I'm trying to find a way into liking the last story I read (nearly last actually, I've gone on since . . .) in the Tove Jansson collection. It is perhaps the longest story in the collection and the one I think I like the least and which took me two weekends to get through. Maybe it is down to the disjointed way I read it spread out over days, probably losing the thread more than once along the way and then simply wanting to finish it and move on. So, it is always helpful to read what Ali Smith said about a particular story in her introduction to the book.
"In this lies the collection's other source of fruitful collision, between so-called romantic collision, between so-called romantic isolation and troubled human interaction. In 'The Garden of Eden', Viktoria, an elderly professor, arrives at an empty house in a place wholly foreign to her, opens a door on a totally new landscape and uncovers the same old colonising layers of judgementalism and powerplay as exists everywhere."
So, Viktoria has come to Spain to visit a relative who is not there to greet her having had to leave at late notice to be with another sick relative. Viktoria decides to stay and continue on with her vacation and becomes embroiled in a feud between two locals, the locals being English women living in a long established 'colony'. Josephine comes calling on her neighbor one day and finds Viktoria in her stead and tells her of her woes.
"'Her name is Smith,' Josephine continued, speaking quietly with her lips pressed together. 'Smith, if you please. She goes around the village brandishing a knife and threatening to kill me. And she lives right next door to me with only a single wall between us! She hates dogs and stereos, she sticks threatening letters under my door and makes faced at my cleaning woman, and last week she cut down my mimosa'!"
And so Viktoria offers to help straighten the problem out. Josephine, as you see from her comment, has small (probably hugely annoying) dogs and plays music not to her neighbor's liking. Josephine is sure that the problem with her neighbor must stem from loneliness, however. X, as she calls her must feel quite an outsider. Viktoria confronts X and tells her that solitary people interest her, "there are so many different ways of being solitary". X knows only too well--enforced solitude and voluntary.
X and Josephine have a disastrous encounter in the village resulting in X cutting off (with those scissors she carries around) Josephine's red pigtails--quite the scene--and maybe my favorite in the sory! Viktoria decides to bring the two women together over a specially planned, down to the very last detail, meal. The meal comes complete with oranges still with their green leaves. Oranges, so very common that no one in the village bothers to eat these days. She tells the women to think of the oranges as a decoration, or a symbol. They are a symbol of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden--something unattainable.
And I lost the thread of the story there and am not sure what she meant by those oranges, but Viktoria does bring the two women together in the end. And by then I just wanted to finish reading and so was happy that all's well that ends well and that was that. The story, however, is trademark Jansson quirky and has some humor to it as well. If this story was not so much to my liking, I did very much like the short story following. It's called "Shopping".
If the recent themes are solitude and isolation and 'travelling light', then "Shopping" was an interesting combination that turns things very much on their heads. The story is quite brief and nothing explicit is ever really shared, which I very much like. She only hints at what is happening, which makes the reader uncertain and a little disoriented. You know just enough to understand but you still must fill out the picture and guess at what it all means.
Little hints are dropped from the start as to what is happening to Emily and Kris. It's five in the morning and overcast and Emily is out doing the shopping which seems pretty normal. Emily notes that no one could call her fat now, maybe only Junoesque. And that seems pretty normal, too, until you begin understanding the relationship of 'food shopping' and what has happened where the pair live and why Emily might be more slender now than before (before what is the question). But when she notes the "changed landscape" and how everyone was told to "stay indoors" and how Emily began "constructing defenses" and that Kris had been hurt somehow and was stuck at home (with a big window completely boarded over), well, you start filling in blanks. I can't decide whether the ending is hopeful or hopeless, and you never find out lots of things, but it is a story I found marvelously constructed. I have purposely tried not to give too much away as this is a story best left to the reader to let unravel at its own pace.
There are five stories left in the collection and I am planning on tackling one story a day and will finish the book by next Sunday (when hopefully I'll be back on track for posting). I already have the next collection picked out to read and I am hoping to get back on track with my New Yorker short story reading again this week. Rather than trying to start from the beginning of the year I will just jump into this week's issue and hope to fill in the blanks for those missing issues as I go.
Despite not quite enjoying the longer story by Jansson, this collection has been a very good one and I am eager to read more of her work. Nearly all have been little literary gems.