Best Books of the Year Part 3 [Not About Covers]

(Continuing from here and here...)

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Tove Jansson: The True Deceiver
NYRB, 2009 (also Sort Of Books, 2009)

I’m gratified by the way my favourite writer as a child has also ended up becoming one of my favourite writers as an adult, for a different set of books. Tove Jansson, for it is she, wrote the wonderful Moomin books. In her later years she turned to novels and short stories for adults, and they are great. Back in the mid-1990s, when I first had a credit card and internet access, one of the first books I tracked down was Jansson’s The Summer Book, then long out-of-print in English, but now available from both NYRB in the US, and Sort Of Books in the UK. If you haven’t read it, I demand that you do. It’s a perfect evocation of childhood and old age, and the strange relationship between the two.

The True Deceiver (first published in Swedish in 1982, and now translated by Thomas Teal) is another small masterpiece. In less than 200 pages, Jansson tells the story of two odd women in a remote Swedish village. Katri is something of an outsider, yellow-eyed, brutally honest, no observer of social niceties, and always accompanied by an enormous, nameless dog. Anna, much older, lives alone in ‘the rabbit house’, where she paints illustrations for a wildly successful series of children’s books. Katri sets about moving into Anna’s life and home, motivated by both selfishness and altruism, trying to scrape together enough money to buy a special gift for her “simple” brother, Mats.

It is a brilliant, beautiful book. And for another side of Tove Jansson, 2009 also saw the publication of the fourth (and probably final) volume of her collected Moomin newspaper comic strips. Light-hearted, anarchic, humane and satirical, they’re also highly recommended: see more here.






Muriel Spark: A Far Cry from Kensington
Virago, 2008

A 20th-anniversary republication, this is probably the best of Muriel Spark’s later novels. Given the incredibly high standards Spark set in her fiction, that’s saying something. Like Tove Jansson, Spark worked almost exclusively at short novel or novella length, with no wasted words and beautifully clear, tight prose. Kensington is the story of Agnes Hawkins, a war widow in the 1950s, living in a boarding house (a frequent Spark setting), and working at a publisher’s. A mixture of bad temper and pride see her sabotaging her career, and becoming involved in a long-running feud with a hack journalist and womaniser called Bartlett. Black humour, death and diabolism ensue. (Weirdly, both this book, the Tove Jansson and two other bloody good books I read this year all have introductions by Ali Smith, who I don't even like much, and yet she obviously has excellent taste.)

I go on about Spark and some of her other great books here.


Miriam Toews: The Flying Troutmans
Faber & Faber, 2009

The set-up for Toews’ third novel is simple: Hattie, a woman fleeing a bad relationship in Paris returns to Canada to see her suicidal, institutionalised sister. The sister has two children, and desperate, to offer them hope, Hattie takes them on a road trip to find their estranged father.

That simple description gives no idea of how deeply funny and moving—as well as frequently alarming—this book is. It’s told mostly through the dialogue between the three characters in the car as they cross the border and roam the US, and it’s mostly in the dialogue that the humour of this book is found.

No a fifteen year old cannot live on his own, I said.
Pippi Longstocking wasn't even fifteen, said Thebes, and she -
Yeah, but she was a character in a book, I said.
And she was Swedish said Logan.
So there would have been a solid safety net of social programmes to keep her afloat, I said. It doesn't work here.

(Quoted text stolen from Dovegreyreader’s excellent blog, as my own copy of this book was loaned to a friend several months ago, and is yet to return (Are you reading, Trish?).)




Katherine Anne Porter: Collected Stories & Other Writings
Library of America, 2008

Porter is one of those writers I was vaguely aware of, but had read nothing by. To be honest, I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to buy this 1100-page volume, except that it was on sale and I have no self-control. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad I did—it was a revelation. I have a particular fondness for short stories and novellas, and Porter must be up there with William Trevor and Alice Munro as one of the great English-language short story writers. This book (half of which is short fiction, half of which short non-fiction) is superb. Hell—the final story, ‘The Leaning Tower’, a 75-page story of pre-WWII Berlin, is reason enough alone to get this.





Shirley Jackson: The Lottery and Other Stories
Penguin Modern Classics, 2009

Somehow, despite hugely enjoying those novels of Jackson’s which I have read, I’d never got this famous short story collection. Like the Porter book, though, this was a serious treat. First published in the 1950s, this collection demonstrates a range of mood and subject I really hadn’t expected: I knew Jackson could do creepy and mad and supernatural, but I had no idea she could do so much more. Having said that, though, the creepy and famous title story is one of the highlights.

Lilli, Hans and Anders

Lilli Carré is a Chicagoan comics writer and artist who has produced the cover for another of those beautiful Penguin Classics editions which, well, are designed by comics artists. (For others, see here, here, here, here and here.) She has tackled Mark Twain's most famous book.



This edition comes out in October. Carré has a few other books of her own work available, showcasing a drawing style that has elements of the cartoonish and of children's book illustrations, as well as darker, eerier overtones. It doesn't hurt that she shows hints of Tove Jansson's influence, either. Compare Carré's work shown below with this representative Jansson illustration:



Carré's most recent is The Lagoon, shown here with some of the interior pages. (Click for bigger versions of these and those below.)





Before that she produced Tales of Woodsman Pete, a series of somewhat absurdist stories about a gentleman of that name...





..as well as the short-story collection Nine Ways to Disappear.





In addition, she has provided covers for a couple of comic anthologies.




Carré's next project is an illustrated version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Fir Tree, which should be out in time for Christmas. Here are three pages stolen from her blog:





This leads me neatly to another of the Penguin Deluxe Classics that I should have discussed a couple of years ago (which is when I got my copy), because it's a beautiful little book. As well as featuring all of Andersen's fairy tales, translated by Tiina Nunnally (one of those translators, like Anthea Bell and Michael Hofmann, from whom I will read anything they bring into the English language), it includes a number of Andersen's paper-cut illustrations, and this gorgeous cover artwork (with flaps) by Anders Nilsen.




Here, pilfered from the amazing archives of A Journey Round My Skull, is one of Andersen's cut-outs illustrations.



Next, a single post about a single artist that cunningly combines Penguins, black American activists and pornography.

Tove Follow-Up

Just a quick addendum to yesterday's Tove Jansson post: here's that edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland which she illustrated.



And here are some of the other interior illustrations:







These images were taken from this wonderful (but possibly copyright-defying) site, which has all of the interior illustrations online. It also shows Tove's illustrations for a number of other books, including these great ones from Tolkien's The Hobbit.

More Tove

I've talked before about Tove Jansson, whose wonderful Moomin novels were a highlight of my childhood, and whose Moomin comic strips I'm now enjoying. When I was old enought to have my own credit card, I began (at what seemed to a student to be a great expense) tracking down those of her adult works that had been translated into English, especially The Summer Book, which is pretty much a perfect little novel, and Sun City.

A few years ago, Sort Of Books in Britain began republishing her adult work, beginning with The Summer Book and following it up with A Winter Book, which is a collection of short stories, and the novella/story collection Fair Play. They are all, of course, great. Esther Freud and Ali Smith have written introductions, available online, which ought to give you a good idea of why the books are worth your time.





Now, nice as those covers are, they don't use Tove's own artwork. For that, we turn to NYRB, who have just published an edition of The Summer Book that looks like this:



This uses Tove's own original cover art for the book:



She also did another cover, used on this Hutchinson edition from 1972.



The Summer Book is about a summer which a young girl, her father and her grandmother spend together on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. It's told from the girl' point of view. Tove had a look at the other end of life with Sun City, about the residents of a Florida retirement community. Not yet republished this century in English, the original cover, with Tove's artwork, looked like this.



Then there is the autobiographical Sculptor's Daughter, much of which is available in the two Sort Of collections. Tove's original cover for that is very nice indeed:



One book I have not been able to track down in English is The Listeners. The cover very much makes me want to read it:



Finally, here's a bonus illustration from a set Tove Jansson did for Alice in Wonderland.




Many of these covers came from The Moomin Trove, an excellent resource for finding out more about the various Jansson books. Lots of nice cover scans are to be found there.

Moomins!

When I was a child, some of my favourite books were Tove Jansson's Moomin books. They tell the tale of the residents of Moominvalley, a gleefully, good-humouredly anarchic place somewhere in Scandinavia, inhabited by a vast array of peculiar but appealing creatures.

These books are a delight: there's no more appropriate word. So you can imagine my joy when Drawn & Quarterly, a Montreal-based comics publisher, last year began reprinting Jansson's Moomin comic strips. She drew these for five years in the 1950s for a British newspaper, and as far as I know they've not been collected in English before.

The second volume just came out, and I devoured it yesterday. They're beautifully produced over-sized books, with colourful cloth covers and thick, creamy pages.





As ever, click on an image for more detail.

These comics are just as wonderful as the novels and stories Jansson wrote (and while we're on the topic, seek out her for-adults work too: The Summer Book, A Winter Book and Fair Play have all been republished by Sort Of Books).


I've put up some individual panels here to give you the idea of the style and tone of the comics.

I apologise that the quality of reproduction is not quite as good as it could be: these come from photographs of the pages, as there was no way I was going to risk mauling these books' spines in my scanner.

Here's Moominmama explaining her family's domestic cleaning habits to the next-door neighbour...


And here's Moomintroll himself, having been driven into a short-lived rage when his girlfriend, the Snork Maiden, is drawn to another man (who is also a sports-obsessed lunatic)...