Moominvalley in November (Moomins Fiction)

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Six depressed and solitary people separately decide to visit this one family that has always made them feel like life is worth living. At last the final installment is being published – oddly, the only book that features none of the Moomin family themselves, though it does take place at their house. There familiar characters converge – Snufkin, the Hemulen, Fillyjonk, and others – seeking out the Moomins' welcoming company, only to find them absent.

I could definitely relate to this one around the age of 12, although when I re-read it as an adult, it made more sense. Instead, Tove Jansson let the values of the Moomin family be adapted by other creatures left in Moominvalley, who are trying to live as the family used to. Everything had withered and died, but right down on the ground the late autumn’s secret garden was growing with great vigour straight out of the mouldering earth, a strange vegetation of shiny puffed-up plants that had nothing at all to do with summer. Drame gospodina sa guči torbicom o apsurdnosti života sam pročitao jednom i mislim da im se neću više vraćati, roman „Novembar u Dolini Mumijevih” čitam treći put. The whole world was craving for more Moomin, and yet, this last novel became a Moomin book devoid of Moomins.Toft, a new character, is of course Jansson's avatar in this story, which adds a melancholy element of metafiction as she tries to say goodbye to the characters that had overtaken her life. The warm and comforting Moominvalley is gone - Jansson couldn't reach it any more, and the series was becoming a burden. This is a wonderfully subtly book about the decay of Autumn and the change towards winter, about loneliness, fear, music, awkwardness, dementia, an old house, the wind at night, the darkness late in the year, the idea of the family, a sense of loss and waiting. Our amazing news is that we will be launching Special Collectors’ Editions of the original Moomin novels in October 2017: the first four titles to coincide with the opening of the Tove Jansson retrospective at Dulwich Picture Gallery.

For Tove this meant a goodbye (for the most part) to Moominvalley, making way for a new chapter in her artistic and personal life. In her last, most profound and poignant Moomin story, Jansson explores themes of loss, legacy and hope. Since Farrar, Straus and Giroux began reissuing the books in 1989, grateful readers old and new have been thrilled to have the stories available again. How exciting would it have been to read 700 pages of them tidying up the Griffindor common room and bickering about who knew the boy wizard the best? The Times Literary Supplement described the book as "possibly the cleverest of the Moomin books", whilst Philip Ardagh, writing for The Guardian in 2003, similarly praised it, describing the work as "melancholy" and comparing the character of Toft with that of Toffle, another lonely child, from Jansson's picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle?Because of this, it has been described as being a "textbook on letting go, being a mature orphan, existing spiritually alone" [1] and features a young orphan looking for a mother as one of its primary characters. Snusmumrikas apskritai sunkiai ištveria bet kokią draugiją ir, suaugėliškai kalbant, bėga nuo realybės ir savęs. He had that simple but rare ability to retain his own warmth, he gathered it all round him and lay very still and took care not to dream. The story appears to run concurrently with the events seen in the previous novel, Moominpappa at Sea (an equally bleak sort of a book).