A Winter Book: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson
Language: English
Pages: 2006
ISBN: 0954899520
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A book collection of some of Tove Jansson's best loved and most famous stories. Drawn from youth and older age, and spanning most of the twentieth century, this newly translated selection provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer's prose, scattered with insights and home truths.
by the shore I could see the iceberg. It was waiting for me and was shining just as beautifully but very faintly. It was lying there bumping against the rocks at the end of the point where it was deep, and there was deep black water and just the wrong distance between us. If it had been shorter I should have jumped over; if it had been a little longer I could have thought: ‘What a pity, no one can manage to get over that.’ Now I had to make up my mind. And that’s an awful thing to have to do.
Scandinavia and existentialism? Don’t expect the heavy old, dark old cliché. Though they never miss a challenge, though they’re very much about the dark, about risk, violence, jealousy, fears of abandonment, and though they never short-change a reader when it comes to the truth about anything unsettling, these stories are the opposite of heavy. Whether they’re about crabbed age or youth, they make an art of lightness, of letting go. Take one of the later stories, ‘The Squirrel’, where an old
milk into the tub so that she wouldn’t be able to see how awful the bottom looked. But she wasn’t interested in cement any longer. She had brought with her a whole suitcase full of her scrapbooks with glossy cut-out pictures and she put them to soak in the washtub. Then she peeled off all the glossy pictures and laid them out to dry on the slope. It was a beautiful calm Sunday and the slope was dotted with pictures of roses and angels by the thousand and she was happy again and carried them up to
should have considered the matter calmly and judiciously, so as to know whether a deliberate sharp heave would have been best or a cautious bit of patient coaxing. She listened to the whispering silence lying over the island, to the rain and the night. ‘It’s impossible,’ she thought. ‘I’ll never go there again.’ She went back to the cottage and undressed and lay down. This evening she didn’t light the lamp, a breach of ritual, but it showed the squirrel how little she cared what happened on the
contact with Pellinge on our newly installed radio telephone. I report, very calmly, that now it has happened and they think it’s you who have tumbled down the rock, but I say: ‘Victoria has been wrecked.’ They bestir themselves and set out at once to see what’s up, but can’t even contemplate putting to land in that heavy sea, so we just wave to one another. Nonetheless, they come out once again…” I interrupted her and said wasn’t it getting a bit too long, but Tooti went on: “They come out a