Second paragraph of third chapter:

Så vandrade de vidare, längre och längre in i tystnaden och mörkret. Småningom kände sig mumintrollet ängsligt och frågade viskande sin mamma om hon trodde det fanns några farliga djur därinne. “Knappast”, sa hon, “fast det är kanske bäst att vi går lite fortare i alla fall. Men jag hoppas att vi är så små att vi ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third story ("The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters" / "Filifjonkan som trodde på katastrofer"):

Then she soaped and rubbed further, to the next blue stripe, and the sun was warming her back, and she stood with her thin legs in the clear water, rubbing and rubbing.
Sen tvättade hon till nästa blåa rand och solen värmde hennes ( Read more... )

My regular reader knows well that I am slightly obsessed with the great Finnish writer Tove Jansson, whose Moomin books I enjoyed as a child and whose more mature fiction I have equally enjoyed in recent years. (And I also marvelled at her father’s statues of her.) So I have returned to five of the Moomin novels - not all, and a slightly arbitrary ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Äckligt, viskade Filifjonkan och skakade sin trasa. Hon lyfte upp fatet och klev ut genom fönstret för att tvätta utsidan.
“Horrid”, whispered Fillyjonk, and shook out her duster. She lifted up the bowl and climbed through the window to wash it from the outside.


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Second frame of third chapter ("Moomin and the Farm"):

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I went this morning with my older godson D (as opposed to my younger godson E), his other half S and their new baby L (the youngest of our grandfather's 24 great-grandchildren) to the Adventures in Moominland experience at the Southbank Centre. S is actually Finnish, so was particularly good company for this outing. You can't take pictures inside, ( Read more... )

By sheer coincidence, my Christmas goodies included two collections of short stories by two different lesbian authors, and I think it makes a neat pair to review together. Not, mind you, that the two collections have anything much more in common with each other than two collections both by straight men would have; it's more that the two of them ( Read more... )

(The Moomins, who normally hibernate, have been woken by a well-meaning neighbour and are trying to get to grips with Christmas. They have worked out that everyone is very anxious about it and that a fir tree is involved.) ‘Now keep quiet a moment, please, and let me think,’ Moominpappa said. ‘If the fir tree is to be dressed as beautifully as ( Read more... )

Second paragraph of third chapter: Tove's youth and her attitude towards her own life are perhaps best illustrated by the ex libris motto she created in 1947, and used from then on. The Latin phrase - labora et amare - is not quite correct grammatically, but its intended meaning is 'work and love'. It was characteristic of Tove to put work before ( Read more... )

A collection of short stories by the great Finnish writer, a surprising number of which are about psychological manipulation and trauma - something I picked up also in her novel, The True Deceiver; the most memorable here is "The Woman Who Borrowed Memories", itself the title of another collection, whose central character returns to visit an old ( Read more... )