The Guardian’s Sue Prideaux has written about the newly published Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Work, Boel Westin’s authorised biography of Tove Jansson, the Swedish-speaking Finnish author who created the Moomins. Prideaux writes that the Moomins originated as Jansson’s signature on the anti-fascist cartoons she was drawing of Hitler and Stalin in 1938 for Finnish satirical magazine Garm.
It was her parents who inspired the characters Moominmamma and Moominpappa and the first book featuring them was published in 1945. Now the Moomins are “a brand rivaling Winnie the Pooh and Hobbit heroes in terms of world-wide money-spinning”.
It is Prideaux’s opinion that Westin, a professor of literature at the University of Stockholm, who did her doctoral thesis on the Moomins, has written an affectionate biography. Westin’s publisher, Sort of Books, interviewed her about reading Jansson’s Moomin books as a child and about meeting her for the first time.
Read Prideaux’s article on Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Work and Westin’s interview on writing it:
“What I liked best,” wrote Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins, “was being beastly to Hitler and Stalin.” Jansson’s lovable, chubby, hippo-like Moomins are now a brand rivalling Winnie the Pooh and Hobbit heroes in terms of world-wide money-spinning. But unlike Pooh and the Hobbits, the Moomins started life as anti-fascist political beings who had the courage to yelp when Hitler was annexing bits of Europe. In 1938, the year of the Munich conference, 24-year-old Jansson was working as a cartoonist for Garm, a Finnish satirical magazine. Her cover for October that year shows Hitler as a spoiled child, bawling for more cake while ignoring the slices of Europe he has already snatched and devoured, from the Polish corridor to Alsace-Lorraine to Yugoslavia. Jansson signed her cartoons with the little Moomin creature and it was a signature with an active part to play, its expression and body language underlining whatever satirical point she was making. “His eyes were set close together,” she said, “and were angry.”
This biography seems a labour of love, meticulously researched and carefully composed. Can you tell us what drew you to Tove Jansson as a subject and how you went about your research?
The Moomin books were part of my childhood and read by my whole family. My father gave me Moominland Midwinter as a Christmas present when I was six, the same year it was published, and I was an early fan of the Moomin comic strips which were published as albums.
The Observer reader Ruth McKay recently sent in a photograph of this sweet letter that Jansson wrote to her when she was seven, in response to her fan mail:
Dear Ruth,
Thank you so much for your nice letter. I’m really glad that you like my trolls. There might be quite a lot of trolls in Ireland, I’ve heard? Here, they’re all hibernating. The whole town is but a huge soft snow drift, a fire is burning in the over the whole day long and the cat is sleeping in my lap.
We’ve had a fine Christmas – the days are short but one known that the light is returning more and more. Soon, I’ll start waiting for spring. Then, I go on to my island in the Finnish Gulf, a tiny one with no trees or bushes – only rock and wild flowers. And big, beautiful storms. You would love it!
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- Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Work by Boel Westin
EAN: 9781908745453
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EAN: 9780798156110
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EAN: 9780798152273
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