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Tag: tove jansson

Tove Jansson: Love, War and the Moomins

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At BBC News, Mark Bosworth looks at the life of artist and writer Tove Jansson:

Tove Jansson grew up in an artistic household in Helsinki. Her father, a Swedish-speaking Finn, was a sculptor, her Swedish mother an illustrator.

While her mother worked, Tove would sit by her side drawing her own pictures. She soon added words to the images. Her first book—Sara and Pelle and the Octopuses of the Water Sprite—was published when she was just 13.

She later said that she had drawn the first Moomin after arguing with one of her brothers about the philosopher Immanuel Kant. She sketched “the ugliest creature imaginable” on the toilet wall and wrote under it “Kant”. It was this ugly animal, or a plumper and friendlier version of it, that later brought her worldwide fame.

Jansson studied art in Stockholm and Helsinki, then in Paris and Rome, returning to Helsinki just before the start of World War Two.

“The war had a great effect on Tove and her family. One of her brothers, Per Olov, was in the war. They didn’t know where he was, if he was safe, and if he was coming back,” says Boel Westin, a friend of Jansson’s for 20 years and a Professor of Literature at Stockholm University.

Jansson’s first Moomin book—The Moomins and the Great Flood—was published in 1945, at the end of this difficult and nerve-wracking period, with Comet in Moominland following soon afterwards.

“Tove’s anxiety and grief are embedded in the first two books. She was depressed during the war and this is mirrored in those books because they are about catastrophes,” says Westin.

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Tove Jansson: The Hand That Made the Moomins

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At The New Yorker, James Guida reviews Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words: The Authorized Biography by Boel Westin, and Jansson’s memoir of childhood Sculptor’s Daughter (both published by Sort of Books):

Writing the Moomins afforded an escape at war’s end. After a quiet start, the series took off in the fifties, bringing welcome financial stability—but the success also represented a kind of detour. Jansson’s ambitions for painting never left her. Now free time was scarce, thanks to an unceasing flow of fan mail, the minutiae of merchandising, processions of visitors, and, until Lars, one of her brothers, took over, the arduous demands of the comic strip. For a while, there was no pleasure to be found in working. Thankfully, social media didn’t exist yet: “I could vomit over Moomintroll,” she wrote. “I shall never again be able to write about those happy idiots who forgive one another and never realize they’re being fooled.”

As with someone like Kafka, it is hard to know how literally to take Jansson’s obstacles. To some degree, her entrapment was avoidable: to be so involved in the products, to answer every letter, seem Moominish ideas—either that or, for a person who so prized being left free and alone, they’re plain masochistic. Were an analogous scenario to occur in the books, the hassles would be washed away by flood, to be followed by a celebratory picnic. As it was, Jansson believed that her nature didn’t give her a choice.

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On related note, Montreal’s Drawn Quarterly have just published two new paperback books in their lovely series of classic Moomin comic strips reworked in full colour, Moomin and the Golden Tail and Moomin’s Desert Island (pictured above).

(NB: the Moomin storybooks, published by FSG, and the Moomin comic books, published by D+Q, are distributed by my employer Raincoast Books. Sorry I seem to be doing this so much lately!)

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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.

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Midweek Miscellany

Look Closer — Adrian Tomine talks about moving to New York, and his new book of drawings with The New Yorker:

I’m not one of those artists with an incredible imagination who can just make things up out of nothing, and I’m not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life, and just try to look at things a little more closely. And even though I’ve lived in New York for eight years now, I still feel like a recent transplant, and I think that’s a big influence on how I see and draw the city.

Invisible — Jeanette Winterson on Tove Jansson and the Moomins, for The Telegraph:

I keep the Moomin books in my study and if I am tinkering about preparing for work I will often open one at random and read a page – they are funny and subversive, (Hemulens of either gender only wear dresses). And playful. Whatever happened to playfulness? Why, as adults, is serious/superficial the boring binary of our lives?… Tove Jansson believed in happy endings… Not the Disney kind but more solid and ambiguous, which is a paradox, but more truthful than black-and-white solutions. Ever-after is what is invisible on the next page.

Approaching Zero — Michael Faber reviews How Music Works by David Byrne, for The Guardian:

Everyone knows that the music industry is in terminal decline. Unlike many doomsayers, however, Byrne feels the changed landscape is good for musicians. Even 20 years ago, any artist wishing to make a record needed a huge sum of money to pay for studio time (and thus needed a large corporation to loan it to him). A lucky few shifted the millions of units necessary to repay the industry’s investment, but the majority got hopelessly into debt. Nowadays, recording costs are “approaching zero”. Distribution costs in the digital era are also negligible compared to the days of physical warehousing. As long as artists can find ways of holding on to a fair percentage of their income (an impossible challenge in the heyday of the record companies), even modest sales can sustain a career. Indeed, says Byrne, “there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience.”

And finally…

A Short Lesson in Perspective — A fantastic essay by Linds Redding. First published in March of this year, this seems to have taken on a life of its own. If you work in a ‘creative industry’ and haven’t read it yet, make sure you read the whole thing:

The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It’s a need that has to be filled. I’ve barely ‘worked’ in any meaningful way for half a year, but every day I find myself driven to ‘make’ something. Take photographs. Draw. Write. Make bad music. It’s just an itch than needs to be scratched. Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.

 

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Something for the Weekend

Jason’s cover drawing for his new book Athos in America (above).

Nordic Provenance — A lovely essay by Matthew Battles on writer and cartoonist Tove Jansson, creator of the Moomintrolls and author of brilliant novels such as The True Deceiver and The Summer Book:

The trolls, singers, and creeps in the Moomin books have about them all of the absurd rigor of Roald Dahl’s characters — only the hatred goes missing. In place of dread, Jansson’s characters struggle with vague longings, forever discovering that their worst enemies are not tempests or monsters or maiden aunts, but themselves. While they’re quite capable of getting up to mischief and putting themselves into dire circumstances, they see their way through troubles not by means of sentimentality but with a kind of philosophically playful savoir-faire.

The Death of a Plaything — Brian Dillon reviews Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things  by Steven Connor for The Guardian:

Though we know, even if vaguely, how an AA battery works, that it has a functional interior, it nonetheless seems a thing solid and uniform to the core, stonelike in its simplicity and selfsameness. We appear to learn from things not just about the practicalities of our local material world, but about the expanding world of metaphor: “A teacup asks to be picked up by the handle; a brandy glass invites us to cradle it, tender as a dove, from underneath.” Nor are the desires we bring to things entirely devotional or affectionate; in an echo of Baudelaire’s essay on toys – the poet’s immediate desire as a boy was to smash a toy and find its soul – Connor conjectures: “Perhaps all play has at its horizon the death of the plaything.”

And let’s finish how we started with the back cover for Athos in America by Jason:

I feel like that some days…

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Monday Miscellany

Kitsune Noir Poster Club — Artists Frank Chimero, Mark Weaver, Jez Burrows, Cody Hoyt and Garrett Vander Leun reinterpret their favourite books as prints for Kitsune Noir . (Frank Chimero’s Slaughterhouse Five is pictured above).

And on the subject of posters…

Penguin US have made the jacket art from Graphic Classic Editions of Moby Dick and White Noise, designed by Tony Millionaire and Michael Cho respectively, available as posters.

From Trolls to Truth — Author Ursula K Le Guin reviews Tove Jansson’s The True Deceivers (available in the US from NYRB Books) for The Guardian:

On the patronising assumption that books for children are nice, ie morally bland and stylistically infantile, critics, reviewers and prize juries often dismiss those who write them as incapable of writing seriously for adults… Anyone familiar with Jansson knows it would be unwise to dismiss her or patronise her work on any grounds. Her books for children are complex, subtle, psychologically tricky, funny and unnerving; their morality, though never compromised, is never simple. Thus her transition to adult fiction involved no great change. Her everyday Swedes are quite as strange as trolls…

Quote/Unquote Bookends designed by Eric Janssen (via SwissMiss).

And lastly…

In my total blogging tardiness, Bookslut (inevitably) beat to the punch on this, but Simon Reynolds column on the music of the decade for The Guardian has so much resonance for books and the book industry:

“The fragmentation of rock/pop has been going on as long as I can remember, but it seemed to cross a threshold this decade. There was just so much music to be into and check out. No genres faded away, they all just carried on, pumping out product, proliferating offshoot sounds. Nor did musicians, seemingly, cease and desist as they grew older; those that didn’t die kept churning stuff out, jostling alongside younger artists thrusting forward to the light. It’s tempting to compare noughties music to a garden choked with weeds. Except it’s more like a flower bed choked with too many flowers, because so much of the output was good. The problem wasn’t just quantity, it was quantity x quality. Then there was the past too, available like never before, competing for our attention and affection. The cheapness of home studio and digital audio workstation recording, combined with the wealth of history that musicians can draw on and recombine, fuelled a mushrooming of quality music-making. But the result of all this overproduction was that “we” were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound.”

(Update: links to Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver added)

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Midweek Miscellany, November 18th, 2009

Lusting After Lustig — Designers Charles Brock and Tim Green share their collection at FaceOut Books.

While Amazon announced the Kindle will be available in Canada this week, The New York Times looks at reading on phones:

Many people who want to read electronic books are discovering that they can do so on the smartphones that are already in their pockets — bringing a whole new meaning to “phone book.” And they like that they can save the $250 to $350 that they would otherwise spend on yet another gadget.

No. Shit.

But, on the subject of e-books… Steve Haber, the president of Sony’s digital reading division, talks to TechFlash (via TeleRead).

A History of 16 Science Fiction Classics, Told In Book Covers at i09 (including the brilliant cover for A Clockwork Orange pictured above and yet more covers for 1984).

A Winter’s Tale — Ali Smith (The Accidental) on The True Deceiver by Finnish author Tove Jannson, creator of the Moomins:

If the Moomins are Jansson’s most celebrated legacy – a community of inventive, big-nosed, good-natured beings who survive, again and again, the storms and existentialism of a dark Scandinavian winter through simply being mild, kind, inclusive and philosophical – what will happen when a real community is put in its place? What will the outcome be when Jansson tackles, naturalistically, the life of a tiny hamlet in a dark, wintry landscape – and in a book so close to real local life that the original Swedish publication carried a disclaimer saying it was in no way based on any real place, nor its characters on anybody living?

You had me at “existentialism of a dark Scandinavian winter.”

The Genius — The awesome Tom Gauld interviewed at It’s Nice That. Limited edition letterpress prints of Tom’s Characters for an Epic Tale are available now.

And finally…

UnderConsideration’s Brand New looks at the new logo for The New York Public Library (via Daily Discoveries on Design)

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