An end of week recap
“People respected one if one didn’t talk. They believed that one knew a great many things and led a very exciting life.”
–Tove Jansson (Tales from Moominvalley)
This is a post in which I summarise books read, reviewed and currently on my TBR shelf. In addition to a variety of literary titbits, I look ahead to forthcoming features, see what’s on the nightstand and keep readers abreast of various book-related happenings.
CHATTERBOOKS >>
If you are planning a reading event, challenge, competition, or anything else likely to be of interest to the book blogging community and its followers, please let me know. I will happily share your news here with the fabulous array of bibliowonks who read this weekly wind up.
* A Brief Summation of Moomin Week (So Far) *
What a wonderful week this has been, filled to bursting with Moominfervour!
I am quite sure just about everyone must be aware that Mallika Ramachandran (Literary Potpourri) and Chris Lovegrove (Calmgrove) are hosting Moomin Week – a celebratory reading event (in honour, would you believe, of my impending wedding) focused on Tove Jansson’s extraordinary trolls. The fun started last Monday with And… It’s Troll Time, an early warning post from our mistress of ceremonies in which she invited everybody to get involved, and from thereon in, the moominfeatures flowed.
“Above all it is the sheer character diversity of the valley’s inhabitants that delight…”
– Chris Lovegrove (reviewing Moominland Midwinter)
Chris’s The world asleep appeared early on Monday morning containing his thoughts on the sixth book in the series, Moominland Midwinter, or Trollvinter, first published in 1957. Here, he expresses concern for Moomintroll who may be “suffering from seasonal affective disorder” after waking abnormally early from hibernation and emerging miserably into a “white wasteland”. I found Chris’s comments regarding symbolism especially fascinating in this piece.
“I picked up Moominsummer Madness expecting a light-hearted frolicking story but found unexpected depths.”
– Mallika’s Mum (enjoying Moominsummer Madness)
Not far behind was Book Review: Moominsummer Madness (1954) by Tove Jansson, a delightful guest post from Mallika’s mother, in which she shares her childhood memories of “getting up early in the morning well before the rest of the family, climbing on the arm of the sofa to reach the bolt of the French windows [to collect] the newspaper thrown on the verandah” – The Statesman, it would seem, which apparently ran “a three- frame cartoon strip on the Moomins.” Fifty years later, she “visited Helsinki and entered a Gift Shop to find a two-foot high, velvety soft stuffed toy, Moominpappa,” which was the moment when she “finally got the Finn connection.” Wonderful stuff!
“…my re-read has definitely reinforced my feeling that there’s a lot built into these books for both children and adults.”
– Karen Langley (rereading Comet in Moominland)
From Karen Langley at Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings came “…comets can go absolutely anywhere…”, a re-examination of Comet in Moominland, published in 1946, and the story in which we first meet “many of the main characters in the series, such as Snufkin and the Snork Maiden (with whom Moomintroll is completely enamoured…)”. Whilst rereading, it occurred to Karen this book is “very much an odyssey, with the characters travelling through strange landscapes and unexpected dangers to find out about the comet which is approaching the earth.” She is struck by the character’s anxiety when they think they may not “get safely back to Moominvalley in time, and [fear] everyone will be wiped out by the impending peril.”
“She felt that the shadows of war were taking away all the colours from the world (which explains the muted sepia watercolours and pen and ink drawings used throughout this story)”
– Bronwyn (on The Moomins and the Great Flood)
Over at This Reading Life (also fondly known as Brona’s Books), Bronwyn tackled The Moomins and the Great Flood. First published in 1945 as Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen, it was a sort of prelude to the main series, since few major characters other than the main family members make an appearance. We learn that Tove drafted this story “during the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union in 1939/40 when it was easy to feel that everything was ‘completely pointless’ – it was therefore put to one side until the “creative urge to write something happy kicked in” and a Moomin “origin story” was born.
“…nothing wrong with a search for innocence, but somehow I felt Pooh Bear did the same thing only better.”
– Frances Spurrier (feeling underwhelmed by Finn Family Moomintroll)
Sad to say, not everyone was smitten with Tove’s trolls. For instance, Frances Spurrier of Volatile Rune had misgivings, which she shared in Rune in Moominland after reading two titles for the event. She started with “Finn Family Moomintroll before moving on to Moominvalley in November, “the final Moomin book, written by the author [in] 1970.” The first, she says, “seemed like a cosy and sweet tale of some hippo like creatures addressed to very young children where the butterflies are golden and all is innocence.” She admits to feeling unengaged, “especially with the slightly pedantic language.” Oh dear! However, she much preferred Moominvalley in November, describing it as suitable for “a slightly older child”, such as herself. Indeed, she rather “liked Fillyjonk [empathising] with her obsessions, her phobias, her loneliness and her refusal to be cute.”
“Moominmamma with her iconic handbag is always there to lay another place at the table…”
– Liz Dexter (reflecting on Finn Family Moomintroll)
Since childhood, Liz Dexter from Adventures in reading, running and working from home has always been “a little nervous of the Moomins”, not really taking to their “blobby forms” – thus, she “steered clear of the Moomintroll family and their friends” for many years. Happily, she overcame her moominphobia long enough to read what she felt “was perhaps the least alarming of the books”, namely Finn Family Moomintroll. Described here as a tale containing numerous “small adventures, [including] finding a magical hat” which, when placed on one’s head, causes “odd spells” to occur, this third book in the series from 1948 gave Liz the impression “that the wonders of nature, meeting different people and being kind and accommodating are the important things of life” – and although feeling “a little nonplussed” by this “whimsical tale,” she admits to quite liking it really.
I thoroughly enjoyed devouring every #MoominWeek post, but of course, the event isn’t quite over. So, here I will stop before my moominsummary becomes too unwieldly and I will share more with you next Saturday (exactly one week before my wedding).
* Irresistible Items *
Umpteen fascinating articles appeared on my bookdar last week. I generally make a point oftweeting/x-ing(not to mention tooting and bsky-ing) a few favourite finds (or adding them to my Facebook group page), but in case you missed anything, there follows a selection of interesting snippets:
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The Observer: The best new novels for autumn 2024, from Sally Rooney to Jonathan Coe and Haruki Murakami – “The biggest names are back in a stellar season for fiction, with rip-roaring feminist horror, revenge tales, family sagas, spy romps and more. Here’s [Anthony Cummins with the paper’s] essential guide.”
JSTOR Daily: “The Crocodile,” Dostoevsky’s Weirdest Short Story – “Why being eaten by a crocodile named Little Karl is really a lesson in the dangers of foreign capital,” finds Emily Zarevich.
Beyond Bloomsbury: Katherine & Virginia: Friends or Foes? – Virginia Woolf once wrote, “Katherine Mansfield has dogged my steps for three years.” Victoria K. Walker examines a friendship that was sometimes “tainted with misunderstanding and jealousy.”
Publishers Weekly: The Big Indie Books of Fall 2024 – “Independent presses keep up the good fight in a fall season full of bold and inventive offerings,” says Matt Seidel.
The Markaz Review: All That Rage: On Comma Press’ Egypt +100 – “What is the work of the writer when sci-fi is already being exploited to further the most reactionary political ends?” Alex Tan reviews Egypt +100: Stories from a Century after Tahrir.
China Books Review: Where the River Reaches Home – “Three recent books narrate family histories that flow over time and space. But when identities evolve across borders, language holds the memory that carries us back to where we came from,” writes Yangyang Cheng.
The Public Domain Review: Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard – “When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin explore this paradoxical sign of interiority and find a class of image that traverses the poles of absorption and theatricality.”
Metropolis: A Fantastical Adventure from Medieval Japan – Takaoka’s Travels – In Eric Margolis’s piece about Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s Takaoka’s Travels (newly translated by David Boyd), we are told of “dreams, desires and delusional thoughts on a journey far west.”
The Literary Edit: Elizabeth Day’s Desert Island Books – Lucy Pearson’s Desert Island Books features “a book whose protagonist Elizabeth [Day] says is one of the great fictional heroines, and the quintessential New York novel…”
Asymptote: Risgröt or juk? On Han Kang’s We Do Not Part and Translating Between Small Languages – Linnea Gradin writes: “[Indirect translation] obscures the specific challenges that arise in Korean-Swedish translations, and thus the joy of these two languages meeting.”
Scroll.in: ‘If I was a believer, I’d talk like him’: Why MG Vassanji wrote a novel about physicist Abdus Salam – Mandira Nayar talks to Canadian writer M. G. Vassanji, author of Everything There Is – “a novel about the Partition, fundamentalism, and finding solace in the laws of science.”
Chicago Review of Books: Ghosts, Womanhood, and Intrigue in “Mystery Lights” – Meredith Boe reviews Mystery Lights, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection set in America’s Southwestern desert region, in which women and girls navigate dangers both supernatural and existential.
The Conversation: Here’s why more Australian scientists should team up with authors on books about animals – It would seem, engaging and scientifically accurate children’s books on Australian animals are sorely lacking. Fostering more collaboration between authors and scientists can enrich children’s literature.
Open: Chronicles from Kalinga – Sampad Patnaik discovers Manu Dash paints a “portrait of Odisha through its literature” in The Big Book of Odia Literature.
Commonweal: When Hitchens Was Good – Morten Høi Jensen on A Hitch in Time: Reflections Ready for Reconsideration: “A new collection highlights the contrarian essayist at the top of his form.”
Defector: The New Trend In Book Covers Is Old-Timey Animals – The ‘book blob’ cover trend could be on its way out according to Patrick Redford – we are now in the era of “old-timey animals.”
The Washington Post: As this millennium began, books reflected tragedies and anxieties – “Both nonfiction and fiction were colored by 9/11 and the other tumultuous events of the 2000s,” recalls Francine Prose.
Independent: Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich and Jason Reynolds among finalists for $50,000 Kirkus Prizes – Finalists for the 2024 Kirkus Prize have been revealed, with 18 books contending for one of the richest annual literary awards in the world.
Words Without Borders: A Rolled-up Paper Gun – “Polish scholar and essayist Małgorzata Gorczyńska considers the differences between Eastern European and Western ways of reading—not only literature but also the world and history.”
World Literature Today: Breaking Gendered Expectations in Japanese Lit – “Though it’s impossible to say which generation of Japanese women writers has had a larger influence on literature domestically and internationally, the noticeable changes from twentieth- to twenty-first-century writers reflects the continued presence and importance of feminism internationally as women continue to move out of the spaces given to them within a male-dominated field,” says Allison L. McClung.
CBC Books: 64 Canadian fiction books to read in fall 2024 – A selection of new Canadian novels and short story collections coming out this autumn.
Electric Literature: 7 Books About Argentina’s “Disappeared” – Rebecca J. Sanford, author of The Disappeared, “recommends memoirs and novels that illuminate the lives of those captured during the military dictatorship.”
CBS News: The tiny N.Y. town where bookstores rule – The small town of Hobart in the Catskills region of New York has remodelled itself on Hay-on-Wye in Wales and now boasts seven bookstores.
Literary Hub: How Weimar Berlin Inspired Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles – In an excerpt from Christopher Isherwood: Inside Out, Katherine Bucknell writes of the “tumultuous world that made the novella and its protagonist.”
3:AM Magazine: From the Other Side – Patrick Autréaux on The Sorrow of War, the only novel by Vietnamese author Bao Ninh.
Interview: Nadya Tolokonnikova Tells Vladimir Sorokin About Life Inside a Russian Prison – Contemporary postmodern Russian writer of novels, short stories and plays, Vladimir Sorokin and puss* Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova in conversation.
Oprah Daily: The Funeral Crasher – “In the 20 years since Alix Strauss debuted [The Joy of Funerals,] her groundbreaking short-story collection about a woman who crashes funerals in search of connection, the post-pandemic world has finally caught up to her message.”
Reactor: The Timely “Why” of The War of the Worlds — From Wells and Welles to Pal and Spielberg – “Every major adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel offers a unique window into the time it was made, from late ’30s pre-war anxieties to the present day…”
Taipei Times: Making literary waves – “Translator Joshua Dyer talks [to Thomas Bird] about what’s hot in contemporary Taiwanese literature.”
Radio Havana Cuba: Cuban president talks with Nigerian Nobel Literature Prize winner Wole Soyinka – Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka received the Haydée Santamaría Medal from Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez at a ceremony in Havana.
The MIT Press Reader: ‘The Cheese and the Worms’: Carlo Ginzburg Launches Microhistory – Francesca Trivellato on Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms – “the now-classic tale of a sixteenth-century miller facing the Roman Inquisition, and its influence in the field of microhistory.”
The Guardian: Strange and wondrous creatures: plankton and the origins of life on Earth – “Without plankton, the modern ocean ecosystem – the very idea of the ocean as we understand it – would collapse. Earth would have no complex life of any kind,” explains Ferris Jabr in an edited extract from Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life.
Daily Maverick: What happens after 1,000 days of the GNU? Two must-read books – Ferial Haffajee suggests reading Is the Party Over?, “an insider view into the inner workings of the ANC, and [Good Hope] a dystopian novel that explores the idea of a breakaway Cape Republic.”
The Armenian Mirror Spectator: Those Words, That Offer to Us: The Armenian Creatives’ Endless Offerings – Arpi Sarafian asks her readers to “imagine that words are no longer a prerequisite to translating […]. In other words, imagine taking translation beyond the formal equivalence of two languages and expanding it to actually include the memories and the stories that surrounded the original text when it was being created.”
ABC News: Astronomy meets literature in new books by Ceridwen Dovey and Alicia Sometimes exploring their humanity – Award-winning Australian writers Ceridwen Dovey and Alicia Sometimes use space as a setting to explore what it means to be human in their new books.
LARB: The Comfort of Memory – Are we at the beginning of the end of alternative literature? Leo Lasdun thinks we may be. Here he “reviews two debut novels at the end(?) of alt-lit: Gabriel Smith’s Brat and Matthew Davis’s Let Me Try Again.
Harper’s Magazine: The New Age Bible – Sheila Heti “on the origins of A Course in Miracles”, Helen Schucman’s landmark guide to modern spirituality.
MSNBC: ‘It Ends With Us’ was already problematic. Blake Lively’s press tour made it worse. – Hannah Holland explains how “Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us went from BookTok hit to the center of a Hollywood controversy.
The Chronicle of Higher Education: ‘A Sub-What?’ FAQs on the Mysterious Book Subvention – Rebecca Colesworthy with “everything you need to know about the subsidies that publishers sometimes request.”
Animation Magazine: Trailer: ‘LOTR: The War of the Rohirrim’ Brings Tolkien’s Epic World Back to the Big Screen – “New Line Cinema debuted the official trailer for The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, the upcoming anime adventure which will take moviegoers back to Middle-earth and deep into the history behind J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved book series,” reports Mercedes Milligan.
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FINALLY >>
If there is something you would particularly like to see onWinding Up the Weekor if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments forBook Jotterin general, please drop me a line or comment below. I would be delighted to hear from you.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I wish you a week bountiful in books and rich in reading.
NBIn this feature, ‘winding up’ refers to the act of concluding something and should not be confused with the British expression: ‘wind-up’ – an age-old pastime of ‘winding-up’ friends and family by teasing or playing pranks on them. If you would like to know more about this expression, there is an excellent description onUrban Dictionary.
‹ Winding Up the Week #389
TOVE TROVE: Tales from Moominvalley by Tove Jansson ›
Categories: Winding Up the Week
Tags: #MoominWeek, Ferris Jabr, Finnish Fiction, Haruki Murakami, Kate Macintosh, M. G. Vassanji, Moomin, Moomin Week, Moomintrolls, Nordic Literature, Tove Jansson
