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    Fair Play
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    Fair Play
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    Fair Play
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    Fair Play

    By Tove Jansson

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    "So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? Expect something philosophically calm - and discreetly radical. Its publication is cause for huge celebration." Ali Smith, from her Introduction to Fair Play

    What mattered most to Tove Jansson, she explained in her eighties, was work and love, a sentiment she echoes in this tender and original novel. Translated for the first time into English, Fair Play portrays a love between two older women, a writer and artist, as they work side-by-side in their Helsinki studios, travel together and share summers on a remote island. In the generosity and respect they show each other and the many small shifts they make to accommodate each other's creativity we are shown a relationship both heartening and truly progressive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSort Of Books
    Release dateDec 14, 2011
    ISBN9781908745200
    Unavailable
    Fair Play
    Author

    Tove Jansson

    The writer and artist Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known as the creator of the Moomin children's stories, which have been published in 35 languages. The Summer Book was one of ten novels she wrote for adults. It is regarded as a modern classic throughout Scandinavia.

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    Reviews for Fair Play

    4/5

    199 ratings18 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This lovely semi-autobiographical book consists of short episodic vignettes of the lives of two older women, Jonna an artist and Mari a writer. It's about aging--"time running out"--and about giving those you love the space to grow. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      A series of short vignettes about two artist ladies, tersely describing the scenes and in the process making observations about life, work, and love.
    • 5/5
      I LOVED this. There's nothing I can say that Ali Smith didn't cover in her gorgeous introduction of the book. I will be revisiting this little novel frequently because I think there is so much still to learn from it.
    • 5/5
      We aren't introduced to Jonna and Mari - they quietly enter onto the stage and go about their lives as if we're not here, watching them. We listen in on their conversations about family trivia and art, we watch with them the second-rate Western movies which Jonna enjoys so, and which Mari tolerates because Jonna does enjoy them.When we meet them, Mari and Jonna have been together for thirty years and are sprightly still in their seventies. Each chapter is a vignette of their shared lives, displaying the little annoyances and intimacies, the small unnoticed things done to please the other, that make up the mundane existence of two people so deeply in love that they are rarely conscious of it anymore as it has become who they are. There aren't any grand dramatic scenes; even the storm that terrifies an unwanted visitor to their island is a backdrop for the human figures in the foreground, and Mari's quiet kindness towards somebody whose presence she resented until she saw their need. A road trip to the USA centres not around any great events or sights, but rather Jonna and Mari's unassuming friendship with their hotel maid, who introduces them to the patrons of an unremarkable back street bar. The closest the book gets to drama is with the coming of Wladislav, a ninety-two year old puppet sculptor whose short visit to show Mari the marionette hands he's made of her character illustrations is more disrupting and terrifying than any sea-storm. Mari, initially disconcerted by Wladyslaw's intensity and brusqueness, is instantly won over by the exquisitely expressive craftmanship of his work.We leave Mari and Jonna much as we found them, quietly, without fanfare, but certain in the knowledge of their deep and abiding love for each other, a gift to us of hope in the possibilty of living an unassuming, long life of fulfilment with another. The final line of the book is probably the most perfect ending I've read in a long time, which I won't quote, not because it's a spoiler, but because it needs the experience of the rest of the book to truly appreciate.
    • 2/5
      I am confused. Why don't I love this book? I will catch it unaware someday and try again.
    • 4/5
      All's fair in art and love. Fair Play really is amazing.
    • 4/5
      How long do I have to wait to be old and making work and living on an island?
    • 3/5
      A slim volume of linked vignettes, this is a nice look into the creative process and how art can enrich even seemingly mundane lives. I liked the writing and look forward to reading more of Jansson's work; there just wasn't enough here to base a higher or lower rating on. Still, a pleasant couple hours' read.
    • 4/5
      Even at her most obvious, Jansson is fantastic.
    • 4/5
      I'd never really heard of Tove Jansson before picking up Fair Play, but I quite like this novel. Novella? Hm, it's really just a series of vignettes about Jonna and Mari, two women in their 60s or 70s who have been dear friends for a very, very long time, and (though it's not said directly in the text) are rather in love with each other.I'm not sure how to describe the book, except that it is lovely. I suppose I could say that it is quietly intense, too. The vignettes don't really say that much about the women, thinking back on them, yet they give a wonderfully full view and description about who they are. I really liked that.I also liked how Jonna is sketched as being analytic and angular and a bit unfeeling, and Mari is the romantic who gets emotional easily, but as the vignettes pile up, the soft and sweet aspects of Jonna's personality and her love for Mari peek out, and Mari proves to have elements to her nature that are just as hard and obsessive as Jonna might appear.I think the book is ultimately about the women's love, and friendship, and the ways of living with one another and caring for the other after years and years of being together. I really liked it, though it's a bit different from what I usually read.
    • 4/5
      This lovely short novel is like a painting. We see Mari and Jonna living together in a spacious home and a spacious relationship on a quiet island off the coast of Finland. At first glance (the first couple of "chapters"), we are distracted by the brushstrokes of their mild bickering. As we continue to study the work, however, the women's interdependence and the warmth of their relationship rapidly become the figure while the simple tension of living and working together for decades becomes the ground. Other characters come into their lives only to highlight the depth of their connection. Having completed reading the novel in the space of one day, I felt like I had spent an enjoyable extended moment gazing at a beautiful work in an art gallery, only to wander away with a lasting impression and a strong sense of satisfaction.
    • 4/5
      While this series of vignettes is listed as fiction, quite clearly it is based on the relationship of the author and her lifelong partner. Both Jonna and Mari are artists, living together with with their studios separated by a long attic passageway. As in any relationship, they are sensitive to each other's moods. Mari know the signs that Jonna is about to have a spurt of creative activity, and Jonna knows when Mari needs her to take over the grocery shopping. They often share their creative processes, but sometimes each insists on isolation, and they are fairly critical of one another's art. Fair Play is a simple book, recording the women's daily lives: watching fireworks from a cruise ship, staying in a tacky hotel in Phoenix, watching American B-Westerns and Fassbinder films, putting up new shelves for their videotapes. In it's own way, it's lovely. But having been blown away by Jansson's The True Deceiver, I was hoping for something more.
    • 5/5
      Tove Jansson never fails to astonish me. Her children's books are gems (The Moomintrolls) that are equally lovely to read for children and adults. Her books for adults are as cold and clear as fjords or Scandinavian sunlight. She describes ordinary events with such clarity and precision that rather than remaining simple, they take on the layers of complexity that color human interaction. The short stories in Fair Play are loosely autobiographical about her relationship with her long time partner Tuulikki Pietila. Both women were artists. In the stories, they become Mari and Johnna. Each story is an examination of the way in which a partnership develops over time and the subtle negotiation between competing needs: for companionship and for independence, things that need to be said and those which can remain unsaid, love and work. While these stories will not supplant the sheer brilliance of The Summer Book and the stories in Travelling Light as my favorites they are worth reading and rereading. Jansson deserves to be discovered by a wider audience.
    • 4/5
      As in The Summer Book, here are short chapters, vignettes really, telling about two women artists, about their love and friendship, work, life. Nothing spectacular but somehow the stories stick.
    • 2/5
      Iris raves about Jansson (as do many others). I just didn't get it! This was a novel of episodes - not really short stories, because it was always the same characters, but very short episodes over the lives of two women. To call the prose spare or sparse does it, in my opinion, a credit - it was not only laconic, it was barely there at all! Jansson clearly has a talent for capturing a character with few words - tiny actions and reactions, rather than long descriptions. My issue was mostly a lack of plot, or progression - time progressed, but nothing really changed between the characters.
    • 4/5
      I always used to be impressed by the author bio in the front of the Moomin books that told us that Tove Jansson lived on her own on a small island. Obviously there were some compensations to be looked forward to in adult life...It turns out that that wasn't entirely true - the island was the site of her parents' summer-house, and she lived there only seasonally, and mostly together with her life-partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. Since we wouldn't have got this rather lovely little book without that set of circumstances, I'm not too disappointed, though.Jonna and Mari are two women of a certain age - one a visual artist and film-maker, the other a writer and illustrator - who live and work together, but not too close together. They are Finnish, after all. There has to be an attic corridor with many closed doors between their two studios.We see their life in a series of short glimpses, on their island, in Helsinki and on various journeys. We see them enjoying the oddness of each other's ways of seeing the world, confronting artistic and practical problems together, quarrelling and making up, and above all feeding into each other's creative work. Although what Jansson tells us about Jonna and Mari is never objectively any more than what we might have seen and heard as a visitor to their house, put together in context it becomes an incredibly intimate account of how two people can share their lives without ever giving up their own contrasting personalities. A beautiful, restrained, delicately funny and very Nordic love story.
    • 4/5
      Turnabout is fair play. In Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a precise and delicate series of dramatic scenes are presented that paint the relationship between Mari and Jonna, lifelong friends, artistic colleagues, travelling companions. They tolerate each other’s minor manias, accommodate their idiosyncrasies, make blunders and rectify them, and contribute to each other’s art – writing (primarily) in the case of Mari, visual art in the case of Jonna. But most of all they remain open to the almost priceless small acts of kindness that are possible when love, respect, and friendship are the deep foundation of a relationship.Such spare descriptive writing seemingly insists on transmuting into symbolism. For example, Mari and Jonna share a well-weathered boat named Viktoria, and fathers that were each named Viktor. But even here, Jansson refuses to accept mere symbolism opting instead for the transformative effects of nostalgia. In like fashion, their experience of the American west in the segment set in Phoenix follows hard on the heels of a discussion of the B-movie western. You might be thinking Baudrillard, but don’t. As the hostess of the Phoenix bar says, “Give these ladies some space…They’re from Finland.” That sounds like good advice. Recommended.
    • 4/5
      In this series of linked stories, Jansson explores the daily lives and relationship of two artists, Mari and Jonna, who have lived together for decades. It's pretty clear the stories are based on the lives of Jansson and her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, the Finnish graphic artist. The brief stories are illuminating snapshots of their work, their travels, their memories and their accommodation of each other as they live separately, but together. It's a quiet celebration of art and love.