Tove Jansson’s Travelling Light is a collection of short stories designed to provoke. Whether emotions, thoughts, or introspection, each of the stories in turn demands a response from its reader, and their combined power surges through the collection, heightening the impact of each story as it is discovered.

Jansson’s prose is, as always, crystalline and delicate, evoking a sense of icy clarity that makes the heat of emotion, when it does appear, all the more powerful. Her light touch and sure sense of place allow her to evoke entire histories in a sentence, entire places with a word. The humour, despair, loneliness, and connection all lie one next to the other, echoing the realties of life.

The stories follow ordinary people bent on some sort of escape, whether it is from a dull and predictable life, an anxious and disturbing child, or a situation gone mad. Each of the characters that populate her stories are, no matter their efforts at separation, connected to those around them. There are occasional spikes of success, the minutest of victories, where the past is left behind, but, in the end, characters are never truly alone, stalked eternally by the ever present reader.

One story in particular plays with the ideas of identity and anxiety, of memory and possession, so deftly as to be equal to any thriller of Poe or Hitchcock. In fourteen short pages, Jansson’s “The Woman who Borrowed Memories” ramps uncertainty to terror and turns memory and love into deadly weapons until the the staccato tap of fear reverberates through every word.

No don’t go, please, don’t go yet, stay a little longer, just a little while, it was all so long ago and there’s still so much to talk about… What are you afraid of?

Here, the act of shedding the past, of losing memories, has become deadly serious, a thing that can be stolen and thrown back at its owner. And this story is not alone, the search for solitude, for freedom, often turns deadly and dangerous in the collection, and travelling light becomes a question not of material goods but of self and certainty.

The shedding of self, while dangerous, does allow some of Jansson’s characters to move on, abandoning baggage and burdens in exchange for an uncertain future and occasional moments of light humour. It is always the journey itself that is fraught with danger and possible disappointment; it is being outside of one’s habits that allows for bits of identity to be lost. But even with that possibility of loss, the uncertainty of success, there is always an escape, an avenue to travel, the promise of something next, even if hidden in the mist.

A thick fog had descended over the city, the first spring fog. A good sign. It meant that soon, little by little, the ice would go.

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