The Listener

The Listener was the first of Tove Jansson’s books to be published after the death of her mother, the point at which she declared the Moomin series over. This collection of short stories is different from Tove’s previous work; fragmentary, starting and stopping in the middle of things. Fascinatingly, the illustrator Edward Gorey appears in one of the stories saying: ”It’s the unexpressed that interests me … it’s a mistake to clarify everything.” This seems to aptly describe Tove’s writing.