Farlig Midsommar
Tove Jansson
143 p.

Awe/Gebers 1987.
(first published 1954 by Nordstedts Förlag, AB.)

Back cover blurb:

Vattnet bara stiger och stiger och allting börjar flyta. Där kommer n teater på drift och med den driver Muminfamiljen in i en midsommarnatt som är full av trolldom och överraskningar, av nya vänner och fiender. Vet ni att hatifnattar kommer ur frö och att man måste så dem på midsommarnatten? Har ni nånsin borrat hål genom ert eget golv eller sett en självlysande parkvakt? Och är ni medvetna om hur hemskt farligt det är att vissla på teatern? Det här är berättelsen om vad som hände i den magiska månaden juni samma år som det eldsprutande berget rörde på sig och mumintrollets mamma gjorde sin vackraste barkbåt.

Tove Jansson is, together with Astrid Lindgren, the most well-respected Swedish authors for children. I really don’t like Astrid Lindgren all that much, but Tove Jansson? I completely adore her. Her novels are so completely surreal and beautiful, and simple brilliant. For some reason I’ve only read one of her novels by myself before, and that was a few years ago. Then I came to discuss Lord of the Rings together with a few people, and one of these people said that he thought that if you were supposed to read proper fantasy, you should read Tove Jansson. This was of course an over-simplified version of the conversation, but it made me think. Seeing as I was sadly unfamiliar with her world - what I know is from when I was very tiny - I decided to read a novel of hers, and make some sort of comparision. And if I decided that the comparision is too far off, I would still have read a good book.

What a good book this is. As a fantasy world it can’t really be justly compared with Lord of the Rings, but with The Hobbit it is clearly comparable. And, I must admit, Farlig Midsommar made me feel a lot more than The Hobbit did. Now, Tolkien’s novel is seventeen years older, and is most definitely inspirational for Jansson, who, after all, has illustrated The Hobbit. I don’t know if it’s my skewed sense of feeling, or if it is actually better, but I could feel more for the mystical creatures in Farlig midsommar than in The Hobbit. Moomin, Snufkin and all of those amazed me with their simple ingenuinity.

The fact that the characters weren’t one-dimensional, which often people in childrens’ novels are, felt very nice. There was a passage where Snufkin, together with twenty-four children he has happened to adopt, are going to the theatre. Here Snufkin thinks that he hoped that nobody would think that the children were his - that would be a bit embarrassing. At another place Moomin promises The Snork Maiden that he has kidnapped her, and that she screamed terribly. What kind of pure childrens’ book is this? This is amazing, that’s what it is.

I really hate the fact that I am more or less the busiest I’ve ever been this week, and that I will have no time to read another Moomin book quite yet. It breaks my heart. But on Friday, when everything’s calmed down a few degrees, I am going to an exhibition with original art from the Moomin novels. I am going to be over the moon.

Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
J.K. Rowling
317 p.

Bloomsbury, 1999.

Back cover blurb:

Harry Potter is a wizard! Along with Ron and Hermione, his best friends, Harry is in his third years at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Who knows what will happen this year? Read on to find out and immerse yourself in the magical world of Hogwarts…

Before I start saying anything decent, I must just profess my love for the back cover blurbs on the first three books. They are all so happy and trying to lure readers to pick up the books. Today, you could write “Harry Potter is kinda hip” and god-knows how many people would buy it anyway. Such is the charm of Harry Potter. This deep fascination and worldwide obsession with Harry Potter I find very interesting. But, of course, I appreciate the books as they are.

This is my favourite Harry Potter-book. It has got everything. With it my favourite characters (Lupin and Sirius) are introduced, the “real” plot is first nosed at (pun not intended). And Voldemort is not in it. Now, I don’t mind Voldemort - I think he’s a quite interesting character - but it feels so fresh to be rid of him for an entire book! If he had appeared in this book, my high esteem for these books would drop a bit. No one tries to resurrect themselves four time. Ain’t happenin’. With this book Harry is also starting to grow up. He is no longer just “yay for wizardry!”. He’s got funny jolts in his stomach and seems to have matured. Of course, he is miles from the Harry he’s become in the last book, but still! Harry Potter as a phenomena had also started to engrain itself in the society, and you were expected to have read the first two books, which means that not everything is explained yet again. That is one of the things that annoy me in the second book - everything is explained as if you haven’t read the first. Which is very practical if it’s been more than a year reading it, but if it is a day and a half, it isn’t quite as practical.

THIS BOOK IS BRILLIANT. That is all I want to say.

Bilbo: en hobbits äventyr
(The Hobbit or There And Back Again)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Translated by Britt G. Hallqvist
Illustrations by Tove Jansson
308 p.

Rabén & Sjögren, 1962
(first published 1937 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.)

For Decades ‘08 and Here Be Dragons.

Back cover blurb:

none

I read this book a year or so before the first Lord of the Rings film was released, and it took longer time still before I actually realised that the upcoming film and the book I had read some time before were even connected. (what can I say? I wasn’t a particularly bright kid, and I’m still daft.) I read it in the same version as I did now, an older translation and beautiful pictures by Tove Jansson (who, if you don’t recognise the name or the style, also wrote and drew the Moomin-stories, as well as illustrated several other childrens’ novels). It is a lovely translation, and it isn’t often I can say that. Admittedly, I sometimes started wondering if the text was only translated, or if it had been altered in any way. As I have never read The Hobbit in English, I can’t tell. The style of writing is vastly different from the one he came to use when writing Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t read in English either. I am a little ashamed, yes.

Now, when I was tiny, I loved this book. When I later read Lord of the Rings, I loved that even more. I was completely enraptured by these hobbits and dwarves and men who were so amazing and different from any other thing I’d read. I never particularly liked the elves, I thought them self-important and more than a little egotistical. The humans were the ones for me. Still, I thought them the best books ever published. I never re-read The Hobbit, which is a little peculiar, but the trilogy I read three or four times. Completely brilliant. Now, when I read it again, I started to feel a little nervous. After fifty pages I didn’t enjoy it at all as much as I ought to. I ought to swoon and go “Oh Tolkien!” in wonder, but these swoons were illuminating in their absence. It was very alarming. And quite upsetting. I really wanted to love this book as much as I did when I was ten.

In the end I didn’t. I liked it more than I did when I started, but it never filled me with that alarming sense of joy that was present the first time. I liked the middle a lot. The middle made me happy. The end confused me a bit, because I had got a strong idea of what was going to happen: the dwarves were going to hunt down the dragon and everything was going to be hunky-dory. Of course, this didn’t happen. I remembered vaguely what was going to happen - who was going to do the dragon in and a few of who were dying. That didn’t match with my view of what should happen. When the great battle started I found myself disappointed again, because in my mind, a great big battle wasn’t really justified for this. The orcs hadn’t been that important before and the dragon was the fiend! Battles where hundreds of people die are not necessary! I guess reading a few Tolkien-ripoffs has taken its toll already. That it ricochetted on Tolkien himself was a bit of misery, though.

I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but with the expectation so high, I loved it less than I wanted to. When I reread it, in several years, I will probably read it in English. This translation is beautiful, the poems and songs are fantastic, but reading the original is always nice. If we had owned it in English (which we don’t. We have a copy of the first edition of Silmarillion, a book it is highly unlikely I’ll read again, but not The Hobbit in English. Two in Swedish, though.), I would have read it in that language. This one copy I read is so worn and loved that the back has fallen off and the spine is leaving. The edges are banged and frayed. Still, it is a lovely edition of a more than decent book.

Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets
J.K. Rowling
251 p.

Bloomsbury, 1998

Back cover blurb:

Harry Potter is a wizard. he is in his second year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Little does he know that this year will be just as eventful as the last…

I don’t know how many times I have read this book. Still, it is my least favourite of the Potter-books. The fault in it does not lie in the plot or in the characters; in fact, I can’t really say wherein the fault lies. It might be that I have always read this book in paperback whilst I’ve read the others in hardback, even though that seems to be more a psychological than a literary reason for not liking it as much. It is definitely not a bad book. It is a good book, but it is apparent that the glory of the Harry Potter series was not yet certain. You aren’t supposed to know who everyone is and everything gets a hardy description, so you won’t be lost. Some of these descriptions are blunt and feel a little too obvious, but others are very nicely worked in. Harry gets to describe what Quidditch is about to a tiny first-years, and so also refreshes the memory of the reader. It is quite cleverly done. I read this book earlier this year, to refresh my memory before reading the seventh book, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did this time. You come to think of things which are hinted in this book and then spelt out in the seventh, and a number of times I went “Oh!” when I realised something that later cropped up in the seventh. Of course, I can’t remember what these things were.

Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets is the last of the Potter-books that are light-weight, so to say. The following book involves a lot of betraying and has a much darker atmosphere. This book, however, is still a whimsical child’s tale of a brilliant place which happens to have a really bad egg, but that happens and it isn’t all that bad. It is an extremely joyful novel. And I can’t help but like it, even though it isn’t quite as good as the other books. I guess I can blame it on nostalgia.