It's kind of hard to describe Tove Jansson's writing, but I love it more with each book I read by her. It was one of my beginning of the year plans to read as much of her work as I could (and one of my plans I actually feel like I made some headway with), and I thought I might be able to squeeze in one more of her books, so I picked up the slender Fair Play recently. If you have read her, you'll know she is a little quirky. There is a special quality to her writing, to her observations, that I am not sure I can explain. It's a feeling you get while reading. Her writing isn't quite straightforward fiction, but it has a sort of magical feeling to it. It's charming and playful, often with a thread of wry humor in it.
When I picked up Fair Play (Rent Spel, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal and winner of the Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation), which also happens to be a NYRB Classic, I thought it might perhaps be a memoir or at least a novel. It's neither but sort of both. I feel like it is somewhat autobiographical, though I don't know much about Jansson's personal life. She is a very good short story writer, and Fair Play seems a collection of interconnected stories. Mari and Jonna are friends who live across an attic from each other. Perhaps Jansson had a good friend like the women in the stories. However, I also saw bits of Tove Jansson in each of the women and wonder if each represents some part of her. Mari is a writer and Jonna an artist just like Jansson herself.
The two women are obviously very good and longstanding friends who know each other's work and and each other's families. There is such a familiarity between the two of the other's life and outlook. They are both intensely creative and play off each other's sensibilities. They support and inspire and critique each other. It's a rare sort of friendship, or at least it seems so to me. The older a person gets the harder it seems to find such intimates. Neither women has a significant other it seems, and perhaps that is what allows their friendship to flourish.
While the chapters are closer to stories or vignettes, they still have a thread that weaves through them to create a sort of continuity. Each could easily be read on its own, if you felt like dipping into the book (though it is short enough to read over the course of a few short reading sessions). Their work is always on their minds and references to it crops up over and over again--Mari's short story writing (she seems to be working on them constantly and Jonna tells her she writes the same theme over and over again). They both love watching movies, and on one woman's shelf sits a row of films, B-Westerns seeming to be a favorite, and at one point Jonna even decides to make her own movie as they travel through the American Southwest.
For a very slight book, there are lots of stories and lots of good reading here. I do have to share just one or two little excerpts from one of my favorite chapters, "Fog".
"There is no silence like sitting in a fog at sea and listening."
I have never had that experience, but I can imagine it. It must be both exhilarating and frightening at the same time. Imagine the eerie silence. Being enveloped in quiet (save for the lap of the water on your boat). So Mari and Jonna are vacationing on an island (much like what Jansson writes about in The Summer Book) and are out in their little boat when the fog rolls in and they have this moment of being completely at swim and alone on the water. Mari asks for some crispbread as her mother always left some crispbread in their box when they went out to sea.
"'Crispbread,' Jonna said. 'Crispbread, for heaven's sake. Your mother was really fussy about crispbread. She broke it in tiny little pieces and put them in a row and spread butter on each little piece. It took forever. And I had to wait and wait for the butter knife, and she did the same thing every single morning and every day and every year she lived with us'!"
***
This elicited a chuckle from me:
"'Incidentally, ' Mari went on, 'your mother was pretty fussy about baking bread. She was always sending us loaves of her break and every time she sent them off, she'd call at seven in the morning and talk for half an hour. Graham bread. When it got moldy we used to call it Graham Green'."
I'll keep chipping away at Tove Jansson's work. I look forward to reading a biography of her life, too, Tuula Karjalainen's Tove Jansson: Work and Love. And in case you are curious about her other books, I have written about: Travelling Light, Sculptor's Daughter, The Moomins and the Great Flood, and The Summer Book. All highly recommended.