Happy Holidays! and reviewing A Winter Book, by Tove Jansson
If you don't celebrate religious holidays, this seasonal collection might be for you!
Good Morning! It’s Christmas!
My partner said she doesn’t think anyone wants to hear from me today, but I decided to ignore her advice and write a seasonal newsletter for all you heathens and non-christians out there, who might indeed want to waste their time on Substack while everyone else is busy. But those who do celebrate are also welcome to read this, maybe on a little break from your families, pretending to answer an important work email or hiding in a closet. Not that I would know anything about that.
I do celebrate Christmas with family and friends, but didn’t always. As a devout atheist, I refused to give into the tensions and pressures of Christmas for a while in my teens and early twenties. It took some growing up (and letting go of the expectation that Christmas had to be perfect) to be able to enjoy quality time with a handful of my favourite people, family, friends, and friends of the family—without having it be very religious at all. At this point, we don’t even get a tree. It’s just a lovely big dinner, some homemade biscuits, and I force everyone to watch Love Actually for the umpteenth time (a tradition I shall never neglect).
For this week’s review, I wanted a book that connects with the cold and clarity of winter, with quiescence and solitude, capturing the atmosphere that I so cherish about the holidays. Despite my one-day Christmas celebration habit, I love to take the whole week off and be still. It seems I can only really achieve this sense of pause in the days between Christmas and New Years; What does that say about the interplay between capitalism and Christianity? Phew.
Review: A Winter Book, by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson, inventor of the Moomins, also wrote fiction for adults, it turns out. In my queer fiction book club, we recently read a posthumously published collection of her work, with excerpts from several of her novels and other writing: A Winter Book, translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff, and Kingsley Hart. Some readers in the book club read the German version of the collection, as it was easier to get a hold of, but it turns out: the books were completely different! The stories had some overlap, but many of them were switched out for entirely different ones. What an unusual way to translate a collection! This is just to say: if you read this review and ask yourself if we’ve read the same book, the answer might be no.
It was an interesting book club, first having to establish what stories we had all read and which ones only half the group had. We were outraged, to say the least. Still, the themes remained very similar, and we had a good time regardless. I thank all book club attendees for their thoughts and the discussion, which feed into this review.
A Winter Book, with a foreword by Ali Smith, collects fictional stories that often read like non-fiction. There is Travelling Light, the story of a person who packs their things to embark on a never-ending journey, away from everyone and everything they know, which I had expected to be somewhat autobiographical (or might it be a metaphor for Jansson’s queerness?), only to realise that person is a man. He is forced to share his cabin with another man, who turns out to want to spend all their time on the ship together, robbing the first man of his desired solitude. In attempts to reclaim his alone time, the man announces that he needs some fresh air, to which the second man responds by prying open the window (remember, they are on a ship!) and letting the sea spray into their cabin. Jansson’s writing is obscurely funny, always surprising and her voice is unique. Take for example The Squirrel, the story of a woman and a squirrel. The woman lives on an island, but she is the island’s only inhabitant. Until one day, a squirrel floats by on a piece of driftwood and enters her sacred space. From this moment on, the squirrel is her enemy—but it is also her only companion. She vows to feed it but never otherwise engage with it, so as not to begin to like it. And so, they coexist for a while, until unexpectedly the squirrel disappears and the woman is alone again, left to structure her days through drinks of wine. These stories are part of the third part of the collection, which centred adult perspectives, while the first two sections collected stories from a child’s view. In all of them, rich descriptions of nature abound, and Jansson’s love of the sea weaves through every single one of the stories. In The Boat and Me, a twelve-year-old child is given a boat and takes off to sail along the islands off the coast of Finland by herself. She simply wants to be in the sea to see the land from which she looks at the sea. And she wants to do this by herself! Loneliness and solitude, and indeed their relation to one another, are central themes of this collection. Jansson’s characters crave solitude but cannot bear the loneliness, both children and adults.
Jansson writes of conflicting desires, of jealousy, of nature, and of art. As my book club co-host aptly summarised, the main question of this collection and of Jansson’s writing is: what is art? Jansson looks to her parent’s art; her Dad the sculptor and her mother the designer are blue prints to what art and artists could be, contrasted with, for example, The Spinster Who Had An Idea. The spinster, here, can neither respect the artists’ space and time nor their craft, and in the end creates her own artworks from glossy magazine cutouts, which the child knows are hardly art, but is impressed with nonetheless.
Jansson’s writing is really wonderful, her perspective on human (and non-human) relations, on art, and on nature are a blessing. I have seldom enjoyed a piece of writing so thoroughly when there was no plot to keep me interested. Surely, the works from which these excerpts were pulled do have great plots, but this collection, seemingly rather random, considering how they exchanged the stories for the German edition, is a pleasure to read for the joys of language. The translations are gorgeous and Jansson’s dry humour is a pure delight.
Thanks for reading, see you next time!