by Tove Jansson, Thomas Teal, Ali Smith
My cousin, Diane, is always posting things about Moomins on FaceBook. It seems Moomins are some kind of mythical/cartoon creatures beloved by Finnish people. I have a vague feeling that Diane has a kid living in Finland, or perhaps he just works for a Finnish company. Anyway, I thought to read about...
A hard-edged young woman on the fringes of society decides she wants what a local children’s book illustrator (a vague, reclusive and clueless woman) has, and sets out to get it according to her own peculiar moral code. Over the course of a long Finnish winter, both characters use each other, take f...
Jansson's prose is magisterial, as cold and icy as the winter setting; the pace is also ingenious which mimics the slow melting of the ice as the winter transitions into spring. The psychological depth of the characters is very nuanced and potent here, and the dialogue is brilliantly handled and all...
I picked this up because I love Moomin, and I thought that the cover was beautiful.And because, I walked into Joseph Fox Booksellers. A small bookstore where you can never buy less than four books at a time because they have such a good stock. Furthermore, you've left another twenty or so behind t...
Review to come (I need to think about it a bit)
My first encounter with Tove Jansson's adult fiction and not the last one if I can help it. I think I'm going to have to take a while to recover first, though.The True Deceiver is chilling in more than one sense of the word. The claustrophobic air of a village buried in snow, described in Jansson's ...
this is not a peppy book. there is some small joy, and moreover, a terrible beauty in the prose, and setting. quietly dark, spare, and poetic, the true deceiver manages to be blunt and subtle, transparent and opaque, all at the same time. it's not pat, and when it ended it left me uncomfortable, and...
Winter settles over the Swedish fishing village of Västerby. Katri offers to run errands for the ageing artist who lives on the outskirts. But what does this strange young woman want in return from Anna Aemelin?Indira Varma reads from the novel by Tove Jansson. Abridged by Jeremy Osborne.On her very...
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