Travelling Light
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Product Description
Book Description
Introduced by Ali Smith Another perfect holiday read from the author of the bestselling The Summer Book
Product Description
This newly translated collection of stories brilliantly evokes the shifting scenes and restlessness of summer. 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 when a disconcerting young boy arrives; an artist returns to an old flat to discover that her life has been eerily usurped. Philosophical and profound, but with the deceptive lightness that is her hallmark, Travelling Light is guaranteed to surprise and transport.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a collection of 12 short stories with amazingly diverse subject matter - from the shopping concerns of nuclear disaster survivors to a teacher in the throes of a nervous breakdown (brilliantly depicted), from a horribly precocious and depressing child who comes to stay to a batty woman who steals other peoples memories and recounts them as her own. The concerns of getting old also find their way into a number of the stories; of time running out but concerns left to address and things left to do. Not all the stories are of the same standard but at least two thirds are extremely good and thought provoking. Jansson's precise, direct and incisive language is both refreshing and rewarding to read. Travelling Light delivers some wonderfully quirky and yet rewarding tales in its author's own unique style.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Originally published in Swedish in 1987, "Travelling Light" has finally been published in English and is another fine addition to the Tove Jansson bibliography. It is a collection of twelve short stories that bear all the Jansson hallmarks: finding the extraordinary in the ordinary, commenting on human psychology, juxtaposing witty asides and harsh dialogue with moments of deep sadness, and with a strange humour lurking beneath it all. Most of the stories are around ten to fifteen pages in length, with central story "The Garden of Eden" by some distance the longest at around forty pages, and all are thoroughly engrossing.
Jansson never gets bogged down in description or crafted similes; her prose is extremely clean and precise - not a word is out of place, nothing is extraneous. As such, it can both be read as quite devoid of familiar literary devices but also as a wonderfully refrshing change of scenery. To use "clean" and "precise" is not to mean boring or lacking in personality; these stories are resolutely not boring - I often came away from the stories with the feeling that I had never read anything quite like it. Jansson's talent for writing about the surprising psychological aspects of the everyday and the ordinary is quite breathtaking, and she finds the most imaginative yet believable situations to write about. For example, an apparently simple story about a teacher and his partner leaving the city for a short break ("The Gulls") becomes a comment on existential despair and the power play in relationships. A woman visiting a relative in a foreign country ("The Garden of Eden") explores the interference of friends and the unspoken social rules and hierarchies inherent in small communities. A dinner party between friends ("The P.E. Teacher's Death") is interrupted by brutal dialogue and musings on the nature of life and suicide.
None of the stories ever feel mechanical, or like Jansson is trying to weave something together to give a clever moral message at the end. Nothing is spelled out. Instead, the reader is left with a series of vignettes, of situations, of ideas, and is left to make up their own mind. For me, this makes these stories all the more powerful and effective. If one got the sense that Jansson was trying to be "clever," the stories would devolve into little more than quirky set pieces. As it is, she lets the stories breathe and gives them space to be what they are, and sometimes what they are initially may appear to be something quite simple. But there's a depth and richness there, and it's easy to be deceived by her lack of florid language, but there's so much going on. She varies her narrative voice from story to story: sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person, sometimes male, sometimes female, and it makes for a diverse and consistently interesting collection. Her dialogue is simply wonderful, and the characters she writes about are often not scared of being rather forthright and rude, often humorously so.
Jansson of course deserves the credit for crafting such unique, beautiful, sad, funny stories, but kudos must also go to translator Silvester Mazzarella for his great work, to Ali Smith for an insightful introduction, and to Sort Of Books for bringing this work to English and to a new audience. It seems that there are a few more Jansson works yet to be translated into English, and I look forward to them eagerly.
Jansson never gets bogged down in description or crafted similes; her prose is extremely clean and precise - not a word is out of place, nothing is extraneous. As such, it can both be read as quite devoid of familiar literary devices but also as a wonderfully refrshing change of scenery. To use "clean" and "precise" is not to mean boring or lacking in personality; these stories are resolutely not boring - I often came away from the stories with the feeling that I had never read anything quite like it. Jansson's talent for writing about the surprising psychological aspects of the everyday and the ordinary is quite breathtaking, and she finds the most imaginative yet believable situations to write about. For example, an apparently simple story about a teacher and his partner leaving the city for a short break ("The Gulls") becomes a comment on existential despair and the power play in relationships. A woman visiting a relative in a foreign country ("The Garden of Eden") explores the interference of friends and the unspoken social rules and hierarchies inherent in small communities. A dinner party between friends ("The P.E. Teacher's Death") is interrupted by brutal dialogue and musings on the nature of life and suicide.
None of the stories ever feel mechanical, or like Jansson is trying to weave something together to give a clever moral message at the end. Nothing is spelled out. Instead, the reader is left with a series of vignettes, of situations, of ideas, and is left to make up their own mind. For me, this makes these stories all the more powerful and effective. If one got the sense that Jansson was trying to be "clever," the stories would devolve into little more than quirky set pieces. As it is, she lets the stories breathe and gives them space to be what they are, and sometimes what they are initially may appear to be something quite simple. But there's a depth and richness there, and it's easy to be deceived by her lack of florid language, but there's so much going on. She varies her narrative voice from story to story: sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person, sometimes male, sometimes female, and it makes for a diverse and consistently interesting collection. Her dialogue is simply wonderful, and the characters she writes about are often not scared of being rather forthright and rude, often humorously so.
Jansson of course deserves the credit for crafting such unique, beautiful, sad, funny stories, but kudos must also go to translator Silvester Mazzarella for his great work, to Ali Smith for an insightful introduction, and to Sort Of Books for bringing this work to English and to a new audience. It seems that there are a few more Jansson works yet to be translated into English, and I look forward to them eagerly.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you haven't read any of the books for grown-ups by Tove Jansson (creator of The Moomins) then do. She is a writer of gentle yet poignant and thought-provoking tales for adults as well as children. Not all of her fiction has yet been translated into English, but if you like this then I can guarantee that you'll want to read more.
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