I found this book in a display in my local library, thought I had heard of the author before (she wrote the Moomin books, which I have never read but ordered the first two for my son after reading the first few stories in this book) and saw that Ali Smith had written the introduction.
I am so glad I picked up this book. The stories in it range from quietly disturbing to life-affirming and offer fascinating insights about what it would be like to live on a deserted island in Scandinavia. There is such variety here and I enjoyed all of them. Jansson’s story Snow has all the claustrophobia of The Yellow Wallpaper:
“Now I could hear the snow. It was falling all the time, whispering and rustling to itself and in one corner it had crept onto the floor.”
The young girl is trapped in a strange house with the snow relentlessly falling, but eventually she and her mother are snowed in and she feels “absolutely safe and protected” so that when they finally hear the sound of shovels trying to dig them out and see light from outside, “the lamps were burning as if at a funeral.”
Jansson often uses a child narrator, but later in the book the stories are told from the point of a much older woman. The Squirrel was one of my favourites – a woman living alone on an island notices that a squirrel has washed up on the shore near her house, carried on a piece of wood from another island. Through her observations we find out “she hadn’t seen a living thing for a long time” and as the story goes on and her relationship with the squirrel changes, we find out just how lonely she is. It is one of the best stories I have ever read and, like the narrator, by the end of the story I was left “not quite sure whether or not everything had now utterly changed.”
These were some of the best stories I have ever read, and I will certainly be reading Jansson’s other fiction for adults as well as The Moomins when they are unwrapped later this week!
A Literary Re-Education 