The Listener

by Tove Jansson

  She read through her list and suddenly it was an inventory in a foreign language and seemed completely alien. Shear pins, mobilat ointment, powdered milk, batteries, a catalogue of strange, unreal items. The only thing that mattered was the bits of timber, whether there’d been six or seven. She took her measuring tape and torch and went down to the shore again. The shore was barren, completely clean. There were no pieces of timber at all, not one. The sea had risen and taken them.

  She was utterly amazed. She stood at the shoreline and shone her torch down into the water. The beam broke the surface and lit up a grey-green watery cavern that grew darker as it went down and was filled with very small, indistinct particles that she had never noticed before. She shone the beam further out over the water and into the darkness. And there the weak cone of light captured colour, a clear yellow colour, a varnished wooden boat drifting away on the breeze.

  She did not understand right away that it was her own boat. She just stared at it, noticing for the first time the helpless, dramatic bobbing of a drifting boat, an empty boat. And then she saw that the boat wasn’t empty. The squirrel sat on the rear thwart, staring blindly straight into the light. It looked like a piece of cardboard, a dead toy.

  She made half a movement to take off her boots but stopped. The torch lay on the rock and was shining at an angle down through the water, a rampart of swollen seaweed that swayed as the sea level rose, then darkness where the rock curved downwards. The boat was too far out. It was too cold. It was too late. She took a careless step and the torch slid into the water. It did not go out; it stayed on as it sank along the side of the rock face, a smaller and smaller vanishing light that illuminated quick glimpses of a ghostly brown landscape with moving shadows, and then there was nothing but darkness.

  “You damned squirrel, you,” she said slowly and with admiration. She stood there in the darkness in continuing astonishment, a little weak in the legs and vaguely aware that now everything was radically altered.

  Eventually she found her way back across the island. It took a long time. It was only when she closed the door behind her that she felt relief, a great, elated relief. All decisions had been taken from her. She no longer needed to hate the squirrel or worry about it. She didn’t need to write about the squirrel, didn’t need to write about anything at all. Everything was decided, everything solved, with a clear and unconditional simplicity.

  It had begun to snow outside. It snowed thick and quiet. Winter had come. She put more wood on the fire and turned up the lamp. She sat down at the kitchen table and started to write, very rapidly.

  On a windless day in November, shortly after sunrise, she saw a person at the landing place.

  Also by Tove Jansson

  THE SUMMER BOOK

  “The Summer Book is a marvellously uplifting read, full of gentle humour and wisdom.” Justine Picardie, Daily Telegraph

  An elderly artist and her six-year-old granddaughter while away a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other’s fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges – one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself. Written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom, The Summer Book is a profoundly life-affirming story. Tove Jansson captured much of her own life and spirit in the book, which was her favourite of her adult novels. This edition has a foreword by Esther Freud.

  A WINTER BOOK

  “As smooth and odd and beautiful as sea-worn driftwood, as full of light and air as the Nordic summer. We are lucky to have these stories collected at last.” Philip Pullman

  A Winter Book features thirteen stories from Tove Jansson’s first book for adults, The Sculptor’s Daughter (1968), along with seven of her most cherished later stories (from 1971 to 1996). Drawn from youth and older age, this selection by Ali Smith provides a thrilling showcase of the great Finnish writer’s prose, scattered with insights and home truths. It is introduced by Ali Smith, and there are afterwords by Philip Pullman, Esther Freud and Frank Cottrell Boyce.

  FAIR PLAY

  “So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm – and discreetly radical. At first sight it looks autobiographical. Like everything Jansson wrote, it’s much more than it seems … Fair Play is very fine art.” From Ali Smith’s introduction

  What mattered most to Tove Jansson, she explained in her eighties, was work and love, a sentiment she echoes in this tender and original novel. Fair Play portrays a love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side by side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other’s creativity, we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.

  THE TRUE DECEIVER

  “I loved this book. It’s cool in both senses of the word, understated yet exciting … the characters still haunt me.” Ruth Rendell

  In the deep winter snows of a Swedish hamlet, a strange young woman fakes a break-in at the house of an elderly artist in order to persuade her that she needs companionship. But what does she hope to gain by doing this? And who ultimately is deceiving whom? In this portrayal of two women encircling each other with truth and lies, nothing can be taken for granted. By the time the snow thaws, both their lives will have changed irrevocably.

  TRAVELLING LIGHT

  “Jansson’s prose is wondrous: it is clean, deliberate; an aesthetic so certain of itself it’s breathtaking.” Kirsty Gunn, Daily Telegraph

  Travelling Light takes us into new Tove Jansson territory. A professor arrives in a beautiful Spanish village only to find that her host has left and she must cope with fractious neighbours alone; a holiday on a Finnish island is thrown into disarray by an oddly intrusive child; an artist returns from abroad to discover that her past has been eerily usurped. With the deceptively light prose that is her hallmark, Tove Jansson reveals to us the precariousness of a journey – the unease we feel at being placed outside of our millieu, the restlessness and shadows that intrude upon a summer.

  ART IN NATURE

  An elderly caretaker at a large outdoor exhibition, called Art in Nature, finds that a couple have lingered on to bicker about the value of a picture; he has a surprising suggestion that will resolve both their row and his own ambivalence about the art market. A draughtsman’s obsession with drawing locomotives provides a dark twist to a love story. A cartoonist takes over the work of a colleague who has suffered a nervous breakdown only to discover that his own sanity is in danger. In these witty, sharp, often disquieting stories, Tove Jansson reveals the faultlines in our relationship with art, both as artists and as consumers. Obsession, ambition, and the discouragement of critics are all brought into focus in these wise and cautionary tales.

  Copyright

  The Listener © Tove Jansson 1971; first published as Lyssnerskan

  by Schildts Förlags Ab, Finland.

  English translation © Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books 2014

  All rights reserved

  Thanks to Sophia Jansson for her encouragement and advice.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher except for the quotation of brief passages in reviews.

  This English translation first published in 2014 by

  Sort Of Books, PO Box 18678, London NW3 2FL.

  Typeset in Goudy and Gill Sans to a design by Henry Iles.

  Sort of Books gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of FILI – Finnish Literature Exchange

  160pp.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1908745361