Notes from an Island by Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, reviewed by Fiona Rintoul

Sort of Books, £12.99

Review by Fiona Rintoul

In 1964, Tove Jansson and her life partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, built a cabin on a barren outcrop of rock in the Gulf of Finland. Jansson, an author and illustrator best known for her Moomins children’s stories and novel, The Summer Book, was in her late 40s when she and Pietilä formed the notion of spending their summers far from civilisation on Klovharun – a previously uninhabited island in the Pellinge archipelago. Their existing island retreat had become too full of the people they had invited out, who “talked and talked about their yearning for the simple, the primitive, and, most of all, their longing for solitude”. Jansson and Pietilä decided to move further out.

Klovharun

Notes from an Island was written when Jansson was 82 – several years after advancing age and ebbing physical confidence had forced her and “Tooti” to relinquish their Klovharun retreat. One of her last pieces of writing, it sketches both the women’s love affair with the atoll-shaped skerry and their battle – which they neither expected nor wanted to win – to tame it.

Notes from an Island is not simply a brief memoir. Jansson’s prose, which mingles diary entries and vignettes, complements a series of sepia-toned aquatints produced by Pietilä, a graphic artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, in the 1970s. Full-page reproductions showcase these brooding images, which, alongside Jansson’s spare but invigorating prose – swallows rip through the air “like shrieking knives” – evoke the challenges and exhilarations of life on Klovharun.

The book also includes extracts from a log kept by Brunström, the seaman who helped Jansson and Pietilä to build their cabin. His brusque observations provide both insights into the practicalities of the endeavour and a foil to Jansson’s more searching appraisal of the 26 summers she and Pietilä spent on Klovharun. “Tarred the cellar floor and then I figured it was about time to go to Hattula and look for lilies that tolerate seawater” is a typically pragmatic entry.

Brunström, who has “an austere, weather-beaten face and blue eyes” and “uses no adjectives in everyday speech”, seeks out the two women, whom he calls “the ladies” and “the girls”, when he sees a light on the island. They make him tea on their Primus stove. Pretty soon, he and his mates are blasting the “Big Boulder” and helping to construct a cabin with windows on four sides, Brunström having convinced Jansson and Pietilä that it’s a waste of time to apply for a building permit.

“You have to seize the moment,” he tells them. “The law says that no building can be torn down if the builder has framed as high as the roof beam.”

Despite his allergy to adjectives, Brunström pens a poem when his job is done. “So now the gents are going home / Leaving the ladies in clover / So we say farewell as a strong wind dies / With a lump in our throats and tears in our eyes.” He is there at the end too, taking a swing around the house to check that everything is shipshape, an essential ingredient in the women’s Klovharun adventure.

The women love Klovharun but they understand the limits of their power and that the island does not love them back. “Sometimes it felt like unrequited love – everything exaggerated. I had the feeling that this immoderately pampered and badly treated island was a living thing that didn’t like us, or felt sorry for us, depending on the way we behaved, or just because.”

The women cultivate a wildflower meadow but regret the beauty of the wild grasses that the flowers replace. Tooti roars with laughter when they come back one spring to find the woodshed they had filled “right up to the cupola” has been washed clean by the sea. They try to uncover a flat stone in a small, sheltered inlet by tossing rocks to the west, but the sea repeatedly puts everything back where it was before. Jansson’s mother “Ham”, who is a frequent visitor to the island with her cat, warns them not to gild the lily and is amazed when people ask “if it doesn’t get a little boring with nothing but rocks and the horizon”.

As is always the case when people flee civilisation, there is a tension between the desire for the simple and primitive and the urge to improve the place and make it more comfortable. Each year, the women spend an entire day getting their red Honda generator up and running. “She’d make an ear-splitting racket while she filled the whole house with electricity.” Starting the propane-run refrigerator, which was bought for the cat’s sake, was another annual task.

Immersed in nature, the women revel in its beauty – during the great break-up of the ice “unbelievable tabernacles” float by “statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable!” – but also participate in its inexorable cruelty. They catch fish in nets. Tooti kills them with a blow and cooks them. “For a time, we got nothing but cod. As they’re dying, they twist themselves into the net in panic.”

Notes from an Island was published in Swedish in 1996. This first English edition features a crisp translation by Thomas Teal and coincides with the UK release of the feature film Tove about Jansson and Pietilä’s life and love. It is a handsome volume with a map of Klovharun drawn by Ham (Signe Hammarsten-Jansson) on the cover, but it is in no sense a whimsical book. It is above all a hymn to the unstoppable forces of the sea and the weather that acknowledges our precarious grip on the planet we claim to own.

The women are unable to stop the local herring gull gobbling down the common gulls’ chicks. Neither can they dissuade those same common gulls from nosediving them, though they saved their eggs from Brunström and collected gull food all winter. “But they are right,” concedes Jansson. “We came later and have no business being here.”