jannson, 1996, notes from an island

written 20240612.

notes from an island feels so ephemeral. on a first read, it is easy to skip right across the surface and take in little of its eighty pages, an account of how tove jannson and tuulikki pietilä come to live on a remote island at the end of the finnish archipelago, klovharun.

klovharun, the last in a row of islands, a skerry “about six to seven thousand square metres, shaped like an atoll with, in the middle, a lagoon surrounded by granite outcroppings except for two shallow gaps, one on either side, which connect it with the sea [and where] it is said at one time seals used to play in the lagoon, until they learned better and moved farther out” (14).

in comparison with neighbouring bredskär, which is home to “everything, albeit in miniature - a little forest with a woodland path, a little beach with a safe place for the boat, even a little marsh with some tufts of cotton grass” (11), klovahrun has a big boulder and little else. but it’s klovharun where the two choose to spend successive summers, and where, if you move slowly through jannson’s understated writing and the intersperced logs from a carpenter-sailor named brunström, all sorts of mysterious details emerge.

when jannson, pietilä, brunström and a “blasting expert” named sjöblom dynamite the big boulder to make space for a cabin, thick green water bubbles out of the stone “full of pale little creatures no one had ever seen before” (15). word arrives of cargo being jettisoned nearby, but the wind turns and little gets salvaged. brunström is characteristically phlegmatic: “no tragedy, stuff like that happens all the time, and maybe it’s a good thing that other shores are blessed” (21).

there is a meticulous focus on the routines, conflicts and reconciliations that accompany the assemblage of this cabin. klovharun seems barren, but everyone in the book finds meaning in it all the same. jannson’s mother ham “writes about the sudden variations in the light - a rain squall passes by, theshadow of a cloud alters the island for a moment, a thunderstorm gives the landscape a bengali colouring, makes the hidden rocks visible and turns them yellow green” (54). pietilä produces etchings of the lagoon and rocks. jannson befriends a seagull.

jannson’s writing is inflected with an awareness that they are not passive spectators on the island, that by living there they have become part of its lifeworld. she wonders if the island dislikes them, or feels sorry for them. the gull colonies try to drive them out. in coming to live on the island, they change it irrevocably, dynamiting the boulder, transforming the meadow and accidentally killing a population of fish when they try to turn the lagoon into a live-box.

the island also exceeds the limits of what jannson can observe. she wonders about the true shape of the island, and what it looks like under the ocean. “maybe a broad base that lost itself in the long, deserted ocean floor - less and less seaweed, more and more darkness, absolute silence…” (57). brunström later takes the ladies to an even more inhospitable island, unvegetated, inaccessible and without a name. “not a blade of grass, nothing grows here, nothing, and that’s just exactly the beauty of it” (81).

jannson follows this idea further: “then i started wondering why a meadow can’t just grow in its own mistaken way in peace and quiet, and why beautiful rocks can’t tumble about however they like without being admired, and more questions like that, and gradually i got mad, and it seemed to me that the vicious bird war could just take care of itself and it was fine with me whichever damned gull decided it owned the whole house!” (78).

i’m reminded of an old art project, which was about trying to map out tree hollows, interior spaces to which all manner of bats, birds, reptiles and invertebrae, and molds and fungi had access, but not us. sure, you could reach a camera in or try to pull rubbings from them, but you would leave your mark in the process, and while you were around whatever usually lived in that area would be making itself as discreet as possible. there were limits to what you could observe. i like that something as simple as a tree hollow, or a rocky island, can present that abrupt limit to understanding. i get the impression reading notes from an island that tove jannson didn’t much mind it either.

with the cabin built, brunström and sjöblom and ham and psipsina recede from the narrative, leaving the ladies to live out their successive summers on klovharun. the two prefer to go off and do their own things around the island. jannson devotes several late passages to her companion. “summer after summer, i marvel at tooti’s rapport with machines. she genuinely loves them, and so knows what they can do and what you can’t subject them to” (43).

the two come together over machinery, their strugggle to get a generator running (“we used to pick a day and devote it entirely to the honda” - 43); relighting the refrigerator pilot light (“one of us would lie on her stomach in front of the fridge with a raincoat over her head and press on a certain inaccessible button, and the other would get in behind the stove, over the hose that runs through the wall to the propane tank, and try to find the hole and light it with a christmas-tree candle” - 44); trying to place a call off-island.

in the same understated way jannson has described everything else about the island, she is expressing her love and admiration for pietilä through the shared pattern of their days and lives. all the same, these passages are inflected with the increasing awareness that they will eventually have to leave, and not return. their boat victoria is wrecked. they give away all the salvage they have collected over the years. they are outpaced by their machinery. “then we got a radio telephone and a solar panel. it was a pure puzzle and hard to describe. but that happened just before we left klovharun for good, and so other people entirely will have to figure it out if the need arises” (45).

there’s so much more to this book i could keep talking about, the care with which jannson describes all the things they find and salvage, what they do with them; their excursions to other islands; ham’s cat psipsina; jannson’s encounter with a helicopter at the summit of the island. if i keep going though, i’ll want to keep pulling out extracts and before long the whole thing will be in here. this book is beautiful. read slowly, it remains with you even after you’ve put it down, leaving you a greater attentiveness for all the subtle and mysterious things at the edge of our focus.

jannson, 1996, notes from an island

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