A descent into Tove Jansson’s most disquieting apocalyptic vision
“Kristian lay on his mattress listening as Emily barricaded them in and he couldn’t stop thinking that she was enjoying herself – almost enjoying herself.”
– Tove Jansson (Shopping)
In this post I should like to offer something a little different from the usual Tove Trove fare. I am going to discuss one of Tove Jansson’s short stories as a stand‑alone entity rather than delve into the full collection from which it has been taken – that being most certainly for another time.
The story I have chosen to share with you was written at some point in the late 1980s, when Jansson was exploring psychological landscapes rather than the fantastical worlds of the Moomins. However, in this instance I am lifting the fictional piece from The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy – and not from the collection in which it first appeared.
Shopping1 was originally part of Resa med lätt bagage (in its earliest Swedish-language form), Tove’s 1987 short-story collection. The tale reached English readers for the first time in 2005 through the Dedalus anthology, translated by David Hackston, and was later retranslated by Silvester Mazzarella for the first English edition of Travelling Light in 2010.
The Story
It is clear from the outset that some sort of catastrophic event has taken place; what that is we never can be sure, because we aren’t told, but its impact appears vast and ruinous, as though civilisation has been destroyed as far as the eye can see – and quite possibly extinguished across the world. The protagonists certainly don’t seem to anticipate being rescued.
Two people – a husband and wife, Kristian and Emily – have taken refuge in what is left of their home, but he is confined to a mattress on the floor, having injured his leg. She sets out early every morning with her shopping bag to visit the grocer’s (“shards of glass crackling under her shoes” as she makes her way over the rubble) to the reeking store where the shelves are all but empty due to “they”, the ones who come for the tinned goods. These days she is fortunate to find pickled cabbage, a handful of candles and a washing-up brush. Meanwhile, the sky becomes ever more overcast with each passing day…
The couple metaphorically dance around each other, neither one daring to speak openly about what has happened – but for very different reasons. He is afraid to upset her by asking too many questions, and she prefers not to think too deeply about any of it – chatting to him as if it were any normal day before it occurred – though she clearly dreads meeting those “tiny specks” glimpsed on the horizon, “moving deliberately”, coming ever closer “across the changed cityscape, the diminished suburb” she calls home – so very little of it now left. She flees at the sight of them, terrified they will take her meagre provisions.
Emily has covered the only window in their kitchen – the room in which they live – but Kristian is desperate for light, desperate for information, desperate to know what is happening outside. This is a source of friction between the couple. He asks about her day. She is evasive. This is how they live as they gradually run short of matches, orange juice and life-sustaining supplies. Eventually he snaps.
What is Tove trying to tell us with this dark little story? She wrote it during a period when her world was shrinking as she grew older and she longed for silence and serenity2. Does the narrative in some ways reflect her state of mind? Perhaps there were times when she felt desolate, helpless even, as her enthusiasm for adventure waned and she stopped working at the easel. Her official biographer, Boel Westin, has described this part of her life as a “time of words”3, when her writing took over from her painting, although she did relish the “freedom and emptiness in the studio.” We also know from previous works that her thoughts sometimes turned to war and nuclear destruction – especially so in The Moomins and the Great Flood (1945) and Comet in Moominland (1946).
What we can be certain of, however, is that this discombobulating tale in the realms of speculative fiction exposes the way people might behave when social norms fall away. It gives little away, raising more questions than it answers, but you would expect nothing less from the pen of Tove Jansson.
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The Collection
“Statistically Finns are among the most literate people in the world.”
– Johanna Sinisalo (Introduction)
Since it is such a wonderfully idiosyncratic, often satirical assortment of stories, I feel I must at least share a few rudimentary details about the Dedalus anthology. There are contributions from a wide range of Finnish authors – twenty in total – including the likes of Arto Paasilinna, Juhani Peltonen, Erno Paasilinna and Satu Waltari – and it brings together an eclectic mix of fantasy literature in translation.
The editor, Johanna Sinisalo (born 1958), a Finnish science fiction and fantasy writer who is described as “one of the leading Finnish authors of her generation”, has included a story of her own in the collection: Transit – a work first published in the short story anthology Ensimmäinen yhteys (‘First Contact’, 1988). She has written numerous novels, short stories, essays and comic strips, including Troll – A Love Story, which was awarded the Finlandia Prize in 2000. You can read my thoughts on the Pushkin Press edition published in 2024 (Don’t Feed the Trolls).
It is the sort of book I will continue to pick up whenever the opportunity arises.
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My copy of The Dedalus Book of Finnish Fantasy is a softback edition published by Dedalus Books in 2010 and translated by David Hackston4. The cover was designed by graphic designer and photographer Marie Lane and depicts The Wounded Angel (1903) by Finnish symbolist painter and graphic artist Hugo Simberg (1873-1917) – a work that was voted Finland’s ‘national painting’ in a public vote organized by Ateneum in 2006. This volume includes a three-page introduction by the editor.
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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 Moomin books, later going 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 eighty-six.
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NOTES
Jansson used the English loanword ‘shopping’ as the title of the story in her original 1987 collection Resa med lätt bagage. Swedish, like many languages, freely adopts English nouns for modern activities, and shopping is one of the most common, appearing in Swedish newspapers, magazines, advertising and everyday speech from at least the 1970s onward. Tove’s adult fiction often utilised English words when they felt culturally or atmospherically right. The story Shopping is about a mundane activity in a world that has collapsed, so it is fair to surmise that she chose a modern, slightly commercial English word to lend a faintly ironic, contemporary edge – creating a contrast between the triviality of the act and the devastation surrounding it.- “‘Silence’, ‘serenity’, ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ – these were the words Tove was using to describe her life.” Tove Jansson: Life Art Words by Boel Westin (translated from Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella), Chapter 17: ‘A Time for Words’, p. 477.
- “The Painter Jansson had laid down her brushes, knives and palette, but even so [she] worked on pictures and visual thinking in film scripts […], drama and exhibitions. But she was not always allowed to join in [despite very much wanting to] help with the film The True Deceiver [– a script based on her 1982 book of the same name] but had to be content with reading about it in a newspaper.” Tove Jansson: Life Art Words, Chapter 17: ‘A Time for Words’, p.476.
- “David Hackston is a British translator of Finnish and Swedish literature and drama. He graduated from University College London in 1999 with a degree in Scandinavian studies and now lives in Helsinki, where he works as a freelance translator.” Dedalus Books, Our Authors and Translators: David Hackston.
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Seldom do my projects and literary challenges align, so it is with pleasure that I add this post to Short Story September 2026.
Image of Tove Jansson © Moomin Characters™
Categories: Fantasy Fiction, Short Stories, Tove Jansson, Translated Literature
Fascinating stuff.
Thank you, Josie. Glad you think so. 🤗
Fascinating, Paula! I read “Travelling Light” back in 2015 but can’t remember specifics – I may have to revisit!!
Thank you, Kaggsy. It’s a great collection. I would need to re-read the TL version of Shopping again to see if the two versions are alike (bound to have differences with separate translators). 😊
This isn’t one I’ve read, it sounds excellent. I’ll have to look out for Travelling Light.
Well, I know I’m biased, but I think everything TJ has done is excellent (some books more excellent than others, obviously). 😉
Thank you, Paula, for an excellent article. I am learning from our discussion that Jove Jansson allows darkness and light coexist in her work. She does not seem interested in protecting the reader from difficult possibilities. I can see why her writing can feel so unsettling at times. From what I have learned (and I have a lot more to learn) she understands and foresees the consequences of the environments humanity creates for itself. I loved seeing Hugo Simberg’s The Wounded Angel on the cover. It feels entirely at home in this conversation.
That’s so true. Those two sides to her work were representative of her as a person, I think. There was the Tove who took great delight in the world around her and the other, more melancholy character – typically Nordic, I suppose. I find it fascinating. Ahh yes, that painting is really powerful. Thank you so much for your thoughtful comments, Rebecca.