Although known first and foremost as an author, Tove Jansson considered her careers as author and painter to be of equal importance. Her writing and her black and white line drawings are both great art and they are fused together allowing her to produce masterpiece after masterpiece.

My, on the other hand, is just as we need her to be; irrepressible and just a little bit wicked, often adding a touch of humor just when things get dark. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. During the winter months Tove lived and worked in Helsinki, but in the summertime she stayed on a beautiful remote island in the Gulf of Finland with her long-term partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä. Her novels along with the picture book Who Will Comfort Toffle are at the centre of her work and divide into two periods.When he starts to notice that nature is not as predictable as he had assumed and that it cannot be controlled this way, he begins to find a more authentic understanding. Perhaps the strangest of all the very strange Moomin books, we begin with the family safe in Moominvalley, but Moominpappa feels useless and unhappy, and they decide to journey to a distant island and live in a lighthouse. The respect shown towards the forces of nature is perhaps most visible in the second to last Moomin book, “Moominpappa at Sea”, released in 1965, where the Moomin family moves from the safe and familiar Moominvalley to a distant lighthouse island at the mercy of the sea, storms and the forces of nature.

The book I think is trying to elucidate a theory where for each person there is a specific purpose that will give their particular life meaning, and that this can be done through a variety of means. The book was funny because Moominpapa was really serious and Moomimama didn't really like the island. Once arriving there, they find it a desolate and lonely place, inhabited only by a very unfriendly fisherman.While there is no war and almost no violence in them I think that they are a sort of antidote to the inhumanity of that conflict. In the beginning of the book, Moominpappa tries, as if by understanding, to control the pompous sea and perhaps even himself: “You see, my idea is to discover what secret rules the sea obeys. A peculiar only-sort-of-for-children late Moomin novel where the family attempts of combat leisure-ennui by moving to a ragged lighthouse island far out in the ocean. Meanwhile, Moominmamma grows more and more melancholy as her dream of planting a garden never works out and her longing for home grows stronger. They are still brilliant stories for children but there is so much going on I find I can read and reread as a 48 year old.