Letters From Klara

 

Letters from Klara / Tove Jansson
trans. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
read by Indira Varma
Copenhagen: Saga Egmont, 2024, c1991.

I like Tove Jansson's writing, and found this collection of short stories that I hadn't yet read; I'm glad I picked it up because I really enjoyed it. It contains 13 stories, and they are reflective of Jansson's concerns and style. 

The stories tackle the awkwardness of relationships and of existing in the world - something I feel like she's particularly good at. I think it's her clear unsentimental look at people's weakness, foibles, and inner lives that I always appreciate. She can be sardonic and hard in some ways, but also has an eye for the wry humour of life, and never mocks her characters. 

I thought all these stories were strong, with characters to draw you in, even though there was no strong thematic line to the collection. The settings are mainly in Finland but there a few which range across Europe, depending on the story. There are artists, mothers and daughters, old women who are still insisting on being a person, young men with existential crises, old schoolmates reuniting (with resulting cringe), and more. Each story was compelling but there were a couple that really stood out to me. 

The title story was fun, although light - if you've read Virginia Evan's hit The Correspondent you'll appreciate this little story alongside that one. "Party Games" follows a group of women who reunite when one of them finds out that their girls school is closing - it's a handful of their classmates having tea at one person's apartment and it is as awkward as you might imagine, with, as Jansson puts it, "do you remembers" taking over a lot of the conversation. But their girlhood likes and dislikes also reappear. So understandable! "Trip to the Riviera" follows a cantankerous older woman and her daughter, who've gone on vacation to a cheap pension on the Riviera, where they are definitely fish out of water, but the older woman is determined to be herself. 

"Emmelina" was the one that I was most drawn into. In this one, a strange young woman inherits a flat from a woman who has just died. The man living below her is having a crisis and befriends Emmelina, although she seems to be there just as a receptacle for all his angst. But when he finally decides to move on from his depression and face life again, Emmelina leaves, telling him she won't be back for a long time. She's uncanny and this story was a delight, with the side characters being some of the best parts. 

There are never heavy plots to these stories, they are more about people just living a bit, vignette style. I enjoy this a lot, and this collection delivered. If you like more contemplative stories looking at a slice of life, often without any real conclusions to be drawn, you'll like this too. 

Fair Play by Tove Jansson

 

Fair Play / Tove Jansson
trans. from the Swedish by Thomas Teal
read by Emma D'Arcy
Copenhagen: Saga Egmont, 2024, c1989.

This is a collection of short pieces following the lives of Mari and Jonna, artists who live at either end of a big apartment, Jonna's art studio at one end and Mari's writing space at the other. They have a balanced life of work, art, travel, film, and time spent on their small remote island. They both dislike visitors and want to keep their life even and uneventful for the most part. 

It's a fascinating look at tiny domestic details, as well as the way they shape and respond to one another's art. Their characters come out strongly, and they are very clearly autobiographical to a large extent. In each chapter, they face something, whether it's just worrying about their boat tied up in a storm, or the arrival of an old school friend who they have to host, or the potential of a year apart when Jonna is offered a residency in Paris. There is an outlier chapter where they are on vacation in the American West, taking home movies of it all, as well. 

These little moments of recalibration of a relationship and a lifestyle are momentous somehow, and the little things matter, they have import. It's a quiet but compelling book, and I found the themes and the illumination of a life that isn't all that dramatic so interesting. I listened to the recent audiobook, and found that the reader was skilled and made the listening easy. That's always a bonus! There are a couple more Jansson books available in audio by this publisher and I will most likely listen to those as well. I like Jansson's writing and am glad to see more it available like this. 

Dog Park by Oksanen

Dog Park / Sofi Oksanen
trans. from the Finnish by Owen F Witesman
TO: Anansi International, 2021, c2019
352 p.

This is a dark and twisty tale of international surrogacy and egg donor agencies; it's a call back to Oksanen's earlier novel Norma which I read a few years ago, and the presence in that novel of baby farms and Ukrainian women being used for both their hair and their reproductive abilities. However, unlike Norma, this novel doesn't have any magical quirkiness to it. Rather, it's very grounded in the depressing, desperate lives of young women in Eastern Ukraine, specifically the Donbas region. 

Our main character Olenka meets someone she knows in a dog park in Helsinki. She's startled because she thought she'd escaped her previous life in Eastern Ukraine but here is someone who could bring it all down. Daria was a former protégé of Olenka's at the agency she worked at, before it all came crashing to a halt. 

The story then goes backward into Olenka's story; her childhood in Tallinn and her family's move to her father's hometown of Snizhne in the Donbas when she was a young teen. They move in with his mother in this depressed area; her father has grand plans of profiting from the Wild West atmosphere which followed the breakdown of the Soviet Union. He has a local partner (who happens to be Daria's father) and together they are going to take over some of the mines in the area and become rich. Of course this doesn't happen, with tragedy coming instead. 

Olenka then tries to go West and become a model so that she can send money home but that also falters. When she has to return to Snizhne she is desperate for work, and that's when her life as a successful coordinator at a donor clinic begins. Everything seems to be going well; she is good at her job, finds girls who are willing to become egg donors, knows how to scrub their backgrounds to give a shining bio to each, has new ideas for expansion and is eager to progress. But after a couple of her ideas don't turn out too well, she has to come up with something better, and then the opportunity to provide a donor to one of the richest, most well-connected gangster families in the area pops up. This brings her a chance for glory, as well as a very unexpected romance. But all the time, her past is waiting to explode into this shining future. 

How and why does she end up fleeing to Finland? And why is Daria there too? The book is twisty and keeps us guessing, although the reader starts to see the outlines before they are all revealed. I found the parts when Olenka was active more interesting than the parts in Helsinki where she's reflecting back and trying to confess the facts to a distant "you" (her lost lover) -- it slowed down the pace of the story a bit, even though the reason she's so focused on "you" makes sense in the end. I thought that this book approached an unusual subject and was unflinching in exposing the kind of poverty, instability and lack of opportunity that dogged women's lives both under the USSR and in the first years of capitalism. Things don't change in an instant; these women's lives were still difficult and limited, and the novel shows how that was easily manipulated by those with the desire for money and power. It is a dark read but also one that caught me.