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Tove Jansson and the Postwar World

James Lovegrove reviews Tove Jansson, Life, Art, Words by Boel Westin, the first authorised biography of artist and writer, and Jansson’s own childhood memoir, Sculptor’s Daughter, first published in 1968 and now available in English for the first time, for The Financial Times:

The stories have… exerted an influence on many modern writers, for adults as well as children. Ali Smith, Jeanette Winterson and Maggie O’Farrell are self-professed Moomin fans. Philip Pullman has called Jansson a “genius”, while Frank Cottrell Boyce drew important life lessons from the Moomins at an impressionable age. “Jansson valorised coffee and pancakes and reticence and the mystery of others,” he wrote in a review of Moomin picture book The Dangerous Journey. “But more to the point she showed me how it might be just those small pleasures that keep us together when we start to grow apart.”

The young Boyce, however, was also drawn to the Moomins because he sensed an existential darkness at the heart of the books. Jansson wrote in the dominant mode of 20th-century children’s literature, fantasy, but hers was fantasy shot through with a quiet anguish. Apocalypse through natural disaster – flood, volcano, potentially earth-shattering comet – looms in the background of her stories. Characters are solitary, lonely, sometimes on the brink of despair, and acknowledge the fragility of things with an accommodating liberal shrug.

Kate Kellaway also reviews both books for The Observer:

[T]he greatest revelation, reading the memoir, is that what drove Jansson’s imagination was fear. This is a book of perils. The dark is a faceless monster with “distinct hands”. Snow is like “grey hands with a hundred fingers”. An eiderdown behaves like a fist. Ice breathes. Snakes in the carpet are almost real. The words “safety” and “dangerous” repeat themselves. The external world was always an internal landscape for Jansson. Reading her is like a return to childhood: things happen that are inexplicable when adults are in charge. It’s unwise to pretend to know what is coming next. Life, she indicates, is best approached gingerly, with respectful regard.

One Comment

  1. My copy of the biography is on my desk in front of me – very excited to read, since Jansson is one of my all-time favourite writers!

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