Their story is written in mundane vignettes: they avoid their friends to watch a Fassbinder movie on TV, and then, almost incidentally, end up discussing the role of artificiality in art they travel together for days shooting film of empty carousels and sharks and in the end, all that happens is that they watch the clips together, asking themselves whether they are good. Fair Play follows two characters who are a close match for the real-life pair-Mari, a writer and illustrator, and Jonna, a visual artist-as they live and make things, each artist on her own path. Jansson herself had a lifelong partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, alongside whom she spent many years working. Fair Play, Jansson’s 1989 novel released by NYRB in 2011, serves as a particularly poignant antithesis of the “loner artist” narrative: it deals with a loving partnership that, rather than getting in the way of artistic work, lifts and expands it. Ali Smith, in her introduction to the New York Review of Books translation of The True Deceiver, Jansson’s 1982 novel, posited that “it could be said that everything wrote is, in one way or another, about the creative interactions between art and reality or art and nature.” Write about the artistic life she certainly did, but Jansson firmly eschewed the stereotype of the lone artistic hero: NYRB has published translations from the original Swedish for three of Jansson’s novels and one collection of stories all three works have two co-protagonists rather than just one. The Finnish writer Tove Jansson is a radiant exception.įamous for her Moomintroll books and comics for children, Jansson, who died in 2001, was also a painter and a writer of adult fiction. Many authors who portray artists, whether James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, or Haruki Murakami, notoriously invoke the trope of the sensitive loner. Portraits of artists doing their work are maybe the most intense in this regard. Usually, the protagonist is aware of his individuality, sometimes painfully, sometimes proudly.

Literary fiction is focused almost exclusively on individuals.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson