redshift

Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white. No matter where you go, the only thing you see is bones. Sometimes they are as thin as needles, extremely fine and delicate, and have to be handled with great care. Sometimes they are large, heavy thighbones, or a cage of ribs buried in the sand like the timbers of a shipwreck. Bones come in a thousand shapes and every one of them has its own structure.

Another of Tove Jansson’s books written for adults, The Summer Book is a gorgeously simple and captivating story about an old woman and her young grandchild spending summers together on an island off the coast of Finland. I find this story captivating, for many of the same reasons I was captivated by A Winter Book.

I’ve mentioned the story’s simplicity, which may need explanation. The language and description is wonderful and precise, with a sense that there are no wasted words, and it reads absolutely beautifully. The story itself is not complex, but it has a lot to say; about people and relationships and life and death and the sea. In relatively few words it paints absolutely vivid pictures of people, places, moments.

A book that I am really going to treasure, this.

Suddenly he burst out, “And now Backmansson is gone.”

“Where did he go?”

“He is no longer among us,” Verner explained angrily.

“Oh, you mean he’s dead,” said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.

Any sheets of paper she’d already written on lay hidden against the surface of the table, because if words lie face down there’s a chance they might change during the night; you may suddenly come to see them with a new eye, perhaps with a rapid flash of insight. It is conceivable.

A Winter Book is a collection of short stories by Tove Jansson, divided into three parts — snow, flotsam and jetsam, travelling light. The first part is a childhood in and around an artist’s studio; the second is a childhood on an island; the third is adult, but no less evocative or touching. It’s described as a book of “short stories for adults” — presumably to differentiate it from the Moomin books for which Tove Jansson is far better known — but really, it’s a book of short stories for anyone, I think.

Many of the stories are more than a little autobiographical, and reading the book I got the very strong sense of seeing the world through the author’s eyes, getting to know her a little at a time. These are sketches of life, often very simple but also captivating. There is a lot about island life, about childhood, about growing older and letting things go.

I’m a coastline girl. I lived until I was eighteen within half a mile of the shore, and the significance of the sea in this book really caught me, probably all the more so because of that. I’ll borrow a few of Val’s words on that subject, and I hope she will (yet again) forgive me: She lived much of her life in the archipelago and later on a small island in Finland. It shows. The sea is not only an inspiration. It’s there in almost everything she wrote and it seems almost like a character in its own right.

And a wonderful character too.

This is a beautiful book.

You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.