Reading: Moominland Midwinter and The Rough Collier

[white_hart]

The darkest days of winter are a time for revisiting old favourites, and while sometimes it's nice to be reminded of summer, my wintry reads are often wintry books. I came late to the Moomins, so Moominland Midwinter is a fairly recent favourite rather than a childhood favourite, but it's no less suited to winter reading for that.

Moomins normally hibernate, but in this book Moomintroll wakes up just after New Year and can't get back to sleep, so he goes out alone to explore the strange and often frightening landscape of Moomin Valley in winter. The book perfectly captures the bleak loneliness of winter, but somehow it's comforting as well. Moomintroll learns that spring does come, that even though the sun may disappear it will return; he has the company of the sensible and practical Too-Ticky (modelled on Tove Jansson's girlfriend) as well as Little My (who predictably sees winter as a great adventure), and it turns out that even the terrifying Groke is as much to be pitied as feared. Always a delight to revisit.

***

The Rough Collier is the fifth of Pat McIntosh's mysteries set in fifteenth-century Scotland. In this one, Gil Cunningham and his wife Alys are staying at his mother's house in the Lanarkshire countryside when a body is discovered buried in a peat-bog, sparking an accusation of witchcraft against a local woman and leading Gil to begin an investigation into the identity of the corpse and the whereabouts of another man who has been missing for five weeks. I really like Gil and Alys and enjoyed seeing how their relationship has developed after five months of marriage, and the mystery was entertaining enough even if I had spotted the murderer by the end of chapter 2 and found Gil and Alys's continuing failure to suspect them somewhat frustrating.

Comments

[perennialanna]

Sort Of books, who publish Tove Jansson's fiction for adults, are doing very nice hardbacks of all the Moomin books, with illustrations restored and fold out maps and whatnot. I am buying them one a month (which is how I got a complete set of Arthur Ransome hardbacks a couple of years ago). Moominland Midwinter is particularly lovely.

[white_hart]

Oh, they sound lovely! I do like the way ebooks have pushed publishers to produce such nice editions of paper books. (I managed to assemble a complete set of Arthur Ransome hardbacks after several years of carefully looking out in second-hand bookshops - they're fairly easy to find. It's fascinating to note things like the difference in paper between pre-war and wartime/immediately post-war editions.)

[perennialanna]

There is a note at the end of my Swallowdale (HB bought new last year) that solves The Dating Problem Of Much Wank - ie, the treaty in S&A being dated 1929 and the note at the top of Kanchenjunga being dated 1931. Nancy would like us all to know that Mr Ransome got it wrong, and S&A took place in 1930. I would love to know when that note got inserted, because it certainly wasn't in Puffin copies of my youth.

[white_hart]

No, I definitely don't remember that in my Puffin, and I'm sure I would have done as Swallowdale may be my favourite. (It certainly isn't in my current hardback copy, but that's unsurprising as it is a 1949 printing. Wartime paper.)

[antisoppist]

But they aren't commissioning new translations. I've been reading them aloud, which is the first time I've read them properly in English, and some of them clunk a bit and others are brilliant, even when sometimes it's the same of the three translators. They were done over decades so I wonder if an editor left or something. But discussion amongst translators comes to the conclusion that everyone is happy to just reissue the same versions over and over again. OUP was re-doing Astrid Lindgren a while back though.

[perennialanna]

It seemed like a hugely missed opportunity to me, especially as Thomas Teal has done what feels like a really good job of her adult books for Sort Of (he also translated Ulla-Lena Lundberg's 'Ice' for them, which I am reading at the moment).

Translations really matter for children. I hated Heidi as a child until I got the Puffin edition, which made everything make sense.

[cmcmck]

'rough collier'?

Sounds like my grandads! :o)