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Irish Independent
23-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Vona Groarke: ‘I don't usually read for comfort. I read poetry for excitement and risk. Novels for company. Biography for nosiness'
Vona Groarke is the new Ireland Professor of Poetry, until 2028. Her ninth poetry collection is Infinity Pool, published in May by The Gallery Press. She has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007 and is writer-in-residence at St John's College, Cambridge, and with the Sligo Yeats Society. Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara won the 2024 Michel Deon Prize. She lives in Co Sligo. The books by your bedside? The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck, The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Seduction and Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick, Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton, Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst, and Sara Baume's Seven Steeples. You'd almost think prose sends me to sleep, were it not for Louise Gluck's Poems 1962-2020. And Karen Solie's Wellwater. That covers a poetic multitude.
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- The Guardian
Travels in Moominland: summer in Tove Jansson's Finland
It's after 10pm and the sky has only just lost the high blue of the day. Sitting by the Baltic Sea, toes in the water, I gaze at distant, tree-covered islands as gentle waves lap over the long, flat rocks. I follow a rough, winding path back to my cabin, through woods so quiet you can hear the pine needles fall. I'm in Santalahti woods, near Kotka on the south-east coast of Finland, on the trail of Finnish author, novelist, painter and illustrator Tove Jansson (1914-2001). Best known as creator of the Moomins, and for her love of island living, Jansson also wrote for adults. Last year, her first novel, The Summer Book, was made into a film starring Glenn Close and directed by Charlie McDowell. One film critic has described it as 'an ode to Finnish archipelago nature'. The Summer Book is a series of 22 vignettes on island summer living, featuring a young girl, Sophia, and her grandmother. I first read the slim volume in the early days of the Covid lockdown. During that uncertain, fearful time, and every year since, reading it has been a balm, a reminder to slow down and pay attention. I've come to Finland to explore Finnish summer living, fill my lungs with archipelago air and try to find a little of the stillness and wonder that Jansson's writing gives me. In Finland, summer is to be savoured. The south of the country receives just six hours of daylight a day in winter, and in the far north the sun remains below the horizon in December. It's this darkness that makes Finns revere and celebrate summer. Schoolchildren get a 10-week summer holiday, and most Finns take July off work. Summer is mostly spent in one of the half a million summer cottages, known as mökki, usually by a lake or on one of the tens of thousands of islands scattered along the coastline. Amenities vary, but there's a deep affection for traditional rustic cabins: off-grid, without electricity or running water, and definitely no wifi. Cottage living, or mökkielämä, is focused on slow living in harmony with nature: time in the woods, in the sea, picking berries, and relaxing in the sauna. I begin my journey on Pellinki, in the Porvoo archipelago, about an hour east of Helsinki. This part of Finland is bilingual. (Like 80% of Pellinki residents, Tove Jansson was a Swedish speaker; in Swedish the island is called Pellinge). It's a quick hop across the water on a free ferry into a different, slower pace of life. Through the woods I spy dozens of cute red and yellow painted cabins, each by a stretch of water. Tove spent many childhood summers on Pellinki, and she drew her first Moomin cartoon here – on the wall of an outhouse – as a teenager. To generate extra income, island families would rent their homes for the summer, moving into an outbuilding. Tove's family rented the home of the boat-building Gustafsson family. Abbe Gustafsson, the same age as Tove, became a lifelong friend and the children turned their daily chore of milk collection into an elaborate challenge: there were trees to be navigated in one direction, streams to jump over and 'evil' cracked rocks to sprint past. This childhood game was the inspiration for The Book about Moomin, Mymble and Little My, which has been adapted into the puzzle-solving outdoor Island Riddles trail. Clues are in rhyme, and I try a few, filtering water to make the next clue rise to the surface in a small well, and hunting for a red umbrella in the trees. 'You just have to play like a child and use your imagination,' Erika Englund, a local who devised the trail, tells me. From the woods you can see the small island of Bredskär, where the Jansson family built a house in 1947. Craving further solitude, Tove built a cabin on the even tinier island of Klovharun in 1964, where she spent 28 summers with her life partner, graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. The couple lived a very simple life here, with the island, each other, and their vast imaginations for company. The landscapes of Pellinki, Bredskär and Klovharun are easily recognisable throughout Tove's work in all mediums. The sea and the weather play a central role: storms rage, belongings are lost and found in the sea, and life is lived with respect for the elements. Porvoo is the nearest town to Pellinki and a stopping point on the way to the archipelago. The old town is one of the best preserved in Finland, built after a catastrophic fire in 1760. I wander through the winding streets, admiring the colourful wooden homes and learning about the town's history as a salt trading port, with Birgitta Palmqvist from Porvoo Tours. I stay at the handsome art nouveau-style Runo hotel in the town centre. The building has been a bank and the town library, and now has 56 minimal, Finnish-style rooms, changing art displays and an award-winning breakfast. Sign up to The Traveller Get travel inspiration, featured trips and local tips for your next break, as well as the latest deals from Guardian Holidays after newsletter promotion On the outskirts of Porvoo I visit Kannonnokka, where a sauna has been partly built into rock deep in the woods. Sauna culture is essential to Finns: in 2020, Unesco recognised Finnish sauna culture as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and there are an estimated 3.3 million saunas in a country of 5.6 million people (though everyone I speak to gives a higher number). Even in the tiny cabin on Klovharun there was a sauna in the cellar (more important than running water). Kannonnokka sauna is kept at 60C for longer, laidback sessions, with dips in the cold plunge pool and gently warm whirlpool bath. Afterwards, the young couple who run the venue cook delicious pancakes over the fire. As a young artist, Tove painted murals for local buildings in towns along the Finnish coast. In Kotka, 50 miles east of Porvoo, a huge fairytale mural remains on show in the town's youth work department. It's a delight, with layers of stories, hidden Moomin characters and gemstone embellishments. In Hamina, a neighbouring town, panoramic fantasy scenes decorate the walls of the town hall: mermaids flirt with cadets under water and shipwrecked treasure fills Hamina harbour. In Kotka, I visit Maritime Centre Vellamo, where Courage, Freedom, Love! A Moomin Adventure launched this year (it runs until March 2027) to mark 80 years since the first Moomin book was published. Children can play inside a replica Moomin house, clamber on the rocks surrounded by an animated sea, and dress up in a little theatre. Also on display is Tove and Tuulikki's boat, Victoria, built for the couple by Abbe Gustafsson. From Kotka I catch a free ferry to Kaunissaari (90 minutes). The island's name translates to 'beautiful island' – fitting, given its pine forests, long white beaches and pretty marina. The harbour is a cluster of red wooden cottages with wildflower gardens, and boat sheds with spooled fishing nets outside. There's a fascinating island museum, packed to the rafters with memorabilia from centuries of hardy island living. I follow winding paths through the trees to find a long, sandy beach, which I have all to myself. I can't resist a swim – even without a sauna to plunge into. I warm up at Kaunissaaren Maja restaurant, where the simple salmon soup recipe has not changed in 70 years. Near Kotka I stay in my own little summer cottage. The amenities are basic: a kitchen diner and one bedroom, but of course a sauna. I set it to heat then spend an hour walking through the woods and around the bay, watching the sunset. The long daylight hours are perfect for happihyppely, a Finnish concept translated literally as 'oxygen hopping': taking a short walk for fresh air and exercise. Back at my cabin I jump between the heat of the sauna and dips in the icy Baltic Sea. I exhale, with the night, the light and the summer stretching out in front of me. I can see why Tove Jansson loved this coastline: all I need for a dreamy summer is right here. The trip was provided by Visit Finland. Runo Hotel in Porvoo has doubles from €171 B&B. Self-catering cabins at Santalahti resort start from €89 (sleep two); sauna cottages from €198 (sleeps up to four)
Yahoo
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
A Finnish Writer's Portrait of American Loneliness
Taking stock of your life can be simpler when you're half a world away from home. For Tove Jansson, arguably Finland's most famous writer of the 20th century, a vacation in 1971 marked an unexpected turn following a tumultuous year. After more than two decades of acclaim thanks to her fictional creatures, the Moomins, Jansson, then 57, was on the brink of potential burnout. Instead of coasting on her reputation as a beloved children's author, she was trying something new, writing novels for adults. In the middle of this career pivot, in 1970, her mother died, compounding Jansson's feeling that her life was changing irrevocably. 'I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm, but so alien,' she wrote to friends. She needed an escape. That vacation—culminating in a long trip to the United States—upended her outlook on the balance of work and life, as well as on the key subject of her fiction: a sense of home. Throwing out a packed work schedule, Jansson submerged herself in not only an entirely new landscape, but also an alien culture undergoing post-'60s social upheaval. This experience changed the tenor of her work, and it helped her become the author Americans continue to discover more than 50 years later. Though Jansson's global fame still derives from those cheeky Moomins captured in comics and illustrated novels, her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence. Jansson conveys a wry, layered empathy rooted in her Nordic traditions, informed by her queerness, and tested by her encounters with American morals and migratory habits. Thanks to a steady parade of recent reissues with introductions by Ali Smith, Lauren Groff, and others, this mature work has quietly developed a readership in the United States. A recent film adaptation of her sweet autobiographical novel The Summer Book may win new converts, but true enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen. Before her American journey, Jansson had been living a life both idyllic and in many ways restricting. She'd been raised by well-known Finnish Swedish artists and remained inseparable from them, leaving art school in Stockholm at 19 to return home to Helsinki, where she would continue her education while writing and creating commercial artwork to better support her family. By 1970, she was tending to her aging mother, Ham, and in a relationship with her longtime partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, that was technically illegal. In Helsinki, the couple lived separately in neighboring studios, though they spent summers in a house on the island of Klovharun, where they could live together in relative privacy. Within a year of Ham's death, homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland. Jansson felt as though a chapter of her life had ended. Fulfilling an old dream, Jansson and Pietilä took an eight-month journey. Beginning with a business trip to Japan, they gradually made their way to the continental United States. In New Orleans, Jansson completed The Summer Book, which idealized her spartan life on Klovharun. The next book she wrote, mostly after returning from the U.S., couldn't be more different: Sun City depicted a Florida retirement home with none of the sentimental warmth of Finland. [Read: What you should be reading this summer] Sun City was inspired by a stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the couple had gone to see the ship used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. Charmed by the town during what was supposed to be a short visit, the couple checked into a guesthouse called the Butler Arms. The perspective of distance, the novelty of the southern United States, and the break from routine presented unexpected creative gifts. What began as a short story evolved into a novel about loneliness and contrived community. Sun City renders St. Petersburg as a place where 'streets lie empty in their perpetual sunshine.' Setting the novel in the fictionalized Berkeley Arms, Jansson follows people on the margins who are reaching the end of their life without strong communal ties. Residents have drifted from all over the country into this boardinghouse arrangement. Among these loners, miscommunication abounds and short tempers flare. One guest tearfully reflects, 'Distrust was a poison that made a person shrink up and lose all contact with real life.' This false Eden, sunny but stark, feels like a photonegative of Jansson's cozy but rugged Klovharun (lovingly rendered in another recent reissue, the nonfictional Notes From an Island). Sun City operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot—appropriate for a work about idiosyncratic humans who may share a pretty veranda lined with rocking chairs but occupy hermetically sealed worlds of their own. A proud woman named Rebecca Rubinstein dines alone with a cab running its fare outside the restaurant. She muses about her fellow residents: 'We are also afraid, but we don't show it, and we don't open up to anyone. Our bodies no longer express anything. We have to get along entirely with words, nothing but words.' Americans are often said to prize their personal space, but from Jansson's perspective, the distance among these residents is a chasm, which prevents them from connecting with others. Their private histories remain fixed in amber rather than coalescing into a collective culture. After the sudden deaths of two sisters, one resident reflects, 'None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives. We are being admonished to be more careful with each other.' No heartwarming community rises from these ashes. There's too little time and not enough at stake. The Berkeley Arms is a stately hotel run by Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley and Miss Catherine Frey. Ruthermer-Berkeley is 93, reflecting back on her life. Frey is her harried employee, whose patience is wearing thin. Linda, a young immigrant from Mexico, maintains the guest home as best she can. Linda's distracted lover, Joe, works on the famous ship—the Bounty—and cruises around town on his motorcycle. She dreams of a passionate rendezvous in the marshes, while he anxiously awaits word from a group of Christians in Miami who promise him that Jesus is coming to whisk them away. The lovers talk past each other; neither shares the other's innermost desire. [Read: The antisocial century] If Sun City represents Jansson's thoughts on American society—particularly the way it treats its elders—it feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock. Jansson was not oblivious to the dangers of displacement before she visited Florida. Her best friend moved away to the U.S. during World War II; her father's shocking sympathies with the Nazis could be traced to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War; her Swedish-born mother was homesick even after decades of building a home in Finland. Ham had supported the family with commercial work while her husband pursued his artistic ambition as a sculptor. Witnessing these marital compromises, Jansson was sure that she would never marry or have children. Yet she seems to have taken the stability and interconnectedness of family life as a given. Though she'd endowed her Moomins with freedom and rootlessness, the precarious independence she described in Sun City felt new in her mature, realist work. The months-long break that spawned the novel didn't represent a rupture from Jansson's earlier life—or not exactly. But after the experience, she became a different kind of writer, partner, and person. Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant. Rethinking her many obligations after her trip, Jansson delegated some of the work that had been weighing her down (including the Moomins; she never wrote another Moomin-centered novel after her return). More broadly, she began to find a more harmonious balance between love and work, devotion and freedom. The best evidence for this evolution lies in a work published 15 years after Sun City, the quasi-autobiographical novel Fair Play. When, at the close of the book, the main character's partner—clearly based on Pietilä—leaves Helsinki for a year's work in Paris, the couple's resilience is tested. But this is not a road to alienation, American-style. It's only a temporary fissure, leading to a more profound connection for both partners. In Fair Play, Jansson allows herself to envision a far more satisfying kind of independence than what she'd wrought in Sun City. As her fictional stand-in reflects: 'She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.' Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
10-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
A Finnish Writer's Portrait of American Loneliness
Taking stock of your life can be simpler when you're half a world away from home. For Tove Jansson, arguably Finland's most famous writer of the 20th century, a vacation in 1971 marked an unexpected turn following a tumultuous year. After more than two decades of acclaim thanks to her fictional creatures, the Moomins, Jansson, then 57, was on the brink of potential burnout. Instead of coasting on her reputation as a beloved children's author, she was trying something new, writing novels for adults. In the middle of this career pivot, in 1970, her mother died, compounding Jansson's feeling that her life was changing irrevocably. 'I am going around in a great sense of unreality, calm, but so alien,' she wrote to friends. She needed an escape. That vacation—culminating in a long trip to the United States—upended her outlook on the balance of work and life, as well as on the key subject of her fiction: a sense of home. Throwing out a packed work schedule, Jansson submerged herself in not only an entirely new landscape, but also an alien culture undergoing post-'60s social upheaval. This experience changed the tenor of her work, and it helped her become the author Americans continue to discover more than 50 years later. Though Jansson's global fame still derives from those cheeky Moomins captured in comics and illustrated novels, her books for adults are rich and complex, revealing the stickiness of human coexistence. Jansson conveys a wry, layered empathy rooted in her Nordic traditions, informed by her queerness, and tested by her encounters with American morals and migratory habits. Thanks to a steady parade of recent reissues with introductions by Ali Smith, Lauren Groff, and others, this mature work has quietly developed a readership in the United States. A recent film adaptation of her sweet autobiographical novel The Summer Book may win new converts, but true enthusiasts will seize on the latest rerelease, Sun City, which explores an aspect of American life—the isolation of the aging—that often goes unseen. Before her American journey, Jansson had been living a life both idyllic and in many ways restricting. She'd been raised by well-known Finnish Swedish artists and remained inseparable from them, leaving art school in Stockholm at 19 to return home to Helsinki, where she would continue her education while writing and creating commercial artwork to better support her family. By 1970, she was tending to her aging mother, Ham, and in a relationship with her longtime partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, that was technically illegal. In Helsinki, the couple lived separately in neighboring studios, though they spent summers in a house on the island of Klovharun, where they could live together in relative privacy. Within a year of Ham's death, homosexuality was decriminalized in Finland. Jansson felt as though a chapter of her life had ended. Fulfilling an old dream, Jansson and Pietilä took an eight-month journey. Beginning with a business trip to Japan, they gradually made their way to the continental United States. In New Orleans, Jansson completed The Summer Book, which idealized her spartan life on Klovharun. The next book she wrote, mostly after returning from the U.S., couldn't be more different: Sun City depicted a Florida retirement home with none of the sentimental warmth of Finland. Sun City was inspired by a stay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where the couple had gone to see the ship used in the film Mutiny on the Bounty. Charmed by the town during what was supposed to be a short visit, the couple checked into a guesthouse called the Butler Arms. The perspective of distance, the novelty of the southern United States, and the break from routine presented unexpected creative gifts. What began as a short story evolved into a novel about loneliness and contrived community. Sun City renders St. Petersburg as a place where 'streets lie empty in their perpetual sunshine.' Setting the novel in the fictionalized Berkeley Arms, Jansson follows people on the margins who are reaching the end of their life without strong communal ties. Residents have drifted from all over the country into this boardinghouse arrangement. Among these loners, miscommunication abounds and short tempers flare. One guest tearfully reflects, 'Distrust was a poison that made a person shrink up and lose all contact with real life.' This false Eden, sunny but stark, feels like a photonegative of Jansson's cozy but rugged Klovharun (lovingly rendered in another recent reissue, the nonfictional Notes From an Island). Sun City operates as a series of vignettes without a strong unifying plot—appropriate for a work about idiosyncratic humans who may share a pretty veranda lined with rocking chairs but occupy hermetically sealed worlds of their own. A proud woman named Rebecca Rubinstein dines alone with a cab running its fare outside the restaurant. She muses about her fellow residents: 'We are also afraid, but we don't show it, and we don't open up to anyone. Our bodies no longer express anything. We have to get along entirely with words, nothing but words.' Americans are often said to prize their personal space, but from Jansson's perspective, the distance among these residents is a chasm, which prevents them from connecting with others. Their private histories remain fixed in amber rather than coalescing into a collective culture. After the sudden deaths of two sisters, one resident reflects, 'None of us liked them and none of us wanted to know about their lives. We are being admonished to be more careful with each other.' No heartwarming community rises from these ashes. There's too little time and not enough at stake. The Berkeley Arms is a stately hotel run by Miss Ruthermer-Berkeley and Miss Catherine Frey. Ruthermer-Berkeley is 93, reflecting back on her life. Frey is her harried employee, whose patience is wearing thin. Linda, a young immigrant from Mexico, maintains the guest home as best she can. Linda's distracted lover, Joe, works on the famous ship—the Bounty—and cruises around town on his motorcycle. She dreams of a passionate rendezvous in the marshes, while he anxiously awaits word from a group of Christians in Miami who promise him that Jesus is coming to whisk them away. The lovers talk past each other; neither shares the other's innermost desire. If Sun City represents Jansson's thoughts on American society—particularly the way it treats its elders—it feels less like a quirky collection of tales, of the sort that made her famous, and more like a moral indictment. It may well be a product of extreme culture shock. Jansson was not oblivious to the dangers of displacement before she visited Florida. Her best friend moved away to the U.S. during World War II; her father's shocking sympathies with the Nazis could be traced to the trauma of the Finnish Civil War; her Swedish-born mother was homesick even after decades of building a home in Finland. Ham had supported the family with commercial work while her husband pursued his artistic ambition as a sculptor. Witnessing these marital compromises, Jansson was sure that she would never marry or have children. Yet she seems to have taken the stability and interconnectedness of family life as a given. Though she'd endowed her Moomins with freedom and rootlessness, the precarious independence she described in Sun City felt new in her mature, realist work. The months-long break that spawned the novel didn't represent a rupture from Jansson's earlier life—or not exactly. But after the experience, she became a different kind of writer, partner, and person. Sun City, her third novel for adults, proved that she was not merely a whimsical artist and storyteller, but also a keen cultural critic who could transpose her observations into powerful prose. It served as a response to skeptics who may have considered her literary work delightfully regional but not globally significant. Rethinking her many obligations after her trip, Jansson delegated some of the work that had been weighing her down (including the Moomins; she never wrote another Moomin-centered novel after her return). More broadly, she began to find a more harmonious balance between love and work, devotion and freedom. The best evidence for this evolution lies in a work published 15 years after Sun City, the quasi-autobiographical novel Fair Play. When, at the close of the book, the main character's partner—clearly based on Pietilä—leaves Helsinki for a year's work in Paris, the couple's resilience is tested. But this is not a road to alienation, American-style. It's only a temporary fissure, leading to a more profound connection for both partners. In Fair Play, Jansson allows herself to envision a far more satisfying kind of independence than what she'd wrought in Sun City. As her fictional stand-in reflects: 'She began to anticipate a solitude of her own, peaceful and full of possibility. She felt something close to exhilaration, of a kind that people can permit themselves when they are blessed with love.'
