Great idea for a thread! Here are some of the books I discovered in my adolescence and early adulthood which really stuck with me.
At the top of the shelf is of course, Mumin. People in the anglosphere will be most familiar with the Mumin (okay, okay, Moomin) comic strip, which is unsurprising since it was commissioned by the Evening News, an English newspaper. Through syndication it spread across the UK and Scandinavia, and then beyond into several other languages, turning it into an international hit. Before production the paper's editors even had the author,
Tove Jansson, brought over for a crash course in comic strip plotting. I really miss when publishers invested in talent development like that. It paid off and what resulted was a truly timeless strip. Much like
Nancy and
Jucika it's had something of a memetic resurgence, due, methinks, to the strong design qualities and quirky, appealingly off-beat vibe (something all 3 of those strips share).
But anyway, less familiar will be the actual series of novels from which the strip is adapted, which is lowkey one of the greatest prose works in the Swedish language (the author is Finnish, but from the part that's culturally Swedish). And as much as I love the comic strip, there are just these moods, atmospheres and emotions that the comic strip format just can't possibly convey, and the series' more mysterious, tense, unsettling and melancholic moments end up not being fully carried over. You'll see what I mean.
The novels have the peculiar and very Scandinavian quality of growing bleaker and more melancholic as the series progresses, with the early novels being adventurous and often laugh-out-funny, and the later ones being bittersweet to a point that's almost unbearable. The world of the Moomin Valley is indifferent and at times even hostile, but because it is beautiful it means that it can't be cruel, even when it's unfair. Carl Barks, also from about this generation, has a similar tendency in his Donald Duck comics. He once said that when writing his stories he never wanted to sugar-coat anything, the story's always had to be honest. It's an outlook I feel like Jansson was committed to completely as well, much like the Barks Duck stories, these are always books ABOUT something, and you always walk away feeling richer for having read them, the highest praise I can give a work.
The early books all have a strong adventurous drive. Usually a natural disaster or supernatural forces drive the Valley into a crisis. Especially memorable is Comet in Moominland from 1946. Historically, comets were thought to
portend great upheavals, usually Judgment Day. Even in the modern day comet cults sometimes spring up, like Heaven's Gate, whose members all
beamed aboard the Hale-bopp comet Star Trek style. Interestingly it shares many symbolothematic elements with
Tintin & The Mysterious Star which also points our gaze at the doomsday comet, channeling the prevailing mood of the World War.
I especially like this modern 20th c. take on the ancient concept of the comet as "Heaven's Alarm". The learned men of the world might use cutting edge scientific instruments to observe it, they might run the calculations on the timetable and scale of the catastrophe, thoughever they are ultimately confounded and powerless to stop it. And this is an area where Moomin especially shines, there's an undercurrent that the events taking place are very serious and important, even when the events are silly, because they're treated as serious and important by the characters, there's always a consistent logic to the nonsense (another quality Jansson shares with Barks).
The absolute funniest, and one of the most inventive from this period is Moominpappa's Memoirs. It's a personal favorite but you'd be making a mistake to read it as your first Moomin novel, just because of how it rewards your knowledge of Moomin lore. Most of the book is written from Moominpappa's perspective, recounting his wild and stormy youth and his adventures with Sniff's and Snufkin's dads. An amazing in-joke is how in his memoir "names and identifying characteristics have been changed" so you have familiar Moomin Valley creatures but their usual behavior has been all swapped around. Moominpappa's self-aggrandizing tone is also consistently hilarious, and very reminiscent of books like the
Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini or
Boswell's London Journal. As it turns out people in the past were actually not very modest, like, at all, but Moominpappa gives them all a run for their money.
The adventurous thrust outward begins to recede in this period and the narrative begins to instead creep inward. The original title "Troll Winter" has a secondary interpretation, "Magic-Winter", almost in the sense that the Winter is ensorcelling/enchanting/spellbinding. Slight note about the English translations is that they do lose some of the poetry of the original, the titles feel kind of unexciting especially "Dangerous Midsommar" gets changed to "Finn Family Mumin" and "The Invisible Child" becomes just "Tales from the Moomin Valley", I think for the most part the contents are fine, although the humorous bouncing rhythm of all the various characters' nonsense names is something which is sadly untranslatable. Anyway, Moomintrolls evolved to live in traditional Scandinavian
Ceramic Stoves, so they find the winter inhospitable and always hibernate.
One year, Moomin awakes from his hibernation and is unable to fall back asleep (hate it when that happens).
The world outside the door has become unrecognizably cold and barren, and the Moomin house itself (incidentally built in the cylindrical shape of a Ceramic Stove), which is always teeming with guests and visitors has become lifeless and still, familiar yet completely alien. For the first time Moomin is truly on his own and from hereon out feelings of loneliness, isolation and unbelonging come into focus. Since the rest of the family's sound asleep, Moomin must for the first time act as his own person (or as his own Moomintroll) and in setting out to explore this haunting, ethereal landscape finds that in spite of the cold there are still friends to be made and fun to be had. He runs into some familiar friends and foes as well like the rambunctious Little My and the tragic monster, the Groke, who freezes the ground behind her in her search for light and warmth. In this reviewer's opinion this one is where the series goes from being "just" excellent, to true masterpiece status.
There's also an edition with different color illustrations, I believe the color plates were requested for the Italian edition.
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