Known for her hippo-like animals the Moomins, featured in a cartoon strip and many books for children, Finnish author Tove Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, though they were never published in the United States. In this new compilation, NYRB Classics has pulled together 26 short stories from five of her collections (translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal and Silvester Mazzarella), bringing her inventive characters to a wider audience.
Written between 1971 and 1998, most of the stories are set in the Finnish countryside, where the weather plays an important role, almost as if it were another character. Animals and their interactions with humans are also prevalent, and Jansson's scenarios allow something as innocent as a squirrel to undermine the day-to-day routine of a woman living on an island ("The Squirrel") or the taxidermy animals in a museum to take on new life ("The Wolf").
Jansson often twists her plots in surprising ways to leave readers pondering the complexity of human relationships, and her stories end at precise moments, though they're not altogether conclusive. In "The Doll's House," two men who have shared an apartment for 20 years suddenly find themselves at odds as one begins to build an elaborate doll house to fill the long days of his retirement. Tension and jealousy increase, building to an ugly altercation, when another man is enlisted to help. Complex, intriguing and haunting, Jansson's unusual short fiction is bound to enchant an English-speaking audience just as it did a Swedish-speaking one many years ago. --Lee E. Cart, freelance writer and book reviewer