The Woman Who Borrowed Memories

October 20, 2014
Like Jansson (The True Deceiver) herself, many of her protagonists are artists, be they illustrators and cartoonists or painters, authors, actors, architects, interior designers, or sculptors. Jansson frequently depicts people who in turn study human character, and her vignettes are remarkable for their cell-like precision. In "The Listener," she writes of an elderly woman who crafts an elaborate tree of family secrets; "Traveling Light" tells of a young man so burdened by others' confidences that he has tried to escape on a voyage at sea. She also studies alienation: people experiencing gradual estrangement from loved ones ("Black-White," "The Doll's House") and those imposing isolation on themselves ("The Storm," "The Squirrel"); in each case, she illustrates the growing rifts with vivid light/dark imagery. Jansson further explores surreal, dissociative themes, such as a man who becomes obsessed with his double ("The Other"), and, in the title story, a woman whose former roommate has co-opted her past. Themes range from madness to sweet reminiscence, murder to survival, in tales that are relentlessly observant. As she writes in "The Listener": "Probably few of us pay adequate attention to all the things constantly happening to the people we loveâ¦"

September 1, 2014
Twenty-six spare, slyly off-kilter stories collected from the life work of Swedish-speaking Jansson, who wrote 11 works of adult fiction (The Summer Book, 1972, etc.) as well as a series of children's books (Moominpappa's Memoirs, 1994, etc.) before her death in 2001. Written between 1971 and 1998, these stories consider loneliness, family, aging and creative experience, sometimes all together as in the opening story, "The Listener," about an elderly woman who creates an elaborate chart of her memories. In "Black-White" and "The Other," artists find themselves erasing the line between art and life, while "The Cartoonist" expresses artistic ambivalence as a man hired to carry on someone else's cartoon becomes obsessed with understanding why his predecessor quit. "The Doll's House," concerning a retired upholsterer who builds a miniature world for himself and his uninterested lover, asks who ultimately owns the finished creation. In "A Leading Role" and "White Lady," actresses juggle artificial roles and reality. In "The Wolf," one of several stories with animal titles, a woman wonders if the Japanese artist she's hosting will draw the caged animal they see together at the zoo or the one he imagines. In one of the volume's most disturbing stories, it isn't clear if a woman writer living purposely alone on an island allows a squirrel to terrorize her or if "The Squirrel" is her creation. Other stories use travel to consider relationships, memory and isolation. Most, like "A Foreign City" and "The Woman Who Borrowed Memories," feature characters whose lives go out of kilter. But a few-"The Summer Child," about a rural family and the difficult boy they take in for the summer; "The Garden of Eden," about a woman negotiating between warring expat neighbors in Spain; "Travelling Light," about a man who can't escape his own generosity-offer slivers of gently sweetened optimism. Windows crop up often in Jansson's stories, reflecting the transparent wall between her lonely characters and their worlds but also Jansson's expression of intangible thoughts and feelings with lucent prose.

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November 1, 2014
Jansson, the award-winning author of the Moomin books for children, has also published novels, short stories, and nonfiction in her native Finland. This volume presents selections from several of her short story collections in excellent translations by Teal and Mazzarella. The 26 short pieces in this volume are specific to time and place and convey a keen knowledge of human nature. In The Woman Who Borrowed Memories, Stella returns home after 15 years to find that her studio isn't the only thing her sister, Wanda, has taken over. Alexander, a skilled artisan, finds retirement to be very boring until he develops a new preoccupation in The Doll's House. Elsa, the young wife in The Gulls, discovers that retreating to a remote island during nesting season may not help her husband, Arne, recover from a nervous breakdown. Letters from Klara provides an amusing portrait of a sharp-tongued older woman. Readers who pick up this collection will be fascinated by these stories, which contain vivid portraits of the landscape of Finland and the lives of its inhabitants.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)