BOOK: Fair Play by Tove Jansson
Although she's best known for the Moomin books, Tove Jansson also wrote a wide variety of other books and short stories which are well worth reading. My pick for today is Fair Play, published in 1989: a novel about two older women and the life they've built together.
It's a slim volume, and very quiet, composed of little free-standing chapters which are more or less short stories in their own right but which add up to a really interesting whole. The language is spare and exact and Jansson's eye for character and mood is wonderful. I like what this book has to say about relationships, and what it has to say about creativity, and I love how it's written. I will note that it's very understated as queer literature, heavy on implication and light on explicit statements, but I've never been able to bring myself to mind.
(As a sneaky bonus: a rather heavier companion to this piece might be Boel Westin's biography of Tove Jansson, recently translated into English as Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. It's a pretty big volume, and quite lit-focused - Westin is a professor of literature at Stockholm University. It's not exactly light reading, but worth it. While I can't speak for the translation, reading it in Swedish made me very happy. In a lot of ways you'll find a mirror to the shape of the characters' lives in Fair Play in here, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that Fair Play is straight-up autobiography.)
It's a slim volume, and very quiet, composed of little free-standing chapters which are more or less short stories in their own right but which add up to a really interesting whole. The language is spare and exact and Jansson's eye for character and mood is wonderful. I like what this book has to say about relationships, and what it has to say about creativity, and I love how it's written. I will note that it's very understated as queer literature, heavy on implication and light on explicit statements, but I've never been able to bring myself to mind.
(As a sneaky bonus: a rather heavier companion to this piece might be Boel Westin's biography of Tove Jansson, recently translated into English as Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words. It's a pretty big volume, and quite lit-focused - Westin is a professor of literature at Stockholm University. It's not exactly light reading, but worth it. While I can't speak for the translation, reading it in Swedish made me very happy. In a lot of ways you'll find a mirror to the shape of the characters' lives in Fair Play in here, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that Fair Play is straight-up autobiography.)