmoren, der får tiden til at gå med at læse bøger, sove i solen og være sammen med Sophia.

Der er en vidunderlige forbindelse mellem den gamle kvinde og det lille barn. Sophia er bestemt og klog, men hun er også kun et lille barn, der skal opdage verden omkring sig, og i farmoren har hun en klog allieret, der både går med på hendes skøre ideer og selv finder på nye ting, når det bliver kedeligt. Sammen kæmper de sig vej til en lille hule bar et tætvokset krat, bader i det kolde vand og sejler ud på ekspedition til en ø endnu længere ude, hvor en direktør har formastet sig til at bygge hus.

Der sker meget lidt, og alligevel sker der en masse. Livet er fyldt med eventyr, hvis man ser verden gennem barneøjne, og en sommer på en skærgårdsø er fyldt med godt, levet liv, hvis man er voksen og suger alt det til sig, som hverdagen byder på. Og er man gammel, er det vidunderligt at nyde sommeren med sin søn og sit barnebarn. (Moderen hører man ikke noget til, men fraværet er ikke noget der italesættes. Det er bare sådan det er.)

Sommerbogen er en smuk og nærmest meditativ bog om familie og natur, barndom og alderdom. Først og fremmest skal den læses for sin stemning af tidløs skandinavisk sommer. Den bliver man helt opslugt af, selvom der egentlig ikke ”sker” noget i bogen.½

I read this book for a book club I got in (Laufey's BookClub), and overall I really enjoyed this book. I think I should reread the last couple of chapters since I read them on a ride back home late at night, and I was very tired. My favorite chapters were The Cat and The Tent. It didn't have an overarching plot and loads of description, so I struggled a little bit, but the characters warmed up to me. I see a lot of myself when I was young in Sophia, especially her curiosity. The grandmother had a lot of similar traits to my grandmother, and I can imagine us both having similar conversations like the one's grandmother and Sophia had. I'll definitely share this book with her.

This would be a great book to read to kids, at least for the most part.

These stories feel like they've been earned - you can't just set out to write something as understated, wise and sincere without the requisite experience. Jansson's storytelling is elegantly spare, and each tale conveys what feels like a lifetime's detail, encapsulated in a small vignette of a few pages. It is as if Jansson is sketching enormous, imposing landscapes in just a few strokes.

The theme of the book is the relationship between Mari (Jansson's proxy) and Jonna another artist - both around 70 years old - in all its fractious, stubborn argumentative devotion. They have clearly been together so long that each manages the other like one would an old car (or, more appropriately, an old boat), of which you know all that idiosyncrasies and annoyances and how to cope with them, and that, additionally, you dearly love. Contentment may be the word, but without any connotation of "settling".

Their stories are told in tiny vignettes, illustrating many varied aspects of their diverse life together. It's similar in that regard to The Summer Book, although personally I preferred this. In fact I started it again the moment I finished it, the first time I have done that with a prose novel, but, at just 100 pages, I was left wanting more. A beautiful little book.

A beautiful book. Charming, convincing and a little whimsical, but with a dark undercurrent running through the book.

The story tells of a loner, Katri Kling, and her brother, and her efforts to secure their position within their small seashore village that respects, but mostly dislikes and only just accepts them. Katri tries to do this by inveigling her way into the life of another loner, Anna Aemlin, a highly successful children's illustrator, better liked by the villagers, but scarcely more accepted.

The darkness through the book is the darkness of the Scandinavian winter, but also of people's hidden motivations. The natural environment pervades the book to such an extent, it makes it feel that these two forms of darkness are interconnected.

The darkness within the characters is not an evil, more selfishness, pride, jealousy - petty motivations which cause people to act in strange ways, often against their own interests. This reminded me a lot of Knut Hamsun, and his attempts to depict the unpredictability of human behaviour.

Of course, The True Deceiver has more immediate, parallels with Jansson's Moomins stories. In both Nature is beautiful and engaging, but also unpredictable, dangerous and destructive; and even the Moomins will all fall prey to their darker feelings occasionally. Naturally The True Deceiver is a more adult take on these themes, but there's a consistency.

It's tempting to see elements of Tove Jansson in both the main characters - the lonely, resourceful survivor and the tense and demure illustrator. And to see the conflict and antagonism - despite which they manage to forge a mutual acceptance and functioning relationship - as indicative of internal conflicts within Jansson.

Whether that's true or not, it's a beautiful, immersive book. Every time I sat down to read it I felt transported to a timeless village, in the dark Scandinavian winter.

A little confused about this short book which is one of the Moomin stories that I didn't read as a child - but I think it was subsequently revised and published as Moominpapa's Memoirs? Anyway, I liked it in parts. Moominpapa, having reached the age of 40, and suffering from a cold, writes his memoirs for the edification of his family and friends. During the book, there are asides where we get the reactions of his son Moomintroll and his son's friends to whom he is reading each bit of the story. By the end of the book, a few mysteries are solved.

There are some places where I found it to drag a bit - I didn't find the ghost particularly funny, for example. The ending also makes no sense because why haven't certain characters' parents raised them if they are alive and well? And what happened to Hodgkins who was my favourite of the new characters introduced - I don't recall him being in any of the ones I've read? On the plus side, I loved the illustrations as always. So on balance, I rate this at 3 stars.

Although I came across the moomins as a child and read a couple of the books, this first in the series, in a recent English translation, was new to me. This presents the moomintroll world in a prototype form. The illustrations show them as less well rounded than their familiar later incarnations, and the Sniff character joins them for the first time but is unnamed, and is just 'the little animal' or similar throughout. There is also a nice dryad type character who bows out before the strory ends, and who I have not encountered in the others I've read. However, some of the background is sketched in, with mentions in passing of some of the weird characters that populate moomintroll world: Hemulens and Snufkins for example.

Where the book has weaknesses, they are in both characterisation and plot. Moomintroll and his mother are on a sometimes perilous quest, but their motive changes. They start off looking for somewhere to make a warm home to hibernate over winter, but along they way their journey turns into a search for Moominpapa who went off with the Hattenfatteners, another strange creature I'd previously encountered in other tales. He seems to have left their original home, behind the stove in a human home, for no really defined reason other than wanderlust.

The other problem is that the flood of the title is a bit of a damp squib when it finally happens. However, the illustrations which include sepia paintings as well as the usual line drawings make up for that, and the production of the editon by 'Sort ofBooks' is very nicely done, so overall I'm rating this at 4 stars.

Quite a sweet little book, told in the form of episodic tales, about the relationship between a grandmother and a 6-year-old granddaughter, and life on a small island, off the coast of Finland, in the summer. The characters of grandmother and granddaughter are apparently based upon the author and her niece.

The child's father is present, but he is mainly a background figure who deals with practicalities such as catching fish or mending things. Although it could be taking place during one summer, I don't think it is, because there is one episode in which they leave the island and do all the chores necessary for departure, but later return to carry on with cultivation of plants the father has had delivered.

One thing that was confusing in places were various references to going into town which did not appear to require a boat as if the town was on the island - it definitely wasn't. The stories have a rather disjointed nature, and characters are referenced who the reader often has no clue about. I also found the rather bratty child annoying, when she is acting out at various times, although there is some nice gentle character based humour from the grandmother. So overall, I would rate this at 3 stars.

This was a re-read of a childhood favourite so I have made allowances to the changes in myself rather than in the book in the years in-between reads. The story is pretty straightforward: Moomintroll and his friend Sniff keep seeing drawings of a star with a tail and they eventually set off on a raft to consult the astronomers in the high mountain peaks after finding out that a comet may be coming towards Earth. Along the way, they meet various interesting characters who join them and most of whom travel with them and eventually return home with their findings.

I love the illustrations in this book (also by the author) and the quirkiness of the various characters, especially Snufkin. I did though find it aimed at rather a younger audience than the age I remember being at the time of first reading (around 10), and a few things did jar with my ability to suspend my disbelief. One was the point that, although the moomins live near the sea and they travel upriver to mountains, the river is actually flowing from the sea to the mountains, since their raft drifts with the river current and the river eventually plummets down a deep hole. Another was who was leaving the various images of the comet everywhere - how did they know it was coming before it started becoming obvious? But there are some lovely imaginative sequences in the book, such as the sequence on the sea bed. So on the whole I rate it at 4 stars.

I liked some aspects of this novel, set in a village during a deep snowbound winter, probably in Finland. The main characters are a young woman Katri, her brother, Mats, and Anna, an older woman who is an artist. When the story opens, Katri is scheming how to gain access to the 'rabbit house' that belongs to Anna, and thereby to gain sufficient money to be able to have a boat built from plans drawn up by Mats. Her brother is quite 'simple' but a genius with boats, it seems. Katri herself is extremely good with figures and organisation, and many villagers come to her for advice on financial matters, while disliking her cold, calculating and rude attitude. Katri is rather a sociopathic person, and sees the bad in everyone. Anna, by contrast, is naively trusting and it is this which Katri plays on.

As the story progresses, the two women influence each other, with Anna becoming suspicious and cynical, and Katri confused. Anna has agreed to various book and merchandise deals, based upon the cute rabbits which populate her picture books for children: it is clear that the painting of the 'ground' (the forest floor) in minute detail is what she excels at and loves, but she has somehow been persuaded to add fluffy bunnies with flowers in their fur, and the merchandising in particular revolves around these. Katri persuades her over time that she has been 'cheated' by these companies, and also by everyone else around her, including the shopkeeper who supplies her with groceries. (The shopkeeper probably is slightly crooked, and there is a hint that he has made an unwelcome advance to Katri.) Anna is beset by correspondence, including fan mail from children, but Katri gradually brings Anna to view the letters from children as greedy and imposing. However, Katri loses her singlemindedness and tries to backtrack on some of the negative things she has told other people. Symbolically, she also starts to lose her 'wolfish' character with the changes to her guard dog, never named, thanks to Anna's influence on the animal.

The cold and snow is almost another character in this story and forms an effective backdrop for the action.

By another writer, the tension between the main characters would have built to some crescendo of destruction, but instead it sort of peters out although there is a twist involving Anna's character at the end though I did wonder how she would earn a living if the bunnies were excluded. So all in all, I liked the story and am rating it at 3 stars.

This was another re-read of a childhood favourite, and I found this one slightly more successful than 'Comet in Moominland' as the level of storytelling is more complex and can be enjoyed by adults.

It is spring in Moomin valley and the inhabitants of the Moomin house, which include long-term guests such as the Muskrat, Snufkin and the Hemulen, are waking from their winter hibernation. Before long, Moomin and his friends find a strange hat which sets off a sequence of events that connect the various chapters, which otherwise would be mostly self-contained short stories.

I loved this quirky sequence of tales, with the various fantasy elements including the darker ones of the hat's owner and the strange and threatening creature which arrives later on, in pursuit of two little creatures who have arrived with a suitcase. Moominmamma is completely unflappable, and always dependable, and Moominpappa, though more self absorbed with his memoirs and his fishing, does occasionally prove useful. The various characters are all delineated with their various quirks, and the author's powers of invention are inexhaustible, producing the strange Hattifatteners and other weird creatures. The only slight irritation is the rather stereotyped views of girls, but I will make allowances for that, given the publication date. So I rate this volume as a 5 star read.

There is a strong possibility that if this collection had been by anyone else, I might have rated it higher, but because it was by Jansson, who is one of my favorite authors, I just WANTED TO LOVE IT MORE.

Short-story collections are often hit-or-miss for me. There were stories here that I loved, but there were also a few that fell flat for me.

I mean, this is definitely me wringing my hands over rating this ONLY four stars instead of five, which is NOT A BAD rating. I just wasn't as incandescently in love with this as I wanted to me. A lot of not terribly likable characters with not quite enough charm to balance it out, I think.

Like others have said, not the greatest Moomins thing but an enjoyable enough kids fantasy adventure thing. Moominmama is great and the illustrations are charming as ever