Tove Jansson RIP

"To places where I'm not?"

"You talked of plans. Have you any yourself?"

"Yes. I have a plan. But it's a lonely one, you know."

"You're thinking of going away."

"When are you going?"

"Now - immediately!"

"Are you staying away long?"

"No, on the first day of spring I shall be here again whistling under your window - a year goes by so quickly!"

"Yes. Cheerio then!"

"So long!"

*echo*

"All small beasts should have bows in their tails ..."

Means even more to me now than it always has. Am as close to crying as I'll ever be on a mere internet forum. I still wonder the same thing as you, Mark.

(ps I made the same mistake as Kim for *years*, I'm afraid ...)

The clocks stopped ticking one by one.

What an imagineer you are if it didn't.

First interpretation, when a teen myself (and perhaps not sure what a "graphic artist" was), was that this was militant tweeness: TJ lived with an Imaginary Friend.

Second interp: when ambivalence kicked in, in my late 20s, as a grown-up lifestyle option sighwas that Tooticki was male, but TJ liked to portray him female.

Third interp: Not so long ago (three years) reread it, and tht, "Oh, maybe..." But then forgot, to be honest. No mention of children, y'see: we anti-breeders grab at such flimsy straws for self-affirmation, y'know.

Guardian obit, by Ros Coward, yesterday: "Her lifetime companion was Tuulikka Pietelä, a well-known artist and professor of graphics on whom the character of Too-Ticky was based."

"Too-Ticky looked at him with her calm, blue eyes. Still, he wasn't quite sure that she really did see him. She was looking into her own private winter world that had followed its own strange rules years after year, while he had lain sleeping in the warm Moominhouse." Some straws not flimsy.

I have both the picture books, which are unsurprisingly worth it for the pictures. I'll try and bring them to the ILE meet-up, if anyone wants to see them (and it happens when I'm not on holiday).

Ros Coward wrote the obituary? CRAZY!!!

Robin C: no, I didn't just imagineer it.

Elama ei ole rauhallista, Nuuskamuikken sanoi ihastuneena.

(not so much his doomrat, as i first wrote)

i realised that i am the love child of the hemulen who loved silence and the fillyjonk who believed in disasters

(from the first i get my immese wisdom as a music critic, from the second my compassion as a political commentator ahem)

sigh, swoon, sigh.

http://www.sortof.co.uk/Winter/index.html

Rejoice again!

http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/shopCatalogLong.php?st=art&art=a43cd43019761a

It's rather frustrating to look at Wikipedia and see that she wrote 8 or 9 books for adults that have never been translated into English. Someone needs to get on that.

I love her perhaps more than any other author.

Just read A Winter Book. "Messages" is amazingly bonkers:

-We are contacting you in connection with this year's marmalade promotion, in the first instance wondering if there would be any chance of a previously unpublished Moomin comic strip on the theme of marmalade

-Hi dear unknown fairy-tale auntie, we're a group of young folks with Ideas! What d'you think?

-Can't you draw me a Snufkin that I can have painted on my arm as a symbol of freedom?

-My cat's died! Write at once

On the other hand, the story made up of letters from a Japanese teenager is utterly heartbreaking.

I love love love this cover

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/31/thes7931/product.jpg

i was just looking at that in the store the other day!

love nyrb press

I knew she was already dead.

xp, I love their covers. The only one I have is the John Collier one. I haven't been able to bring myself to read it yet though, because the typography is terrible. Letters too dark, too many lines on a page, really cheap pulpy printing : ( Are they all like that?

It makes me really happy to see that on the recommended shelf at pretty much every bookstore I walk into.

Have there been any more English-language reprints of the Moomin comic strips after the one which came out a couple of years ago? Anyone who likes Jansson or the Moomins should check the comic out, I think it's pretty much just as good as the Moomin books, though a bit more adult-oriented in its themes. (Tove's brother Lars Jansson took over the strip after a few years, because she was unable to meet the deadlines, but his scripts for the comic are possibly even better than Tove's even if his art isn't always on the same level.)

There was a second volume, but I don't know if there are plans for further reprints.

Weren't the comics originally in English?

Volume 3 (of 5) comes out September 30 according to Amazon.

I remember in the previous thread we had about them someone mentioned that they're only going to reprint the strips Tove did by herself. If so, that's a shame, because they're going to miss lots of great late 60s and early 70s stories... Like the ones where beatniks and hippies and anarchists visit Moominvalley, or when Moomintroll and Moominpapa get appointed as policemen and the authority goes to their heads, or when the Moomins travel to a Spanish holiday resort and try some drugs.

(x-post)

I don't know what language the comics were originally were... I think they first started appearing in some British newspapers, but they were soon appearing in Finnish newspapers too. I assume Tove and Lars originally wrote them in Swedish or Finnish and someone else translated them into English.

Beatnik one sounds awesome.

Actually, I think the beatnik episode might already be in one of Tove's strips, but the hippies and anarchists only come later. IIRC Snork Maiden falls in love with the beatnik guy, which obviously makes Moomintroll very jealous, even though he tries to deny it. I think the social commentary in the comics is rather interesting. It seems Tove and Lars were both quite liberal and generally left-leaning, so the hippies and other such characters are not portrayed unsympathetically, but being older than the radicals of the late 60s and early 70s the Janssons can also make gentle fun of their youthful earnestness.

i really dislike the comics, to be honest. (i've only read one volume of the Drawn and Quarterly ones.) gaggy, and don't hold a candle to the books.

they are very different.

I just got Vol. 2 of the comics yesterday, I have really been enjoying it.

Is that NYRB cover by Tove herself? It looks a bit like it.

The earlier NYRB books, and the ones that are new translations, are all nicly typeset, but the more recent ones which reprint previously published stuff just tend to replicate whatever the previous typesetting was, so sometimes you get nasty-looking pages like the Collier collection. It's a fantastic book, though!

that 'Snork Maiden falls in love with beatnik' storyline is in the second D&Q volume (and is ace)

i really dislike the comics, to be honest. (i've only read one volume of the Drawn and Quarterly ones.) gaggy, and don't hold a candle to the books.

IIRC the very first Moomin strips aren't the best of the bunch, and the series does get better as it goes on. But it's true that the comic does have a rather different tone than the books (even if the main charaters are pretty much the same): it's quicker paced, less contemplative and more anarchic, and deals more with the outside world (i.e. the "real" world) than the insular world of the Moominvalley. I think both the books and the comics are great in what they do, but I can see why someone who loves the books and possibly looks for the same qualities in the comic might be disappointed by it.

I love them both, but suffer from cognitive dissonance caused by the way the characters are in parallel worlds, rather than the books and the comics taking place in the same universe.

i just got all four volumes of the comics as a birthday present, and i think they're pretty cool. a somewhat different tone than the books yeah, but nicely peculiar and very identifiably moominish.

plus: they look nice on the bookshelf.

http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/images/moomin/moomincover.gif

just picked one up at the ny book festival -- totally amazing

They're beautiful. Is vol 4 going to be the last?

i think there's one more to come.

sorry, when I say "one" I mean a Tove Jansson book, but not one of the comics volumes.

#4 is the last of the all-Tove or Tove/Lars comics. There’s enough material for another 1 volume of just Tove/Lars, and then 15 or so of all-Lars strips, but D&Q announced upfront that they would stop at the end of the Tove-only material.

There's a Vol. 4? I thought I only needed to add Vol. 3 to my collection. I got a picture book at the Brooklyn Book Festival too (last year I got Vol. 2 there). I think this is the same one that Hurting got: The Book About Moomin, Mimble and Little My

http://www.moomintrove.com/images/0953522741-0-large.jpg

i only just found out how to pronounce little my the other day cuz i met a swedish girl who's name was my

uh-oh, how do you pronounce it? i've just been using the english pronunciation all these years, it could change my whole idea of the character if i have to say it differently...

so is vol. 4 the last one? d&q initially announced 5, but i can't find anything on their site that says one way or another whether 4's the end.

you pronounce it like 'mu' the greek letter - or that's what it sounded like to me

You guys should write some angry letters to D&Q to get them to release the Lars strips too. They're in no way worse to the Tove ones, the art may be somewhat inferior, but the plots get even more wacky and groovy. At least they should reprint the story where the Moomins travel to "Torrelorca" and buy some mind-expanding "LBJ" pills from a local drug den; that one is a genuine cultural artefact of the early 70s, and funny as hell too.

so is vol. 4 the last one? d&q initially announced 5, but i can't find anything on their site that says one way or another whether 4's the end.

I wz sure they announced 4 but would be pleased to be wrong

SO ANNNOYING that the vols aren't numbered btw!

coming out on Dec. 8!

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product-file/51/thet9251/product.jpg

this book was harsh

yeah it was

Not sure how many ilxors there are in NW England, and of those there's likely only a small subset who will be interesed, but this looks great:

Moominvalley at Bury Art Gallery

http://www.themillions.com/2014/10/ruthless-beautiful-dangerous-comforting-how-it-is-in-the-world-of-tove-jansson.html

Box set of the Tove vols of the strip coming out for Christmas.

I still need the last two of those

Reread The True Deceiver this weekend, such a remarkable book. No wasted space, no false sentiments. I hadn't realized there were more story collections released in the U.K., I'm unclear on how they line up with the US collections.

There's also two picture books for tots: Moomin Mymble and Little My (which has holes cut in the pages so you can see thru to the next bit of the story!! Fuck you BSJohnson you plagiarist HACK!!) and Who Will Comfort Toffle?

my wife found the first one of these at a library sale, we were amazed cuz we did not know about them. her 3-year-old granddaughter loves the book! now I will be on the search for the second one.

the recent biopic is on bbc4 in the obvious slot this Saturday

I once sat in school for hours - no, it was DAYS! - and copied out page after page of - what's it called? - Moominvalley in Winter, I think.
The clocks stopped ticking one by one.

― the pinefox, Friday, 29 June 2001 01:00 (twenty years ago) bookmarkflaglink

!!

It's true.

https://4columns.org/sinker-mark/tove-jansson

Do you know if Paul Gravett has seen this, Mark? I'm sure he would like to share such a nice review on Facebook etc.

it only went up fri night so possibly not but thames & hudson US know abt it (and provided the images)

Good that, Mark.

seconded