Already a little change of plans, but that's okay. Better to realize at the outset of the book that it isn't quite right for the moment than trying to press on, right? I have heard many good things about Helen Simpson and had pulled out a collection of her stories to read, but I found I was just not focusing on her writing quite like I wanted. And then I thought of Tove Jansson and how much I want to read her work this year. Why not start now? I have a wonderful NYRB collection of stories by her--selected stories from all five of her collections--but I think I want to begin with something shorter and more specific since I am mostly new to her work (I did read her The Summer Book several years ago and plan on rereading it). So I have started reading her fourth collection of stories published in 1987, Travelling Light.
In the introduction to the book Ali Smith says that at the heart of this collection is "Jansson's insistence that no man or woman is an island." I am getting ready as Smith says that this collection asks questions of the reader about inclusion and exclusion and so many other things that are polar opposites.
"This collection revels in this paradox, the human longing for solitude versus the human need for contact. Can you travel light? What happens to this urge when it's dark? Its very funny stories are deadly serious; its world is one in a state of fragmentation and breakdown, sometimes obvious, sometimes covert, but breakdown at all levels from intimate to global. In a series of surreal encounters which, on the one hand, gently nudge a reader out of any comfort zone and, on the other, deliberately smash notions of comfort in shiny broken shards, the collection is a work of fusion, of entertainment with disquietude, exhilaration with resignation."
I find that I am struggling in my own life with the desire for solitude and wanting to be alone yet also wishing sometimes there was someone close by I can share things with, so I am very curious about what Jansson has to say about this question, this desire. It's interesting, too, since the idea of solitude seems to be popping up in other works--in Jean Giono's writing (which I will tell you about this week sometime) and in a movie I plan on seeing soon, too.
So the collection opens with a story called "An Eightieth Birthday". May and Jonny, a young couple not long together, are going to the eightieth birthday party of her grandmother, a painter. She worries about their choice of gift and he worries he won't fit in with the guests. The room is crowded with people, families and their children, acolytes of May's grandma. They realize too late that they sit at a crowded table filled with what her grandmother calls "the intellectuals". May and Jonny are young and uncertain, too fresh in the world--not even sure about the pictures on their own walls--why they have them and why they even like them. May finds that if she just listens and murmurs small words of approval she needs not worry as the critics are happy to just talk. She need only be a listener as they drone on about the "theory of perception".
A group of three gentlemen of disheveled appearance, "or more accurately, stained or smudged" enters making a grand entrance and bowing to May's grandmother. When everyone else has moved on to coffee and cake the men are still drinking red wine and it is obvious they are comfortable in their own way and not concerned by the "posings" of the young critics and young artists. May and Jonny ease their way closer to the men curious about them.
"They talked on, calmly and thoughtfully. They sounded like men who were used to talking together but could no longer be bothered with actual discussions. They made statements. They never referred to things like perception but seemed more interested in rising rents or an unfair review of some painting, though of course what could you expect . . . "
* * *
"None of them paid us much attention, though they made sure our glasses were always full and made a space for me closer to the table. The conversation was soothing, and we sat as if on an island sanctuary. None of them asked us about ourselves; they let us be anonymous."
Of course it is these older, slightly disheveled looking gentlemen and not the hip young critics that say the most meaningful things in their ordinary and unselfconscious manners. They have the real little truths about life and art. They are themselves artists like May's grandmother though now their work no longer catches the eye of the young critics. What's most lovely about the story is the way May and Jonny recognize this and what art and passion mean in their own lives, and young as they are that their lives also reflect those little truths.
Next weekend "The Summer Child". I have another book by Tove Jansson handy. I wonder if it is being gluttonous to read that right now, too?