Book Review: ‘Tove Jansson,’ by Boel Westin

The Moomins are a nature-loving, philosophical family of long-snouted, rotund white troll-creatures, born during World War II in a period when Jansson was a leading political cartoonist. Jansson found herself at odds politically with her father during the war, but never wavered in her hatred of Hitler. “It was the utterly hellish war years that made me, an artist, write fairy tales,” she later wrote.

The word “Moomin” was never given a clear etymology, though Jansson traced their lineage to the ghost stories of her childhood. Published and received as children’s books, the Moomin series appealed equally to adults. Jansson never censored her stories out of a false sense of childhood’s innocence. Most children, she believed, “live in a world in which the fantastic and the matter-of-fact have equal value,” and death visited the Moomins’ lives like any other.

The first several Moomin books received little fanfare in Finland and Sweden, where they were eclipsed by the contemporaneous appearance of Pippi Longstocking, yet Jansson was, characteristically, completely undeterred. She wrote the second book before the first was printed, and the third before the second was published. After the war, color rushed back into her work.

Despite their particular Finnishness, the appeal was international. The Moomins landed in America, were syndicated in newspapers throughout England, took Japan by storm. Academics debated Moomin philosophy. The Moomins grew larger and fatter as they grew more famous, and Jansson’s anxieties about her celebrity became a subject in their stories.

“It’s going so well I can’t help getting rich, even if they keep cheating me,” she wrote to a friend. The Moomins, in their strange specificity, spoke to a near-universal audience, and Jansson’s readers felt they knew her. She received approximately 2,000 letters a year, and sent a handwritten response to every letter she received.