My musings on Tove Jansson’s A Winter Book – a blend of short stories drawn from different collections

“You can close your mind to things if something is important enough. It works very well. You make yourself very small, shut your eyes tight and say a big word over and over again until you’re safe.”
– ‘The Stone’
(PART I: Snow)

A book about winter? A book of winter? A book set in the depths of winter, perhaps? Well, yes and no to all… And while I cannot definitively describe it as a book about people with winter in their hearts, Tove Jansson’s work always carries an element of melancholy, whatever the season.

I wonder if, after the success of The Summer Book in 1972 (which I am soon to cover), her publishers felt there should be a counterpart or companion volume of sorts. Ali Smith¹ says in her introduction that the selection aimed to give “as full a view as possible” of Jansson’s short stories, with “an array of pieces hard to find in English” at the time², but they are by no means all set in wintertime. As Smith points out: “The winter stories are largely town-based and the summer ones island-and-sea stories³.”

For once this wasn’t a re‑read as such – although I have previously come across most of these short pieces in other books – but as an assemblage of narratives selected with careful consideration from Tove Jansson’s oeuvre, the anthology melds wonderfully, forming a cohesive collection of the author’s personal favourites.

Its twenty stories are drawn from different points in her writing life and originally appeared across five collections published between 1968 and 1998 – all in Swedish. Seven appeared here in English for the first time, two of them – ‘The Boat and Me’ from Meddelande (Messages) and ‘Taking Leave’⁴ from the 1966 memoir‑cum‑log‑book Anteckningar från en ö (Notes from an Island) – never having appeared in English elsewhere before or since.

“I don’t like it when people find life difficult. It gives me a bad conscience and then I get angry and begin to feel that they might as well go somewhere else.”
– ‘The Spinster Who Had An Idea’
(PART II: Flotsam and Jetsam)

The pinnacle of the collection is, for me, the selected tales from her first autofictional work for adults, The Sculptor’s Daughter (Bildhuggarens dotter, 1968). Tove was in her early fifties when this, “one of her most dynamic works⁵,” was published, yet she remained throughout her life movingly in touch with her inner child – something Atos Wirtanen⁶ described as her “genius.”⁷

There are certainly several shiveringly wintry stories in parts I and II⁸, none more so than ‘The Iceberg’⁹, a disconcerting, almost mythic tale about a vast iceberg drifting up against a family’s island, first inspiring wonder and then unease. Their young daughter secretly believes it is waiting for her and sneaks out one night for a closer look. As it melts and moves on, it leaves her altered in subtle, unspoken ways.

The stories that follow continue to explore winter in its many moods: the isolating hush of snowbound islands, the sharp clarity of cold light and the strange, heightened awareness that comes with living close to the elements. In pieces such as ‘The Squirrel,’ ‘The Storm and ‘The Winter Bonfire,’ Tove turns frost and darkness into emotional landscapes, using the season not merely as backdrop but as a quiet catalyst for introspection – sometimes even fleeting enchantment. Each tale offers its own facet of winter’s character, from the eerie to the tender.

The warmer‑weather stories, such as ‘The Summer Child’, a tale about a visiting boy whose presence unsettles and amuses an island’s inhabitants, and ‘The Listener’, set in the warmth of late summer and following a young girl observing the adults around her with a mixture of curiosity and quiet insight, open the collection out into lighter, more varied emotional terrain, revealing Jansson’s gift for capturing the subtleties of everyday life.

Both summer and winter pieces move through childhood memories, artistic frustrations and small, piercing moments of human connection. Whether she is writing about family rituals or the gentle comedy of ordinary days, she brings the same precision and wry insight that animate all her short fiction, and together they provide a counterbalance.

“One is frantically busy with inessentials, while what is important and irreparable goes from bad to worse, duty and blame nibble away at us and the whole syndrome is vaguely labelled angst, a spiritual malaise one seldom succeeds in defining or even tries to define.”
– ‘Travelling Light’
(PART III: Travelling Light)

Read together, these stories form a portrait of a life lived close to nature, art and the shifting weather of human feeling. Overall, it is an excellent collection in which to dip one’s readerly toe before wading fully into Jansson’s adult writing. Incidentally, I finished it on the night of the Winter Solstice – it could not have been more perfect.

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My copy of A Winter Book is a softback edition published by Sort of Books in 2006, with a foreword by Scottish author Ali Smith. It was translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella, David McDuff and Kingsley Hart. Peter Dyer designed the cover. The photograph on the back is by Per Olov Jansson and the author portrait by Alf Lidman. There are afterwords¹⁰ by Philip Pullman, Esther Freud and Frank Cottrell Boyce.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tove Jansson was born in Helsinki on 9^th 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 Moomin books. 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 27^th June 2001 at the age of eighty-six.

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“Tove Jansson was a rare and extraordinary writer: a being seemingly composed equally of woman, nature spirit, sea creature and Moomin, whose consciousness was both equally local […] and generously universal”.
– ‘Afterwords’
(Philip Pullman)

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REFERENCE LIST

1. A Scottish author, playwright, academic and journalist who has often written and spoken about Tove Jansson, most notably in essays, introductions and public talks. Her interest, however, seems less scholarly than kindred, and she appears to recognise in Jansson’s work the same clarity and playfulness that shape her own writing.
2. A Winter Book was first published in 2006, five years after Jansson’s death and at a time when little of her adult fiction had been translated from Swedish into English.
3. ‘Introduction’, A Winter Book, Ali Smith, page 12.
4. Hildi Hawkins of Books from Finland later published these two pieces online at finlit.fi/booksfromfinland using the translations that first appeared in A Winter Book. 
5. ‘Introduction’, A Winter Book, Ali Smith, page 12.
6. Atos Wirtanen (1906-1979), a Finnish left-wing intellectual, journalist and member of Finnish parliament. He and Tove were close friends and lovers in the 1940s.
7. “You write for all ages […] You yourself are all ages, from youngest to eldest, and perpetually at the start of your life, which you have already lived many times over. There is a short and precise word for that: genius.” Letters From Tove, ‘Letters to Atos Wirtanen 1943-1971’, page 260, edited by Boel Westin.
8. “Parts I and II [of the book are] originally from the Sculptor’s Daughter, rearranged here seasonally into winter stories (Snow), then summer stories (Flotsam and Jetsam)” – from ‘Introduction’, A Winter Book, Ali Smith, page 13. We are also told on page 14 that the book: “modulates between winter and summer”.
9. ‘The Iceberg’, A Winter Book, Part II Flotsam and Jetsam, pages 73-77.
10. ‘Afterwords,’ A Winter Book, pages 206-208.

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Image of Tove Jansson © Moomin Characters™

Categories: Short Stories, Tove Jansson, Translated Literature

Tags: #ToveTrove, Ali Smith, David McDuff, Esther Freud, Finnish Literature, Finnish Short Fiction, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Kingsley Hart, Nordic Literature, Philip Pullman, Short Story Collection, Silvester Mazzarella, Tove Trove, Winter Reading