The Girl With the Moomintroll Tattoo
My summer fling with Tove Jansson
I don’t really mind that it’s been too hot to go to the beach. The sun makes me break out in freckles, and juicy books stand up remarkably well to air-conditioning.
On a recent muggy morning, I found myself craving a spot of Swedish crime fiction. An hour later I was still browsing books online, having deemed The Hypnotist too woo-woo, The Shadow Woman too grizzly, and the new Henning Mankell too un-Nordic (it’s set in East Africa). And that’s how I ended up reading about The True Deceiver, a not-quite-crime book by not-quite-Swede Tove Jansson (she was a Swedish-speaking Finn).
Jansson’s may not be a household name, but she is a big deal in my apartment. She created and wrote the Moomin books, a colorful series for children about the loveable, hippopotamuslike title character and his coterie of peace-loving and excellently named trolls, including Fillyjonk, Snorkmaiden, and that rapscallion Little My. The books have been translated into some thirty-four languages, and at one point the Moomin cartoon appeared in 120 daily newspapers. You can still visit the Moomin Bakery & Café in Japan and buy a Starving Sniff lunch plate.
Moomin first appeared as a sketch on an outhouse wall when Jansson was fifteen. Inspired by the “Moomin troll” her uncle had told her hid in the pantry and preyed on midnight snackers, the prototype didn’t bear much resemblance to the chubby, cute creature that would win over legions of fans.
When Jansson hit her fifties, she lowered the curtain on the Moomin series. By this point, she and her life partner were living on a remote island off the coast of Finland. She began publishing fiction for older readers at the age of fifty-eight.
The True Deceiver, one of her earlier novels for adults, is not a warm and fuzzy tale. It is stark, eerie, and odd, not to mention one of the most special books I have read in a long time. This ice cube of a novel might as well be the negative imprint of Moomin world. The story takes place over the course of a winter in a Nordic hamlet and details a cat-and-mouse game played by two of its residents: Anna Aemelin and Katri Kling. These women share little in common besides their status as outsiders.
One of the characters will sound familiar to fans of Jansson. Anna is an aging author and artist whose “flower bunny” children’s books are a huge international success. “[The villagers] didn’t know Anna Aemelin. Most of them hardly knew what she looked like, since she almost never appeared on the road, but she had become a concept, something of an old landmark that had been in place forever.” Katri is a twentysomething outcast, with yellow eyes that unnerve the townspeople. Her sole friends are her shy, slow brother, Mats, and her dog, which also has yellow eyes, and to which she refuses to give a name.
Anna has something that Katri wants: a large house. Once inhabited by Anna’s parents, it is now called the “rabbit house” by the villagers, due to its shape. “The building actually resembled a large, crouched rabbit—the square front teeth of the white veranda curtains, the silly bay windows under eyebrows of snow, the vigilant ears of the chimneys.” Katri wastes no time insinuating herself in Anna’s life with the aim of usurping it. She stages a break-in and then offers to come live in the house as Anna’s protector. A taut psychological battle ensues that will strike a chord with anyone who has ever had the pleasure of regretting his or her choice in roommates. The two come to deeply irritate each other, yet little by little, they pick up the other’s habits and modes of thinking.
It’s chilling stuff, flecked with emotional truths that caused this reader to wince all too understandingly. At one point, Anna calls Sylvia, an old friend, and they talk about getting together, even though they both know full well that the get-togethers they discuss rarely come to fruition. Anna gets off the phone feeling blue. “It can be sad having a friend you’ve admired too much and seen too rarely and told too many things that you should have kept to yourself. It was only to Sylvia that Anna had talked about her work—without reservation, boasts and cruel disappointments all jumbled together, everything. And now all of it was there with Sylvia, unloaded on her over the years in a dense clot of rash confidences.”
The story culminates in an outcome so unexpected and subtle, I needed to read it twice, and am still chewing on it. Should you want to know more about Jansson, I highly recommend the BBC documentary Moominland Tales, which you can watch here. But, I’m telling you, it’s the book that will help you ride out the heat wave.
I’m still worrying my lip over Emily Cooke’s review of Susan Choi’s new novel, My Education, in the July 21 New York Times Book Review. She outlines the book’s movements, then essentially faults it for not politicizing its subject — a love affair between two women who identify as heterosexual.
She writes:
Two of Choi’s previous books, American Woman (2003) and A Person of Interest (2008), take their inspiration in part from real people — Patty Hearst and Wendy Yoshimura in the first case, Ted Kaczynski and Wen Ho Lee in the second — and these stories too seem oddly unmotivated, as if Choi’s subject matter, like the sex of Regina’s lover, is curiously optional. The high stakes of the real-world conflicts that inform these novels are sometimes replaced, in the fictional versions, by lower stakes. . . My Education shows a similar timidity with the relevant political stakes, perhaps to similarly apolitical effect. Bisexuality has little social consequence, after all, when it’s wrapped in heterosexual identity.
While I haven’t read An Education—or any other book by Choi — I disagree with the idea that a work of fiction that delves into charged territory has a responsibility to underscore the Very Important status of the issues at play. I don’t want my novels to hit me over the head like a skillet.
I respect Cooke’s experience of wanting more from the book, but I’m sure that had Choi set out to write a story with a less nuanced agenda, she would have done so. Fiction, now more than ever, is about slowing down and looking within and around ourselves. Excellent novels or films that take on serious social issues, such as The Flamethrowers or Fruitvale Station, succeed because they come from a place of character. They afford us an intimacy with inner worlds we likely otherwise wouldn’t know much about and an opportunity to formulate our own ideas.
Just as I don’t ask my newspaper articles to drill down to the regrets and secret sufferings of the people who are quoted about cronuts or the rise in gas prices, I don’t ask anything of my novels other than that they, just as Jansson’s work does, operate without clichés and help me see the world afresh.
