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The Art of Waiting: Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November
A masterpiece of children’s literature about grief, friendship, human difference, and the art of waiting.
It is a story where nothing happens. Nothing other than waiting, and hope, and friendship, and the fear of living in a world we only partly understand, and a sense that life could be somehow different, if we could only work out how, or could drum up the courage to change things.
Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley in November was published in Swedish in 1970. In the original Swedish, it was called Sent i november, or “Late in November.” It was the last of Jansson’s books about the Moomins—a little family of round-snouted trolls who lived in a remote valley.
At the centre of Jansson’s Moomin books stands the Moominhouse, the bustling hub of a loose-knit community of strange creatures: adopted family members, fleeting visitors, wandering philosophers and troublesome hangers-on.
Sometime around my final year in elementary school, I became entranced by Jansson’s Moomin books. The universe about which Jansson wrote felt immediately familiar. I was brought up in a vicarage in rural Norfolk, in the east of England. I, too, lived in a home that, like the Moominhouse, was at one and the same time both draughty and expansive. It was a place where people were always turning up unexpectedly, where sometimes—as Jansson wrote in Finn Family Moomintroll— “unexpected and disturbing things used to happen, but nobody ever had time to be bored, and that is always a good thing.”
Jansson’s fictional universe is populated by an array of creatures that are a testament to her hospitable vision of human diversity. Fillyjonks are highly strung, neurotic and obsessed with cleaning. Hemulens are slow-moving and obsessive. They are fond of stamp-collecting and rules, and they make excellent park-keepers. The chilly Groke — the most terrible of monsters, one of the few creatures who is never invited in—freezes everything she touches, and on the ground where she has sat, nothing grows again. The wanderer Snufkin guards…
