The Overhaul #3

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I’m picking up this occasional series where I look back at book ‘hauls’ of the past… and see how many of the books I’ve actually read. Yes, it’s an exercise in self-flagellation. Or, who knows, maybe I’ll have read all the books?! (Narrator: this will never be the case.)

I’ve gone back to 2009 and 2011 before – this time it’s 2012. And one of my many trips to Hay.

The Overhaul #3

The original haul post is here.

Date of haul: February 2012

Location: Hay-on-Wye

Number of books bought: 18

If you click through, you can even see the whole photo from which I took my Twitter banner pic. WHAT an incentive. Here, one at a time, are the books and whether or not I’ve read them – and why.

  • Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

I’ve not only read this one, I gave a paper on it an Elizabeth von Arnim conference! I think it’s an unfairly neglected one – find out more about what I thought.

  • Elizabeth of the German Garden by Leslie de Charme

Not read this one yet – and I did read a different biography of E von A by Jennifer Walker, so will probably hold off for a bit.

  • Off the Deep End by Christopher Morley

I don’t think I’ve read any more Morley since this trip, let alone this one.

  • The Iron Man and The Tin Woman – Stephen Leacock
    The Boy I Left Behind Me – Stephen Leacock

I have read some Leacock since this trip, but… not these.

  • Borrowed Plumes by Owen Seaman

It all started so well, didn’t it? I was very intrigued by this signed book of parodies… and I remain intrigued.

  • Concert Pitch by Theodora Benson

I did read this one! Sadly it was not very good. It was very confusing and a bit of a trudge. Still on my shelves, though I’m not entirely sure why.

  • Daisy’s Aunt by E.F. Benson

And I read this one, with much better results. A total delight of a novel, not a word of which made any logical sense – but you can forgive it, and even revel in it, when a book is this fun to read.

  • The Initials in the Heart by Laurence Whistler

I edged closer to reading this when I read Anna Thomasson’s excellent book about Rex Whistler – Laurence’s brother – and Edith Olivier. But I have to concede that I did not, in fact, read it.

  • The Windfall by Christopher Milne

I’d read this before I bought it, so… free point!

  • Surviving by Henry Green

Sigh, I really must read more than one single book by Green. I have not read this.

  • A Casual Commentary by Rose Macaulay

I think I’ve read this? In fact, I think I read much of it before I bought it. I’m counting it as a yes.

  • The Gentlewomen by Laura Talbot

Yep, read this Virago! Re-reading my review from last year, I’m reminded what an unusual and interesting style it had. Must look up more Talbot. Because, if this post has taught us nothing else, it’s that I need more books.

  • Mr Scobie’s Riddle by Elizabeth Jolley
    Foxybaby by Elizabeth Jolley

I almost pick up Mr Scobie’s Riddle this week! But… I did not. I still haven’t read any Jolley novels.

  • The Only Problem by Muriel Spark

Not only have I read this, I did so only a month or so after I bought it. It was during Muriel Spark Reading Week, and it remains one of my favourite Spark novels. It looks at hostages and the Book of Job…

  • Stepping Heavenward by Richard Aldington

I still love Dolphin Books, but I have not read this.

  • Ivy and Stevie by Kay Dick

Yes! Loved these interviews with Ivy Compton-Burnett and – to a lesser extent – Stevie Smith.

Total bought: 18

Total still unread: 10

Total no longer owned: 0

Mr Emmanuel by Louis Golding

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I have a feeling I first bought Mr Emmanuel (1939) by Louis Golding when I was looking for novels by Louis Bromfield and got confused. And I’ve decided to try both Louises – Louis? Louiss? – recently. Unsurprisingly, they are very, very different. And Mr Emmanuel is very different from what I thought it would be when I started it.

The novel was published in 1939, but I’d be intrigued to know whether it was before or after September 3rd. That is, was it after war had been declared between England and Germany, or after? It is certainly very concerned with the situation in Germany, and is set in the period shortly before the war.

But we start out in England. Mr Emmanuel is a Russian immigrant who is now a British citizen and very proud of it. He lives in a close-knit suburb, where he is well-liked and respected by the neighbourhood. And rightly so. He is an upright, thoughtful, kind man – often depicted as being on the older side of things, in the novel, but I suspect no more than 50. (I also discovered that Mr Emmanuel is the second novel in a series of four, and so many of these characters should probably be familiar, but I think it’s fine to read this book independently.) The setting appears in quite a few of Golding’s novels, I think. It’s an interesting depiction of nineteen-thirties segregation beginning to blur.

Magnolia Street is a small street in the Longton district of Doomington, in the North of England. It is one of several streets called after the names of flowering shrubs, that run parallel to each other right and left across the central thoroughfare of Blenheim Road. It is mainly Jews who live in the streets south of Magnolia Street, though some Gentiles live there. The converse holds of the streets north of it. Magnolia Street itself is different from those others because Jews and Gentiles live there in equal numbers, the Jews in the odd-numbered houses on the south side, the Gentiles in the even-numbered houses on the north.

That has been the situation for several decades, and there was a time when it would have been as unthinkable for a Jewish family to live on the Gentile pavement as for a Gentile family to live on the Jewish pavement. The two sides of the street virtually did not exist for each other, excepting when certain major public occasions, like the Great War, or certain dramatic private occasions, like a wedding or a death, reminded the folk they were made of pretty much the same stuff, spirit and mind and flesh. There had even been one or two marriages between people from the opposite sides of the street, but on the whole these had not much affected the general situation, though they had caused a good deal of chatter at the time they happened.

In rather a protracted opening, he learns that some friends are looking after German Jewish refugees, and would appreciate his help. Mr Emmanuel is Jewish himself – as was Golding – and he is very conscious of the need to help these refugees. He is less conscious about the situation for Jewish people in Germany, at least in terms of specifics.

While staying with these refugees, he befriends a young boy called Bruno. He is unpopular among the other children, and clearly very anxious. He misses his mother, and wants to know whether she is dead or alive. And Mr Emmanuel promises Bruno that he will go to Germany and find out. Against the advice of everybody else… that is exactly what he does.

This is quite a long novel (over four hundred pages) and a sizeable portion of the first half feels like set up for the novel proper. I never quite disentangled who all the figures were in this section, and it’s quite possible that they are bigger players in the previous novel Five Silver Daughters. I kept reading, but it was only when Mr Emmanuel went to Germany that I really thought the novel started working well.

He has the name of Bruno’s mother and a potential address – which no longer exists. Golding does an excellent job of sustaining the tension for a long time as Mr Emmanuel gently, persistently tries to find Bruno’s mother’s whereabouts. We get a sense of the fear and anger on the streets of 1939 Germany. Mr Emmanuel is oddly naive in her determination, scarcely recognising the danger he is in. He firmly believes that being a British citizen will protect him from the anti-Semitism that is clearly rife.

This is where the novel gets quite grim. I was surprised how graphic the scenes were when he gets on the wrong side of the Gestapo and is imprisoned. Seeing this lovable, kind, innocent man being mentally and physically tortured is really hard. (When I say ‘tortured’, I mean beaten often and without knowing when – in case, like me, your mind replaces that word with far worse things if no details are given.) It is also illuminating about what people knew was happening, as early as ’39.

The denouement of the novel is unexpected, though it is difficult for such a long novel to sustain something that changes how we have perceived what comes before, if that makes sense. I shan’t give away more. And, while it is on the long side, Golding has a measured and steady style that makes for a good reading experience. I still think he should have cut quite a lot of the beginning, but perhaps it was necessary for getting the uninitiated reader to love Mr Emmanuel.

 

The Remarkable Life of the Skin by Monty Lyman

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A little while ago I reviewed a book for Shiny New Books that you might not expect to see on my reading pile – The Remarkable Life of the Skin (2019) by Monty Lyman. Well, I’m learning that I should start reading more in areas that I don’t think will appeal. The whole review is over at Shiny New Books – below is the start.

The number of science books I’ve read can be numbered on my fingers, and the number of science books I’ve read that weren’t written by Oliver Sacks is nil. Until now! Full disclosure, Monty Lyman is a friend of mine – and that was why I picked up The Remarkable Life of the Skin. But I’m very glad I did, and would definitely recommend it to anybody who doesn’t have the privilege of being Monty’s friend.

Lyman (let’s keep this review professional) is a doctor in Oxford, and his research has specialised in dermatology. That interest has taken him around the world, and the book reports on interesting cases from most of the planet’s continents – with an especial interest in Tanzania. The real marvel of The Remarkable Life of the Skinis is how much content it packs into a relatively short space.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

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It always feels slightly different to read a book that is a worldwide bestseller. I’d obviously heard of The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho, but I couldn’t tell you a lot about it. Except that I’ve always got it mixed up with Perfume by Patrick Suskind, which I also hadn’t read.

Well, my book group chose this book and I borrowed a copy from my brother Colin, who hadn’t been enthusiastic in his mini review of it. This edition is translated from the Portuguese by Alan Clarke – I don’t know if there are mutliple translations out there. I was certainly intrigued by the atmosphere of the opening paragraph:

The boy’s name was Santiago. Dusk was falling as the boy arrived with his herd at an abandoned church. … an enormous sycamore had grown on the spot where the sacristy had once stood.

In case there are others who didn’t know the plot – it’s about this boy called Santiago who lives in Andalusia, where he is a shepherd. But he dreams of more from life, and can’t stop thinking about a fortune he received from a fortune teller – that he should travel to Egypt to discover treasure.

Off he goes to Africa but not, he quickly learns, materially nearer Egypt than he was when he started. I can’t remember if it’s spelled out, but I’m pretty sure he’s in Morocco – where his money gets stolen by a conman, and he must work for a crystal merchant. He is still determined to raise the money to find this supposed treasure.

Rather late in the day, he does get to Egypt and meet the alchemist – who seems more minor a character than I’d have anticipated from the title. And then it all becomes a mixture of magic realism and an Aesopian fable.

So, what did I think? Well, I really enjoyed the first third of the novel. Santiago is a wonderful character – an interesting mix of determination, hope, uncertainty, and naivety. All of the stuff in Morocco was a delight, and I would happily have read a novel of his experience in the crystal shop – becoming something of a surrogate child to the crystal seller. I’ve never been to Morocco, but I felt rather like I had when I was reading this.

But as the novel moves forward, and Coelho loses any sense of being tethered to the ground, then I lost my affection for The Alchemist. And it’s not even my documented reluctance for magical realism. It’s because the novel tries to become extremely profound, and succeeds in sounding rather silly. There’s an awful lot about following your heart and the truth being in all of us etc. etc., and it began to feel a bit like a thought-a-day desk calendar. It’s everything I kind of suspect the most run-of-the-mill self help books might be. I felt like Coelho’s sensitive eye for character was rather wasted in a series of philosophical truisms.

He’s continued writing ever since, but I haven’t heard of any of the other books. I’d love to try something else by him if he’s written anything that is less queasy. And I can do no better than quoting a line from Col’s thoughts: “A life-changing book, the blurb claims, but I suspect mostly for people who believe horoscopes.”

 

 

This Golden Fleece: interview with Esther Rutter

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I recently reviewed This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter – otherwise known as my friend Phoebe – and I really enjoyed reading it. Since she’s a good friend of mine, I did a quick interview with her – asking her a bit about the book and about knitting. The Guardian liked the book, btw, so you should give it a go.

1. What was the genesis of This Golden Fleece?

I’d been a knitter since childhood, but the book started with a present from my Mum – four balls of woollen yarn from Shetland, which she gave me in 2016. At that time, I’d just switched jobs from working in literary heritage and education to being in university administration, and moved to the Fife countryside for my husband’s job, where I was doing a lot of knitting in the dark winter evenings. As an avid reader, I was on the look-out for a history of knitting in Britain, but couldn’t find one in print. So I thought: why not give up this job I really didn’t like and write it myself? Having studied English at Oxford and been a ‘secret writer’ for years meant that I thought I had the research and writing skills to give it a go – and my husband agreed that we would be able to manage on his salary alone for a year, so I handed in my notice and off I went.

I was extremely lucky in that, having given up my job at Christmas, in January I won a Twitter competition called Tweet Your Pitch, where a panel of agents and publishers spend a day reading book pitches on Twitter. From this I secured an agent, who advised me to develop a chapter-by-chapter plan for the book, and write the first two chapters – by early March 2017, so that she could take these to London Book Fair to put them under the nose of interested editors. Fortunately a few publishers were interested in the book, and after a very exciting auction, I signed with Granta.

2. How did you first become interested in knitting and wool?

It was a bit of a circuitous route… I was 5 when my father’s business went bankrupt, we lost our home, and moved from our modern semi-detached house to a tied farm cottage. The best thing about this was that we were now right next door to a working farm, and the farmer – a Mr Walford Arnold Griffiths – was happy to let me and my brothers ‘help’ out with the sheep. So his love of all things sheepy was a strong influence on me, as was my mother’s skill with fibre crafts. She was – and still is – a very accomplished spinner and weaver, and as young children we would pick up all the little grubby bits of wool from around the farm, wash them, and bring them to her to spin. The magic of this transformation never failed to amaze us! But it was my best friend’s mum who taught me knitting: mum’s spinning wheel and weaving loom were a bit too much for my little hands to manage, and so it was Suzanne – who made a lot of my best friend’s clothes – who first placed a pair of knitting needles in my hands. She also taught me to crochet – which I didn’t get on with.  But her daughter is a fantastic crocheter, so I think she’s pleased that we have both continued to develop the craft skills she taught us when we were children.

3. What was the most unusual knitted object you saw on your travels?

Definitely the funeral stockings I found in St Fagans museum in Wales. Very few of these have survived, but they were extremely common and used widely until the middle of the twentieth century. Although this was the first and only time I have seen a pair, I had read about funeral stockings in Bruce Chatwin’s On the Black Hill (1982), his fictional history of a Welsh family and their farm. Funeral stockings were knitted specifically for a person’s laying out, and, alongside a shroud and funeral cap, were laid aside for use after death. The red and cream pair I saw belonged to a woman called Eliza Lewis, and may well have formed part of her wedding trousseau; they were certainly knitted many years before her death, as it was only because she became ill with dropsy in later life that she was not buried in them.

4. Which knitting project are you proudest of?

I think I am most proud of having completed a gansey, a traditional fisherman’s style jumper. To knit it I had to buy specialist steel needles as it was so large and heavy – it weighs over a kilo and used almost kilometres of yarn – and took me pretty much an entire year to finish. But I was very aware of the tradition in which I was working, where generations of women from fishing communities had made these intricate and elaborately patterned garments, often knitting in almost complete darkness, and I was in complete awe of what they were able to make by feel alone.

5. Which celebrity knitters (past and present) might surprise us?

I think a lot of people know that Virginia Woolf was a knitter, but I was surprised to find that both Lytton Strachey and Adrian Stephen also plied their pins! Jean Harlow, Ginger Rogers, Vivien Leigh,– there seems to have hardly been a female star of the silver screen who didn’t wield her needles. And today Meryl Streep, Anjelica Houston, Uma Thurman and even Ryan Gosling all appear to be enthusiastic knitters.

6. What do you think the future of knitting is likely to be?

Hand-knitting is having something of a renaissance; as with the organic and ‘Slow Food’ movements, provenance and sustainability are really important concerns for the international knitting community. Many people are turning away from synthetic fibres because of the microplastics that leech from them, and wool, silk, cotton, linen and other natural fibres are growing in popularity. Racism and white bias is also a big issue in the craft world, and popular fibre website Ravelry has recently taken an important stand in refusing to allow material which promotes the racist politics of Donald Trump. So, like the original Luddites and les tricoteuses, knitters and knitting will continue to be an important and visible force for change in our world.

Why do people care about first editions?

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I went to a couple of bookshops while I was in London last weekend, and they were quite different. About the only thing they had in common was that they are pretty small.

First up was Archive Books, near Marylebone. I thought I hadn’t been there before, but this turned out not to be true. The website said they opened at 10.30am on a Saturday, and I was lurking outside around 10.15. That’s when I spotted a scrap of paper in the window saying that their Saturday opening hours were 11-5, so I sat in a little park around the corner and read a book. I came back at 11.10, when the owner was starting to put some boxes of discounted books.

In I went, and the quiet but friendly owner asked if I needed any help – no, said I, I was happy browsing. Which I was, though I couldn’t see all the shelves. The shop is tiny and the amount of stock is rather larger, so I couldn’t get to all the shelves. But I could get to the fiction and biography, and that’s what I was after really – I picked up R.C. Sherriff’s autobiography, No Leading Lady. Only later did I discover that I’d stumbled across rather a rare book. The cheapest copy online is about £75, and I paid £5 for mine. More importantly, I’m really keen to read it because I love the novels of his that I’ve read.

The copy was in very good condition, with an almost pristine dustjacket. I think it might have been a first edition, because I’m not sure that there was a second edition. It was only when I got home that I discovered I’d torn the back of the dustjacket quite significantly. One clumsy journey in my bag probably knocked off at least half its value. But I was more bothered that it was rather a shame that the dustjacket had survived for decades in the wild and less than a day in my hands. I felt bad. But I didn’t care about the value. I’m not planning on selling it.

Which takes me to the second shop I went to – The Second Shelf. You’ve probably heard about it, if you read some of the same blogs I do. I heard an enjoyable interview with the person who runs it, on The Book Club Review Podcast. In brief, it was set up to combat the marginalisation of women writers in the world of rare books and book collecting. There is a catalogue/periodical, and the bookshop has many fine editions of rare books.

It was a lovely space to be in. And lovely to see beautiful editions of so many authors I love – most of the books were from the 20th century. But I have to admit that I came away from the shelves feeling rather sad. So many wonderful books – probably to end up unread on somebody’s shelf. Because I can’t imagine there are many readers who will settle down with a cuppa and a novel if they’ve just spent £200 on that novel.

There is a small paperback section, including lots of Virago Modern Classics, where you can come away with something for a fiver. That’s brilliant. But the other novels I picked up had to be very carefully put back again. I’d love to try more Nancy Spain, and they had Murder, Bless It that I’ve been intending to read – but I’m not going to spend £400 trying it. I can’t imagine many people are. There was a Rose Macaulay I’d love to read – £250.

To be clear, this is an issue I have with the whole of book collecting and the rules that have arisen around it. Not just The Second Shelf. I think anything that gets equality in any area has to be lauded, and it’s good that the imbalance in the rare books business is being addressed. But I do still have any issue with books as commodities to be sealed away and kept pristine, worth more for their scarcity and condition than for their contents. My collection of books is dear to me because I love the books – but the 3,000 books I own are collectively worth substantially less than £3,000.

The reason it affected me in this shop is because these are the authors I love. I don’t care if a rare edition of Wordsworth is put in a case and never touched, because I don’t particularly want to read him. It feels closer to home if it’s Barbara Comyns or Dorothy Whipple. It’s not even that I want their books on my shelves – I had cheaper, tattier copies of the ones I saw there – but I want someone to be reading them.

Which does also bring me on the title of this blog post. I can understand people paying a lot for a book that is very hard to get hold of. I can even understand spending more for a signed book, because I like the sense of connection with the author. But I’ve never been able to get my head around a first edition being worth more than any other edition. Why does its being the first make it better than the second or seventeenth? The content is the same, and it’s quite possible that the cover art and other aesthetic elements are worse. It seems such an arbitrary way of designating value. I’d take a pretty reprint over an ugly first edition any day.

I suspect most readers of this blog will be readers first and collectors second (if at all). But I would be intrigued to know if there’s anybody who hankers after a first edition – and, if so, why?

And more power to Second Shelf, why not. I only hope that their well-off patrons are also keen readers, and don’t get too precious about damaging the books they buy.

The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg by Louis Bromfield

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I bought The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928) by Louis Bromfield back in 2011, after reading Rachel’s review of his novel Mrs Parkington. I do also own that novel, but had yet to read anything by Bromfield. Both would have qualified for Project Names, but the reason I picked up Annie Spragg was (a) because the title was so intriguing and (b) because I read a review that said it was like reading an Alfred Hitchcock film.

Well. Hmm.

This might be the worst structured novel I’ve ever read. Or cleverly experimental in a way that I really don’t understand. And yet it was sufficiently well written – in its constituent pieces – that I still liked it. All very confusing.

The novel opens with Mr Winnery, who is living in a small town in Italy and slowly, laboriously writing a long book about miracles. He believes there is always a rationale explanation for them, and that is the gist of his book – but it has taken him years, and he doesn’t imagine he’ll ever finish it. Instead, like almost all of the English-speaking society he moves in in Italy, he has stayed in this exile because he can’t afford to leave. The one wealthy woman is the doyenne of the society, Mrs Weatherby, and she has a matriarchly abusive relationship with her companion – who loathes her but cannot leave. Throw in some Roman Catholic colour – nuns, priest – and you have the contemporary set up. Annie Spragg is not part of this set, but she is known to them – an odd, sad older woman.

But when Annie Spragg dies, the nun attending her deathbed finds that stigmata have appeared on her. Her palms and feet bear the scars of nails; her side the sign of having been cut. A miracle has happened – she has the same scars as the resurrected Christ.

I think this is a fascinating set up for a novel, and I was enjoying reading about the group of ex-pats in Italy. There was enough tension for an interesting and moving novel. But instead…

For approximately the next two hundred pages, Bromfield gives us detailed, scattered portraits of other people. We do see a bit of Annie Spragg’s childhood – one of many daughters of the leader of a religious cult. I find this sort of painstaking flashback a little irritating, but worse was when he goes off into detail about characters we’ve not met yet. Often these would end with some tangential connection to the present day events, sometimes impacting them. Occasionally they’d only link to a whole other chapter of back story that would then link to the present – which we didn’t see, we just had to remember it existed.

It’s a patchwork of stories that all feel like they should have been notes he made, to work out a history in his head. But they are compiled in such a disjointed way that we have to wade through many pages that have no emotional connection for the reader, because we don’t have a clue who he’s talking about. Or we get a chapter of back story that could equally well have been achieved with a couple of sentences of context.

It’s frustrating, because his writing is excellent. He manages to get moments of dark humour and observational humour into the scenes, and is incisive about human behaviour. I was really enjoying the beginning – and, indeed, I really enjoyed the end, when we were back in the present. (And all is… sort of explained?) In each chunk, once he’d finally established where we were and what was going on, I enjoyed a lot. But it was all so maddeningly arranged.

Perhaps people had more patience in the 20s, or perhaps this was all a formal experiment in storytelling. It didn’t really pay off for me, not least because I had to wait so long before the characters I was interested turned up again. BUT – because the page-by-page writing was so good, I’m quite likely to give him another go sometime. And Mrs Parkington is still on the shelf.

This Golden Fleece by Esther Rutter

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Do I know anything about knitting? Absolutely not. Actually – caveat, I knew nothing about knitting before I picked up Esther Rutter’s This Golden Fleece. Now I know rather more!

Why did I request this rather off-brand review copy? Well, Esther is a good friend of mine – and if you flick to the acknowledgements, you’ll even find my name there. It seems quite odd to call her Esther, as I know her as Phoebe or Epsie, but I should probably go with what is on the cover.

Esther’s book falls into that genre that has become quite popular since H is for Hawk – of being about a topic, but also about researching that topic. This Golden Fleece is not as deeply confessional or emotional as some in the genre, but we do follow Esther as she travels up and down the country, learning about regional knitting practices, historical details, and other eccentricities in the world of wool devotees. And it’s clear that they do have a world – one that is very welcoming to others, and where strangers will enthuse to each other about their projects and crafty passions.

While this isn’t a deeply emotional book, it is certainly a personal one. Throughout the year, Esther reveals glimpses of her family life, and also discovers that she is pregnant along the way. Her attention turns from knitting a complicated gansey for her dad to creating clothes for her future daughter. Gathering wool for these projects, and covetously looking at expensive varieties, play out alongside visits to craftspeople and collectors who can reveal glimpses into knitting’s past. But there is a feeling that the past is not too far from the present. The world of wool has certainly changed, but not as dramatically as many other worlds. With two pieces of roughly identical wood and part of a sheep, you have something in common with many generations before you. (I use ‘you’ advisedly; I have no idea how to knit, even after reading the knits and purls of This Golden Fleece.)

Some of the most interesting bits include how knitting has been a revolutionary act – e.g. being used to record secrets as part of spying, a la A Tale of Two Cities – and, of course, how knitting came into its own as a method of protest as recently as the ‘pussy hats’ when Trump became President. The stereotype of the passive, harmless knitter-in-the-background looks flimsier and flimsier, doesn’t it?

Most importantly in this book, Esther writes very well. I would expect nothing less, having studied English alongside her – which also helps with the contextualising moments, where unexpected knitters like Virginia Woolf get tangential mentions. The whole thing is very winning and engaging, and Esther’s warm, lovely personality shines through. A wonderful gift for the knitter in your life (or, of course, yourself). And, if nothing else, look how beautiful that cover is!

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

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I read a second book for Women in Translation month, but didn’t get around to reviewing it. But here are some quick thoughts about Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen (2013), translated by David McDuff.

I read Boel Westin’s excellent biography of Tove Jansson when it was translated a few years ago. It was one of those times like buses, where you wait ages for a biography to come out and then two come at once. I’m not sure why I leaned towards the Westin – maybe it came out first? It was also the authorised biography, I believe, though I’m not sure I knew that at the time.

Karjalainen certainly didn’t go rogue with her lack-of-authorisation and spread all sorts of salacious rumours. Instead, she takes us on a journey through the work and love of the title. And it’s a steady, methodical journey.

I really enjoyed reading this book, but here is where we come across the main reason that I think Westin’s biography is better. Karjalainen compartmentalises Jansson’s life so thoroughly that it’s as though she were living four or five parallel lives, without overlap. She writes at length and sensitively about Jansson’s relationships with men and women, but at such length that for a while her career disappears completely. The Moomins are cautiously not addressed for half the book, except for an accidental stray mention that doesn’t make sense since she’s given no context. I can understand that this sort of makes sense, but it means jumping back and forth in time, and pretending that Jansson’s love life was completely unrelated to her career, or that her success as a strip cartoonist had little bearing on her painting. And so on and so forth. Then again, when I reviewed Westin’s book, I complained about repetition… maybe there’s no way to deal with the complexity and overlaps of Jansson’s life and career within the confines of a conventional biography.

I will add, in each of her compartmentalised areas Karjalainen writes interestingly – though leaning perhaps a little too much towards the ‘Jansson must have felt…’ school of biography. As with Westin’s, there isn’t as much about the adult books I love so much, but I suppose that’s inevitable. And thankfully, as with Westin’s book, there are lots of beautifully reproduced examples of the paintings being talked about – even if Karjalainen evidently didn’t know which would be there when she was writing it, as the composition of some paintings are described in unnecessary length when we can just looked at them on the page opposite.

Oh, and the book itself – beautiful! I love the design and the solidity of it. Surely one of the nicest-looking and -feeling books I have on my shelves.

Overall – yes, I’d forgotten enough about Jansson’s life since I read Westin’s biography that I enjoyed learning it all again. But for my money, if you only read one biography of Tove Jansson, this should be your second choice.