3 - Fair Play (Tove Jansson)
I talked in my last post about Tove Jansson, and we're still on that topic. Fair Play is another of her later books, written in 1989, and in structure it's pretty similar to The Summer Book: a series of chapters which are all very self-contained and, I think, could very well be read individually, but which add up to something a little more than the sum of the parts. Like The Summer Book, Fair Play is also very much about relationships, with a sense of negotiation, but it's also far more about creativity. In Fair Play two women, a writer and an artist, have neighbouring studios on the top floor of a building in Helsinki and share time together on a little island in the gulf of Finland. They travel together, help and hinder each other in their work, and grow old together.
There is a level on which this book looks like autobiography: the main characters are not called Tove and Tuulikki, but they live in the places those two lived and do some of the things that they did, and it feels like a very quirky and surprising love story but a love story all the same, and one which feels as though it's probably very personal to the author (the book has been described as 'discreet', and maybe it's just about possible to read Mari and Jonna of the story as close friends - for this reason I refrain from adding a "c: lesbian" tag - but I would say they most definitely love each other in one sense or another).
It is also probably about as close to something I could consider romantic as any book I can think of off the top of my head has ever come, in that it's about a relationship based on deep love but also on respect, between two fiercely independent and often pretty crotchety women who still manage to fit into each other's lives and enhance them rather than limiting them. Of course they spend a lot of the book bickering, sometimes over apparently very insignificant things, but at the same time that only seems to underline the fact that they really, really trust each other (and doesn't the title seem so very relevant).
I kind of really dig that.
It's also a book about the relationship between art and life, experiencing things and capturing them as distinct actions, and creative space, and the relationship between artist and audience. It has a lot of interesting things to say on that front, and although one can never tell the truth of things like this one sometimes feels one is getting to look at Tove Jansson's view on life and work in a rather personal way.
I think that summarising it better than this is going to completely defy me, although I also think I've not done very well. Basically I think this is a really beautiful book concerned with the day-to-day and using it to pick up on ideas and themes rather than telling a narrative story with dramatic twists and turns.
Quotes:
Jonna had a happy habit of waking each morning as if to a new life, which stretched before her straight through to evening, clean, untouched, rarely shadowed by yesterday's worries and mistakes.
Another habit - or rather a gift, equally surprising - was her flood of unexpected and completely spontaneous ideas. Each lived and blossomed powerfully for a time until suddenly swept aside by a new impulse demanding its own undeniable space. Like now this business about the frames. Several months earlier, Jonna had decided that she wanted to frame some of the pictures by fellow artists that Mari had on her walls. She made some very pretty frames, but when they were ready to hang, Jonna was seized by new ideas and the pictures were left standing around on the floor.
"Just for now," Jonna said. "And for that matter, your whole collection needs rehanging, top to bottom. It's hopelessly conventional." Mari waited and said nothing. In fact, it felt good having things unfinished, a little as if she had just moved in and didn't have to take the thing so seriously.
and
"Did you admire [your father]?" Jonna asked.
"Naturally. But being a father wasn't easy for him."
"Not for mine, either," Jonna said. "It's funny. You actually know very little. We never asked, never tried to find out about the things that were really important. We didn't have time. What was it we were so busy with?"
Mari said, "Work probably. And falling in love - that takes an awful lot of time. But we still could have asked."
and
They never asked, "Were you able to work today?" Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected - those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.
There is a level on which this book looks like autobiography: the main characters are not called Tove and Tuulikki, but they live in the places those two lived and do some of the things that they did, and it feels like a very quirky and surprising love story but a love story all the same, and one which feels as though it's probably very personal to the author (the book has been described as 'discreet', and maybe it's just about possible to read Mari and Jonna of the story as close friends - for this reason I refrain from adding a "c: lesbian" tag - but I would say they most definitely love each other in one sense or another).
It is also probably about as close to something I could consider romantic as any book I can think of off the top of my head has ever come, in that it's about a relationship based on deep love but also on respect, between two fiercely independent and often pretty crotchety women who still manage to fit into each other's lives and enhance them rather than limiting them. Of course they spend a lot of the book bickering, sometimes over apparently very insignificant things, but at the same time that only seems to underline the fact that they really, really trust each other (and doesn't the title seem so very relevant).
I kind of really dig that.
It's also a book about the relationship between art and life, experiencing things and capturing them as distinct actions, and creative space, and the relationship between artist and audience. It has a lot of interesting things to say on that front, and although one can never tell the truth of things like this one sometimes feels one is getting to look at Tove Jansson's view on life and work in a rather personal way.
I think that summarising it better than this is going to completely defy me, although I also think I've not done very well. Basically I think this is a really beautiful book concerned with the day-to-day and using it to pick up on ideas and themes rather than telling a narrative story with dramatic twists and turns.
Quotes:
Jonna had a happy habit of waking each morning as if to a new life, which stretched before her straight through to evening, clean, untouched, rarely shadowed by yesterday's worries and mistakes.
Another habit - or rather a gift, equally surprising - was her flood of unexpected and completely spontaneous ideas. Each lived and blossomed powerfully for a time until suddenly swept aside by a new impulse demanding its own undeniable space. Like now this business about the frames. Several months earlier, Jonna had decided that she wanted to frame some of the pictures by fellow artists that Mari had on her walls. She made some very pretty frames, but when they were ready to hang, Jonna was seized by new ideas and the pictures were left standing around on the floor.
"Just for now," Jonna said. "And for that matter, your whole collection needs rehanging, top to bottom. It's hopelessly conventional." Mari waited and said nothing. In fact, it felt good having things unfinished, a little as if she had just moved in and didn't have to take the thing so seriously.
and
"Did you admire [your father]?" Jonna asked.
"Naturally. But being a father wasn't easy for him."
"Not for mine, either," Jonna said. "It's funny. You actually know very little. We never asked, never tried to find out about the things that were really important. We didn't have time. What was it we were so busy with?"
Mari said, "Work probably. And falling in love - that takes an awful lot of time. But we still could have asked."
and
They never asked, "Were you able to work today?" Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they'd gradually learned not to. There are empty spaces that must be respected - those often long periods when a person can't see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone.