Sandra reviewed Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson
Feeling his family's life is too safe and fixed, Moominpappa moves them to a lighthouse …
I live by the ocean and during the night
5 stars
Content warning Moominpappa at Sea: premise revealed + resolution vaguely hinted at. No plot points discussed
Let's sail all the way out to the sea to a tiny speck of an island where we can explicate and externalize and incarnate our hitherto unspoken grawing worries and fears, Liminalize the subliminal, break on through to the other side, scratch and breach the subdermal in a land of shortening days and dwindling lamp oil.
That's what the Moomin family does in this 1965 classic, penultimate in the Moomin series and sort of a sister book to the 1970 Moominvalley in November. At least, that's how I always thought of it because the Moomin books, the eight illustrated prose novels (well, one of them, the best one, is a short story collection) are presented as one set, the full-on picture books as one set, and the comics (Newspaper strips) as one set.
These last two books really feel like her bookend on the Moomin series, and her own run on the comics are all from in between the previous books and she had passed that baton by the time of Moominpappa at Sea, but I think one or two of the picture books are actually later. I should make an "intertwined timeline" at one point mostly for my own benifit so I can see where each comic storyline was published in between which novel and so on.
I had read one or two of the Moomin books as a very young girl but when I was twelve I checked out the entire set from the library and read them more coherently. These two last books (this one is the seventh out of eight) really felt like a "aargh, to heck with this! Let's twist the dagger in this series" sort of like The Silver Chair is to the Narnia series.
And as I told some of y'all the other day, this book was always the scariest and creepiest to me for how it's liminal, how it's twilight to the last book, Moominvalley in November being full dark no stars and easier to understand and grasp and dive into, especially after having made it through this one.
But the sea isn't just dark and drowning. It's also glistening and sparkling and fresh. There is a dawn after this twilight and the way it's set up and delivered is note by note perfect. This book can be your map through the dusk and into the new and unhurried, unworried life. A timeless classic.
It's just coindence that I wrapped up two 1965 books just after one another, this and The Drought. Both similarly liminal and would make great companion pieces for each other.