Leaving the baggage at home A Contrary review by Pauline Masurel 
Travelling Light Tove Jansson Translated from the Swedish by Silvester Mazzarella Sort of Books, 2010 Buy this book...> Many will seek out Tove Jansson's adult writing, as I have, because they enjoyed her Moomin stories for children. Travelling Light is part of Jansson's later work for adults, which is only just becoming available in English translation. In Travelling Light she conveys the same enormous fondness for her characters we find in the Moomin stories, while celebrating each character’s individual strangeness. The title story concerns one man's attempt to achieve “the act of travelling unfettered and with no responsibility for what one has left behind and without any opportunity to foresee what may lie ahead and prepare for it. Nothing but an enormous sense of peace.” He finds that people afloat are just as adept at unloading emotional baggage as those ashore, however little luggage he embarked with himself. In fact, awkwardness, nuisance and discomfort often crop up in this collection. These stories are not 'light' in the sense of being cheery travel pieces. There is considerable darkness; inexplicable things happen. A stranger disappears following a chance meeting caused by a piece of lost property, a PE teacher hangs himself, gulls attack with the savagery of a class of children, and siblings venture into a dark wood until the forest begins to venture back at them. Jansson’s devotion to her characters’ individuality counteracts any inherent bleakness in the stories to make them uplifting. For example, in “The Eightieth Birthday,” Johnny realizes “Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it's mine.” This collection journeys into foreign territories but also focuses on the more familiar landscapes of human nature. The premise of a story can be as simple as attending a party for the relative of a loved one, foisting a child upon a family for the summer, or returning to a previous dwelling after many years. “Shopping” questions the very fundamentals of this ordinary act and examines what people really need to obtain in order to survive. It implies, like most of these stories, that the answer is communication. There are many “lonely islands” in the collection: some geographical, others human. Such as two elderly men who meet in the hothouse of a Botanic Gardens. Or Elis, in “The Summer Child,” who knows the price of everything and compulsively collects animal corpses to bury. He sours the atmosphere for his hosts with “a soft-spoken litany about the ruined sea and the ruined air and then all the wars and all the people who had nothing to eat and were dying everywhere all the time and what can we do, what can we do...” Stella, “The Woman Who Borrowed Memories,” travels into the past to find it rewritten by her former flat mate. There is a chilling buildup as this appropriation and betrayal unfolds. Finally some resolution emerges: “A thick fog had descended over the city, the first spring fog. A good sign. It meant that soon, little by little, the ice would go.” Tove Jansson writes cadenced endings like these, that settle with a sigh or a wry smile. Language emerges as one of the barriers between travelers and natives. In “The Garden of Eden” Viktoria is staying at her goddaughter's home, “and a young man came in with a toolbox, smiled and explained something Viktoria didn't understand. Then he began making a large hole in the wall. It's funny, you think you've learned all these fine and useful things to say in Spanish, but when you need them they all just vanish.” This edition includes an introduction by Ali Smith, whose own enigmatic short stories have attained as much prominence as her novels. As Smith writes in the introduction, “How lightly Jansson's fiction traverses the wide world. How profoundly it implicates us.” If you enjoy having beautifully-crafted, nuanced stories to read on your own travels, then this collection would be a valuable addition to your luggage, however lightly you pack. Pauline Masurel writes short and even shorter fiction. She lives near Bristol, UK, is a regular reviewer for The Short Review and a member of the storytelling group Heads & Tales. More can be found at her website www.unfurling.net. Index of Reviews...>http://astore.amazon.com/contrary-20/detail/1852248815Reviews.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0shapeimage_1_link_1

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