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Apr. 23rd, 2020 07:13 amThe consensus for last month's book group was that we all wanted to read something as non-stressful as possible; therefore, Tove Janssen's Fair Play, a collection of semi-autobiographical vignettes about Mari, an author, and Jonna, an artist, who have spent decades intertwining their lives together.
To be honest, the book got my hackles up a little early on -- there's a very early story in which instead of going out to meet with other friends, Jonna and Mari decide to stay in and watch a film, and then Jonna asks Mari if she minds it that they don't spend time with other people any more, only each other, and Mari says no, and I went 😬 because I don't love that kind of relationship claustrophobia at the best of times (but especially not at this time, when Seeing People that you don't live with feels like such a simultaneous impossibility and necessity; read the room from thirty years ago, Tove!)
...but as the stories went on they did indeed leave the house and meet other people with some frequency, so my hackles lowered again. Also, it was an early Saturday morning in which I was the only one awake, and a surprise April snow, and I had tea, and all these factors combined to create the perfect circumstances in which to read these cozily wistful little snapshots of life with two creative and challenging people, in their seventies now, with years of work and love and arguments between them.
This is perhaps an odd comparison given their very different subject matters, but structurally this book reminded me of nothing so much as Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories: an accumulation of moments, each not particularly narrative but containing a contextual weight far beyond what's actually on the page, that come together like pointillist dots to create an impression of a whole. In the end, I enjoyed the experience very much.
To be honest, the book got my hackles up a little early on -- there's a very early story in which instead of going out to meet with other friends, Jonna and Mari decide to stay in and watch a film, and then Jonna asks Mari if she minds it that they don't spend time with other people any more, only each other, and Mari says no, and I went 😬 because I don't love that kind of relationship claustrophobia at the best of times (but especially not at this time, when Seeing People that you don't live with feels like such a simultaneous impossibility and necessity; read the room from thirty years ago, Tove!)
...but as the stories went on they did indeed leave the house and meet other people with some frequency, so my hackles lowered again. Also, it was an early Saturday morning in which I was the only one awake, and a surprise April snow, and I had tea, and all these factors combined to create the perfect circumstances in which to read these cozily wistful little snapshots of life with two creative and challenging people, in their seventies now, with years of work and love and arguments between them.
This is perhaps an odd comparison given their very different subject matters, but structurally this book reminded me of nothing so much as Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories: an accumulation of moments, each not particularly narrative but containing a contextual weight far beyond what's actually on the page, that come together like pointillist dots to create an impression of a whole. In the end, I enjoyed the experience very much.
