Artists at work

NYRB is publishing translations of Tove Jansson’s writing that haven’t been available before in English, and we’re so lucky.

I loved the first memoir I read, The Summer Book, reflecting the memories of a child. Now I’ve read her adult memoir entitled Fair Play. The books are very different, written in differing styles, but they form parts of a while.

The first is a wonderful retelling of the feelings, images, and myths of childhood. The second is a matter-of-fact recounting of how two artists live and work together — and the give and take required to make that work.

“Fair Play” here means balancing needs, creating companionship without getting in each other’s way – and not using weaknesses against each other.

The stories illuminate the understanding, civility, silence, distance and patience between these two women, and the quirks that must be allowed for.

My favorite passage was the story of the chaos her partner creates when rearranging artwork on the walls and then the amazing change it makes when she’s finally completed her work and the juxtaposition of pieces changes their impact and meaning. The scenes set in a hotel in the USA while they traveled cross-country on a Greyhound bus were funny and interesting too, rather like one’s own travel journals, strange and interesting things happen, but is it a story? Does it round itself off? Perhaps it’s simply an anecdote to retell years later.

The tension of trying to be there for your partner, while focusing on your art wholeheartedly, touched and inspired me.

It’s the end of the world, and I feel fine

Summer is just about over, but we still have some middle-grade adventures to complete!

I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about the concept for City of Ember, because I have read a lot of survival after the end of the world stories. But the author was profiled in the local newspaper and I was intrigued by the story of how she came to write it, and it’s not a dystopia.

I was charmed when I began reading it. The book reminded me of Robinson Crusoe, with that exacting level of detail of how people live, what they eat (potatoes and turnips), and what they wear. For them it’s entirely normal to live with no sky, and with lights that go out at a certain time of night. The emotional heart of the story are the explorations of two young people finding their way in the world, when everything is an adventure, not gloom and doom. Although there’s plenty of gloom when the lights go out. And of course the satisfying middle grade trope of adults in power being a threat, even to themselves.

I wanted to find out how the kids would get out of their predicament, and what had caused it (being of the duck-and-cover generation, I naturally assumed nuclear war) and by the end of the book I still don’t know why the underground city was built, or why they had to stay there for several hundred years. Apparently I must read the next book, The People of Sparks.

Our brains are wired to look for experiences that will help us survive; maybe that’s why we never tire of imagining what we’d do when the apocalypse finally comes. I recommend the book, especially for younger readers, because there’s nothing too scary in it, yet the suspense is satisfying.

Brontë action figures! You know you want them

In honor of the bio-flick on tonight on the local PBS station – all the Brontës — all of them! I bring you one of my all time favorite U-Toob videos.
For that Gothic Transformer kind of mood.

Follow up 9/23: I watched the film and it was a horrible disappointment. I wasn’t too surprised, considering the anti-feminist writer they thought suitable for the job (she did the *Amazing Mrs. Pritchard* which set back women in politics by about 50 years, and no, it wasn’t even funny.). Amazing how they always choose the woman who won’t threaten patriarchal assumptions too much (“of course the brother is more important”).

Instead of examining how the shared imaginative lives of all the Brontë children created a unique imaginative and literary education, the film fed us scene after scene of Branwell’s self-destruction, unending and boring stupors and rages, once again relegating the 3 most astonishing British writers of the 19th-Century to secondary characters in the story of their feckless brother. Even now.

Honestly, the action figure clip is a better introduction to their writing.