A Word in Your Shell-Like… #ToveTrove

My musings on Tove Jansson’s first adult short story collection, The Listener

“Letters, gifts, and affection’s glossy greetings are important. But the ability to listen face to face is even more important, a great and rare art.”
– ‘The Listener’

After the Moomins came The Listener.

Expectations ran high as publication day loomed but there were misgivings. Why discard such a wildly successful series at the peak of its popularity? Simply put, Tove Jansson was desperate to move on.

In 1970, at the age of 55, Tove lost her mother and shortly thereafter released her final Moomin book: the introspective and sombre Moominvalley in November. The following year, during a discussion about designing the cover for her forthcoming title, she wrote to her editor: “[…] a person can feel a chill wind blowing round her legs as she emerges from a Moomin valley”.¹ Not only was this her maiden adult short story collection but also her first book of any sort following the widely adored Moomin stories. Nevertheless, as it came off the press, she and Tooti² left Helsinki for Japan³ on a “Big Trip [they had] dreamt of for so long”. In fact, by the time the first copy was printed, they were already far, far away.

The Listener⁴ was a dramatic departure from her Hemulens, Fillyjonks and other eccentric beings – the writing was oblique and impressionistic compared to the usual uncomplicated lyrical prose beloved of her audience – however, upon closer inspection, there were subtle similarities. There were no illustrations but, as scholars have since noted, the presence of “absent illustrations”⁵ were palpable and the text continued to weave-in visual narration and recurring motifs like storms, solitude, aging and islands.

To begin with, reviewers were unsure what to make of the collection. When first published in English, it was described by Jane Housham as “fragmentary, starting and stopping in the middle of things, concerned more with situations than plots, and never going for clever twists or the flourish of a neat ending.” Whilst true, with The Listener Jansson was able to explore themes such as memory and changing concepts of selfhood, frequently using characters who were isolated or emotionally distant. Essentially, it was a darker, quieter, more complex version of Moominvalley, though not without humour.

“She had achieved ‘well-earned world fame’ […] and having [moved on, it was observed] that the enchanter who had created the Moomin world was now writing short stories and novels about the difficulties, sufferings, obsessions and desires of human beings, but that she was also able to write about human happiness was difficult to take.”
– Boel Westin⁶

The Listener contains eighteen stories that delve into nuanced emotional themes, offering understated yet profound insights. In ‘The Birthday Party’, a woman’s attempts to organise a children’s party underscores her loneliness and longing for connection. Similarly, ‘The Storm’ utilises a city beset by adverse weather as an allegory for emotional turbulence and strength. Each narrative succinctly encapsulates complex lives within concise, evocative moments. Most powerfully, ‘The Rain’ reflects on her mother’s recent passing in “a short, intensely intimate text about an old lady’s death in a hospital near the sea.”⁷

In Finland, squirrels hold spiritual importance in folklore, where they are sometimes seen as omens of bad luck. Tove appears to have incorporated this symbolism into her writing – most memorably, with the squirrel’s death in Moominland Midwinter (1957), which left a lasting impression on readers. Here too, in ‘The Squirrel’, the final story in the collection, the animal of the title both enables and interrupts the solitude essential for writing, which is crucial for author and protagonist. This, I feel, is a subject that merits a post unto itself.

On rereading The Listener for the third time, I am reminded of how profoundly human these whimsical and unsettling stories are. It is a significant work in the Tovian⁸ oeuvre and is now rightly appreciated by critics and followers alike.

“Autumn by the sea had not turned out to be the autumn she’d expected. There had been no storms. The island withered quietly.”
– ‘The Squirrel’

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My copy of The Listener (purchased from Blackwell’s) is a softback edition, published by Sort of Books in 2014 and translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal.⁹ The cover was designed by Peter Dyer. It is dedicated to Tove’s eldest brother, Per Olov Jansson.¹⁰

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9th August 1914, the daughter of a Swedish-Finnish father who worked as a sculptor and a Swedish-born mother who was a graphic designer. She first trained as an artist and made a name for herself in her homeland as a painter and cartoonist. She became internationally famous after creating the Moomins. She later went on to write novels and short fiction for adults. She worked in her Helsinki studio, moving to a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland during the summer months with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. She died on 27th June 2001 at the age of 86.

“No one can depict desolation who hasn’t inhabited desolation and observed it very closely. Things condemned have a terrible beauty.”
– ‘The Listener’

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REFERENCE LIST

1. From a letter to her editor, Åke Runnquist of Bonniers publishing house in Stockholm, 8 June 1971, page 476, Letters From Tove, edited by Boel Westin.
2. Tuulikki Pietilä (Tooti) was Tove Jansson’s partner and creative collaborator for nearly five decades. Their relationship, which started in the mid-1950s, was marked by mutual support and independence.
3. “They set off in October 1971, [just as Tove’s] new short-story collection The Listener came out. She managed to escape [its] reception […] (she kept the reviews to read after she got home). This was a relief.” Quoted from the authorised biography Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, Boel Westin, published in English by Sort of Books, 2014, page 427, Chapter 16 – ‘Journeys with Tove’. Translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella.
4. First published in 1971 as Lyssnerskan by Schildts Förlags, a Swedish-language publisher in Finland.
5. See “Absent Illustrations” in The Listener: Visual Narration Across Tove Jansson’s Authorship, Ida Moen Johnson, June 2018. An abstract can be found at Barnboken, 41, http://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v41i0.355.
6. From The Listener by Tove Jansson review – odd, disturbing stories from the Moomins’ author, The Guardian, 22 August 2014.
7. From Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words, pages 444-445, Chapter 16 – ‘Journeys with Tove’.
8. Tovian (adjective) relating to or characteristic of the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson or her oeuvre (‘the text is Tovian in tone’).
9. Thomas Teal has won the Rochester Best Translated Book Award and the Bernard Shaw Prize for his translations of Tove Jansson’s fiction.
10. Per Olov Jansson (1920–2019) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish photographer who took many pictures of his sister.

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Images of Tove Jansson © Moomin Characters™