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| A winter's tale Celebrated for the Moomins, Finnish novelist Tove Jansson also wrote many books for adults. Being able to read one of her best novels in English for the first time is like discovering buried treasureIn 1962 Tove Jansson published a story for children called "The Spring Tune", featuring Snufkin, the peripatetic musician of the Moomin stories. "'It's the right evening for a tune,' Snufkin thought. 'A new tune, one part expectation, two parts sadness and, for the rest, just the great delight of walking alone and liking it.'" As he settles down to compose, he is disturbed by a small creature, a "creep", which rustles out of the undergrowth, declares its admiration for the famous Snufkin, asks him a lot of questions, and demands attention and comfort.Meanwhile, the tune, which until then had been forming itself out of the noises of forest and brook and the slow revelations of the season, disappears. Snufkin has to wait for it to come back. Never underestimate Jansson, who never ever underestimates her reader. This story for eight-year-olds is a sharply pertinent discourse on the relationships between art, nature, fame and identity, a discussion of the place and role of the artist and of the mysterious sources of creativity.It could be said that everything she wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature.Tove Jansson was born an artistic child of bohemian Finnish artists. Her mother, Signe Hammarsten, was one of Finland's best-known artists, designers and book illustrators; her father, Viktor Jansson, was a celebrated sculptor. Jansson herself became well known in her 30s for her Moomin tales and illustrations, which eventually made her world-famous. Because she was and is so recognised for her children's literature, her adult fiction, which she began writing in her early 50s (she died in 2001, aged 86) has tended to be overlooked, but in her last three decades the 11 books she wrote were all for adults. The UK republication of The Summer Book (1972) in 2003, followed by a selection of her short stories, The Winter Book, in 2006, and the first publication in English of her final novel, Fair Play, in 2007, has been revelatory for her English-speaking readership. That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure, especially when the translator is as well suited to her resonant, minimal style as Thomas Teal (who was also the original English translator of The Summer Book in the 1970s). The True Deceiver is another fortunate first, and it is an unassuming, unexpected, powerful piece of work.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?A novel about truth, deception, self-deception and the honest uses of fiction, The True Deceiver is almost deadpan in its clarity and seeming simplicity, and is at heart one of her most mysterious and subtle works. First published in 1982, it was her third novel specifically for adults. Her biographer, Boel Westin, records that she had great difficulty with it. "Its unsparing view of life," Westin comments, "is, in fact, one of the characteristics of her adult books." Jansson herself commented on how "stubbornly, labororiously" she had worked on it. There's no doubting the oppressiveness of the conditions under which her characters have to live and work. "The winds had risen. It pressed snow against the windows with a powerful whispering that had followed the people of the village for a long, long time. Between squalls there was silence."It begins with the disarming simplicity that characterises the whole novel. "It was an ordinary dark winter morning, and snow was still falling. No window in the village showed a light." It's a book about a dark place, where snow creates a kind of claustrophobia, where "paths filled with snow as quickly as they were shovelled out", and where "people woke up late because there was no longer any morning". By paragraph two the censoriousness of small community life has set in. "It's still snowing and there she goes again," the unnamed narrator comments about Katri. Katri and her brother, Mats, are clearly not liked in the village. He's too "simple" and her eyes are the wrong colour. Worse, they aren't properly "local".The novel's voice is flat and exact, a kind of reportage, which shifts, seamlessly and suddenly, into Katri's own voice, making it unclear who the first narrator is and unsettling all notions of objectivity. By the end of the chapter, we know that this book, concerned with locality, money, winter, wildness, social unacceptability and power, will also be about whether there's such a thing as objectivity. Objectivity and truth are Katri's obsessions. Her refusal of social niceties, her honesty, her silences and her bluntness have made the villagers uncomfortable and deeply hostile towards her, but made her peculiarly trusted and given her a great deal of power in the community.Is this also going to be a book about class and hierarchy? Within five short pages, Katri is standing looking at the local big house, which surreally resembles a giant rabbit's face, and is owned by an artist, Anna Aemelin, who lives there "all by herself, alone with her money". Her motives are clear: she and Mats are going to move into that house. The book begins on the projected standoff, dog versus rabbit, "the real story of Anna and Katri" – in other words, the standoff of "real" versus "story". At its heart is a battle that promises to be savage.Katri wants an obliterating purity – "I wish the whole village could be covered and erased and finally be clean" – she is a personification of wintriness. Her opponent, Anna Aemelin, has no foothold on winter and is a being particularly associated with spring. "It was winter, and she never worked until the first bare earth began to show." Her art is dependent on the spring, and it almost feels, sometimes, as though the spring may be dependent upon her art. She's also a person practically disconnected from the village, an ageing child living in a veritable museum to her parents, and a famous artist, who draws forest floor pictures known the world over for their authenticity, then takes these "implacably naturalistic" pictures and adds lots of very unnaturalistic flowery rabbits, for which she is equally world-renowned, especially among small children. Who is the true deceiver here? And how does deception relate to truth? The novel, with its village full of mundane cheats and charlatans, is a philosophical confrontation between Katri's cynicism and Anna's aesthetic sensibility. Is there such a thing as kindness? Or is there only "the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want, maybe an advantage or not even that, mostly just because it's the way it's done, being as agreeable as possible and getting off the hook"? What are flowery rabbits (or, it might be added, Moomins) actually for? Or is it Anna who's right, that the paying of attention to people's needs, though "a pretty rare thing," is a natural and uncynical part of being human? She knows what is expected of her, and she acts on it, just as she knows her own lie and finds it tiresome. But "Things are not always that simple." Katri, on the other hand, knows exactly what "simple" means. She has seen and destroyed the snow figures the village children have made in spiteful likeness of her and her "simple" brother.Jansson's own texts are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like ice over a lake, allows you rare access to something a lot riskier and more profound. "Rarely do books give as clear an impression as yours that they have simply matured to the point of inevitability," Jansson's editor at Bonnier, her Swedish publisher, wrote to her when she was struggling with difficult work; in many ways, The True Deceiver is a book about artistic maturation as well as human coming of age.Is this an autobiographical portrait? Jansson herself commented, at the time of The True Deceiver's first publication in Swedish: "Every serious book is a kind of self-portrait." This overexcited reviewers, who decided to see the book, a subtle and calibrated work, in the simplified and reductive terms which "autobiographical" almost always means. But the hopelessly innocent Anna Aemelin, totally at a loss with the commercial spinoffs from her flowery rabbits, is laughably far from the sharp-eyed Jansson, who could write so acridly and merrily (as she did in her short story "Messages") about the flurry of requests that came in from companies and individuals concerning her "product". Jansson knew the responsibility and surreality of her position, which could result in a request like the one from a company that wanted to use her tiny anarchist figure, little My, on "a discreet new mini sanitary towel" (she said a discreet no) directly alongside one from a reader asking for a drawing of Snufkin "that I can have tattooed on my arm as a symbol of freedom".One of its most haunting moments is when Anna, looking through reams of her parents' old correspondence, trying to find a portrait of herself as a girl, discovers that she was hardly there. She realises that she became "a painter of the ground" only after both her parents were dead and buried in it. It is a deeply poetic work, and such images, like that of the dog that finally runs mad, or the pile of rubbish left on the surface of the frozen lake – all the piled-up ephemera of Anna Aemelin's life, which will sink when the spring comes and the ice melts – are pervasive. On the surface, this is very much a book about how to survive, as well as how to deal with what surfaces in lives, over time.The True Deceiver is the opposite of charming – and deliberately so. But this novel's presentation of itself as a tough and unresolving work is a kind of deception in itself. "There are no real answers to what is right and what is wrong," Boel Westin concludes. That's one possible reading of the novel. But look at its deep understanding of human surreality and sadness, and at Jansson's vision of the epic qualities inherent in all small things. Though meticulous in its rejection of sentimentality, it demonstrates, alongside all the cruelty, a wealth of small, real acts of kindness. By the end, its two fixed protagonists, Anna and Katri – the two opposite poles of its "real story" – have learned to shift position. This change doesn't come without fracture – ice will break in the melt. All the same, at the end of this mysterious novel, both women have changed their old tunes for new. It is one of Jansson's most deceptively quiet, most astonishing compositions.FictionAli Smithguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Al Roker's new book: This time, the TV weatherman did it 'Today' regular Al Roker writes his first murder mystery and it has a familiar setting rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Publishers Delay E-Book Releases Publishers have been debating the timing of e-books in part as a way to protest the low prices that online retailers are offering on e-book versions of new releases and best sellers. feeds.nytimes.com |
Chinese author sues Google A Chinese novelist is suing Google Inc. for scanning her latest book and making it available for free in its online library. cbc.ca |
City Boy and Chaos by Edmund White Fictionalised elements lighten Edmund White's prose, says Jay PariniEdmund White is a pervasively intelligent writer who has ventured into many genres, although autobiography lies at the heart of his work. A Boy's Own Story (1982) remains his most widely known book, one that tracks the emotional life of a sensitive Midwestern boy as he stumbles towards his gay identity. It forms part of a trilogy that includes The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988) and The Farewell Symphony (1997). Each of these novels has the feel of a memoir, and each is fiercely grafted to a particular era – the closeted 1950s, the wild era of gay liberation in the 70s, and the dismal 80s, when Aids first swept through the gay community, leaving chaos in its wake.White has written biographies – of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud – and novels that venture, often with jaw-dropping brilliance, into the realm of biography, such as Fanny (which styled itself a "discovered" bioÂgraphy of Fanny Wright, an early American feminist, by another Fanny, mother of Anthony Trollope) or Hotel de Dream, centred on the life of Stephen Crane. Instinct guides him, almost compulsively, towards narratives that, in one way or another, summon a life – his own or its refraction in another life.In My Lives: An Autobiography (2005), White dug into his primary material with clinical savagery, examining his life not in chronological terms but by subjects, such as "My Shrinks", "My Hustlers" and so on. He left few personal stones unturned as he gleefully revealed the maggots beneath them. With City Boy, his latest memoir (one has to assume that more will be forthcoming), he takes us into the 1960s and 70s, describing Manhattan life in those tumultuous decades with a compulsive, self-revelatory energy.This is the story of gay liberation. It's also the story of sexuality run amok, detached from love, caught in its own whirligig of mindless sensual motion, as when White recalls: "I would swoop down on men of all ages and shapes, usually late at night. Not that there was much happiness in a life of pleasure. Once I was in the backs of trucks or in the ruined piers along the Hudson, I simply couldn't make myself go home. Even after a satisfying encounter with one man or 10 I still wanted to hang around to see what the next 10 minutes would bring."City Boy describes a man's own story: how he arrived in New York from the Midwest in 1962, got a hack's job at Time-Life Books, and set off on foot to cruise the streets. Although White has lived abroad for extended periods, New York has always been home, and this was never more true than in the 70s, when he found himself in a circle of prominent writers, critics and painters. He seems to have met everybody worth meeting: Truman Capote, John Ashbery, Susan Sontag, James Merrill, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jasper Johns – these pages are studded with bold-face names. As would anyone, White felt unsure of himself among these grandees: "I was the youngest and least well-known person at the table, not silent but certainly mostly a listener. I longed for literary celebrity even as I saw with my own eyes how little happiness it brought."In New York, White not only encountered (and inhabited) the labyrinthine gay world but discovered a rich vein for writing. "A straight writer," he muses, "condemned to show nothing but marriage, divorce, and childbirth, might need a new formal approach or an exotic use of language. But a gay writer, free to record for the first time so many vivid and previously uncharted experiences, needed no tricks." (The shades of Nabokov, Updike and Roth seem to hover barely out of sight here.)I generally prefer White in fictional mode, where he is more of a stylist than in his nonfiction. For instance, he covers much of the same autobiographical ground more gracefully in The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, the latter a haunting novel that alludes to Haydn's famous symphony where the musicians leave the stage one by one until only a single violinist is left. That conceit set the Aids crisis in memorable relief.Chaos consists of its title novella plus five stories, all of which deal with aspects of gay life. The novella is compelling if somewhat chaotic, offering a portrait of the artist in late middle age. Jack is a novelist of considerable fame (but inconsistent royalties) who falls in love (or something like that) with Seth, a young and sexy ex-Mormon whom he meets online. Their sex is largely hydraulic, and poor Jack has to pay for every one of the young man's multiple orgasms. Described in discomforting detail, Jack's erotic life is often funny, as in this opening flashback to a tryst: "Jack had had sciatica once when he'd laid flat on the bed and a hefty man had sat on his dick and Jack had made little plunges up into all this wet, soft heaviness – for the next week he'd scarcely been able to walk, so painful was his lower back."There is a piecemeal quality to "chaos", as if it has too many strands not quite woven. On the other hand, life is like this – chaotic – and the novella frames this randomness with eerie precision, concluding with a fierce email from Seth to Jack, where Seth examines his former lover with a cruel remorselessness. He writes: "You say your life is chaotic but you keep turning it out." Indeed, Jack does turn it out – book Âafter book. And so does Edmund White.Perhaps the finest thing in this collection is "Recorded Time", a first-person tale in which a mature man recalls his life at the age of 13, in 1953: "My loneliness was ready to Âsizzle and explode as it leapt from one electrode to another: high-voltage emptiness." The writing continues at this lyric pitch, a remarkably sustained evocation of an era, a state of mind. The boy has a strong thirst for culture, and listens repeatedly to old vinyl recordings of operas. His indulgent mother once drove him to a distant village to a screening of George Cukor's classic film Camille (1936), starring Greta Garbo. He was thrilled by the film, and the mood of ecstasy lived on as he waited for the train home beside a sailor who played a mouth-harp: "The night was conspiring graciously to help me – the deserted, dripping village with the gas lamps and cobblestones, the sailor with the mouth-harp, even the sight of forsythia blazing in the dark on the hillside next to the station." Moments such as these place this story among my favourites in White's whole vast and accomplished body of work.Jay Parini's The Last Station is published by Canongate.Jay Pariniguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |