book post: The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

[queenlua]

I read this book all the way back at in May—a long enough time that, usually, I’ve forgotten the book almost entirely, except for whatever notes I took down.

And yet I touch this book and I’m overwhelmed with how it felt: a plot that drove along like hoofbeats or heartbeats, steady yet powerful and very alive, hyperfocused on this quiet, tense, weird little conflict, in a quiet town someplace very far north and very far away from everywhere else.

So yeah, I loved this. As I blathered on Tumblr, it feels like it combined the elements of a good thriller with good literary fiction to make a beautiful new thing.

Writing now, it occurs to me that this novel is what Carys Davies’s West wanted to be: a slim, stylized novel, in which its mood/setting was so imposingly huge it became a Thing all its own. And while West nailed its mood and setting, its stylizations feel more like stereotypes or cardboard cutouts—whereas Jansson’s stylizations feel like hyperreality, like Katri and Anna are somehow the purer, rawer distillations of two very real humans. And where West was limp, the plot meandering this way and that in the middle, The True Deceiver amps up the tension with every page-turn, in a hundred deliciously quiet ways.

someone please read this book so I can talk about it with someone, sob

(also i HELLA want some yuletide f/f Katri/Anna fic because. my god. the tension. like, i don’t think it’s romantic/sexual tension in the book, at all, but there’s so much tension there that you could totally twitch the knobs a bit and make it that way—

sorry, you came on my blog, you’re gonna get the intrusive fanfiction thoughts)