Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson (1996)

 This book comes readymade with good wishes for me, being a reader of some of the Moomins series when young. This is my first exposure to the author as the writer of anything more. The straightforward relation one can make is with regard to "magic" I guess. There's a kind of connectedness to the rawness of child emotions, or folk emotions, in those childhood books which gives them their own colour, an unusual and delicate one. And this is somewhat the same, but muted. The question I would ask is whether the muting is from me, or from Jansson's intentions. Is she writing differently because this is the story of her real life? Finding a tiny rocky island with her partner, going through a wildly uplifting period with the help of bluff and eccentric locals to build a cabin on it, experiencing the sea and the wind across their blissful summer quietness and the storminess nearer to winter, finding near the end that they have to leave as they begin to find the physicality needed to cope a stretch. Or am I less susceptible? I know some little elements of these feelings as the resident of an archipelago, and having spent a good amount of downtime in wildish places, and having a love of islands which keeps their terms in my imagination. So I do get to some extent the groundfeel which is immanent in how she scribes it. It's probably both: this delicate but frank colouring is another tangent of the part of her which brought forth the Moomins. But also I am registering that there is a difference - her imagination is engaged in a very different way. It has the taste and colour of an unknown fruit from a place far away from your usual territory - not mouth-twisting and sour, or unbearably sweet, or blastingly weird, but instead a savour you haven't quite ever tasted before. Mild, strange, unpinpointable as yet, but you could get used to it.