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the complete review - fiction

The True Deceiver

by
Tove Jansson

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : simple yet fascinating and unsettling characters-study,

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Strange but impressive

  From the Reviews:

• "Jansson crafts an unsentimental -- often mischievous -- novel of ideas that asks whether it is better to be kind than to be truthful, especially for an artist." - Adrian Turpin, Financial Times
  
  
• "It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures. The sentences are beautiful in structure, movement and cadence. They have inevitable rightness. And this is a translation ! (...) The unfolding of their story through vivid contrast and interplay of truthfulness and deceit, purity and complexity, ice and thaw, winter and spring, makes the most beautiful and satisfying novel I have read this year." - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian
  
  
• "(A) delightfully dark winter's tale. (...) Although Jansson's book isn't a thriller, there's a tension to the prose which suggests that blood might be spilt." - Emma Hagestadt, The Independent
  
  
• "This is a very strange novel: brilliant, haunting, wholly memorable. (...) The house, the landscape, the cold and the loneliness haunt in the reading and afterwards, their atmosphere and chill linger to intrigue, puzzle and terrify. A strange novel indeed." - Susan Hill, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Katri Kling is the The True Deceiver of the title (which doesn't quite capture the original, Den ärliga bedragaren), a straight arrow whose forthrightness most of those in the small community she lives in find disconcerting. She is twenty-five, and lives with her brother Mats, who is ten years younger, and a dog that she refuses to even give a name, the only two creatures she seems to care in the least about. She's good at maths -- "her heart was riddled with numbers" --, and so people do come to her with accounting matters.
       But she could also offer:

unambiguous solutions to knotty problems requiring a different kind of arithmetic.

Katri's advice was widely discussed in the village and struck people as correct and very astute. What made it so effective, perhaps, was that she worked on the assumption that every household was naturally hostile towards its neighbours. But people's sessions with Katri were often followed by an odd sense of shame, which was hard to understand, since she was always fair.

the woods, the forest floor. Anna Aemelin could render the ground in a forest so faithfully and in such minute detail that she missed not the tiniest needle. Her watercolours were small and implacably naturalistic, and they were as pretty as the springy blanket of mosses and delicate plants that a person walking across in a dense forest but seldom really observes. Anna Aemelin made people see. They saw and recalled the essence of the forest, and, for a moment, experienced a vague yearning that felt pleasant and hopeful. It was a shame that Anna spoiled her picture by putting rabbits in them, that is to say, Mama, Papa and Baby Bunny. Moreover, the fact that she drew little flowers on the rabbits dispelled much of the deep-forest mystique.

I've never met anyone so terribly -- and I use the word in the sense of frightening -- so terribly honest.

Easily and skilfully, she reproduced Anna's uncertainty and her awkward kindness getting lost in needless small talk.

You don't know how to play -- that's precisely the problem.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 January 2010

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Links:

• Sort Of Books publicity page
• New York Review Books publicity page
• Introduction by Ali Smith

• Asylum
• The Bookbag.co.uk
• Bookmunch
• Cleveland Plain Dealer (scroll down for review)
• A Common Reader ...
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• Irish Times
• Lizzy's Literary Life
• The Los Angeles Times (scroll down for review)
• Serendipity
• Stuck in a Book

• Tove Jansson at books and writers

• Fair Play
• The Summer Book

• See Index of Scandinavian literature
• Other books from New York Review Books

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About the Author:

       Swedish-writing Finnish author Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known for her 'Moomin' stories.

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