She uses an economy of words which, for the most part, works well (we are left to think) however, perhaps a little more could have been offered in the economy of words that form some of the story titles: Albert, Jeremiah, Annie are titles that don’t frame the story offerings so well.įourteen of the twenty stories in A Winter Book are concerned with childhood. This sketching process is one of Jansson’s signatures. Each piece stands alone, but as the reader delves deeper into the pages, Jansson’s characters start to return to the shore, in the analogy: of course, here are the repetitions of Jansson’s parents, Signe (known as Ham, for Hammarsten) and Viktor, both artists, but here too are others such Old Charlie, sketched in to a few of the stories, before taking his leave again.

The reader must first accept the slow pace of the story offerings in this collection in order to begin the process of engagement (whether having read previous Jansson offerings or not).

The stories span periods between 1968-98: the latter being three years before Jansson’s death at the age of 86. The body of work is like a succession of waves.Ī Winter Book (Sort Of Books, English translation from the original Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff and Kingsley Hart, 2006) is, according to the introduction by Ali Smith, a combination of select stories about childhood from Jansson’s first collection ( Sculptor’s Daughter Bildhuggarens dotter, 1968) and a smattering of pieces from various later sources, translated into English for the first time. The feeling is all the more succinct for this reader, having recently immersed in Jansson’s much acclaimed The Summer Book (1972, 2003) and her novel, The True Deceiver (1982, 2009). We can suspend our imaginations for a certain period and indulge in the idea that pure fictions are present, but at the back of the reading mind is the knowledge of something different taking shape. Herein lie twenty stories dealing with childhood and older age however, for the larger part, the reader is really engaging with semi-autobiographical material. Some accounts offer us the heightened middle of a life led: A Winter Book offers us the book-ends to Tove Jansson’s long life.

A winter book by tove jansson