欧宝娱乐

I like Tove Jansson鈥檚 brand of wisdom. It鈥檚 not a 鈥渉ard won鈥� wisdom of the sort that has grown from the rubble of cynicism, betrayal, and defeat. It鈥檚 a clear-eyed wisdom that has never lost its innocence; a wisdom that plays even as it sees through to the dark heart of people and things. It鈥檚 the wisdom of solitude and barrenness that attracts company and fertility but doesn鈥檛 need them; content to know but not participate overmuch, radiating a warmth from its detachment.

This is a late novel by Jansson, published in 1982, a good decade after the last Moomin book, and is something of an oblique manifesto of this wisdom. It鈥檚 the story of two women that plays out with eerie similarities to Bergman鈥檚 Persona - two women of (initially) radically different temperaments who through close proximity push each other to crisis and change of perspective, passing through each other as this occurs, and all transpiring in a small Scandinavian house. But the agent of change in The True Deceiver is a willful action by one of the women, a possibly sociopathic, yet very beguiling and fascinating character, a calculating loner whose heart is devoted to the welfare of her simple-minded brother. She forces change upon the other woman who for a lifetime has been sheltered from the world and its vagaries by her success as an artist.

It鈥檚 a cat and mouse game that proceeds with fairy tale touches (the Big Bad Wolf and the Flowery Rabbit) that only enhance its glaring realism. And once again after reading one of Tove Jansson鈥檚 鈥渁dult鈥� novels, I am not only marveling at her narrative subtlety and evocativeness, and her effortless ability to use the natural cycles of the seasons as a plot device (this book proceeding from deep Winter freeze to the beginnings of a great Spring thaw), but also at the Finnish practice of carelessly dumping their garbage in the sea. This practice of garbage disposal plays a major role in this novel, as all the baggage of the artist character is lugged out onto the ice and piled up to await the Spring thaw when the ice will crack and all her unnecessary possessions will sink away, leaving room for her life to change even as it remains the same.