The two women at the heart of Fair Play-Mari, a writer, and Jonna, a visual artist-are longtime partners who live down the hall from each other and sometimes alone together on a remote island of the Finnish archipelago. Although she’s so different from Jessica Au, whose Cold Enough for Snow I looked at a couple of months ago as part of this project, she also sometimes offers a similarly oblique angle of approach, the pressure of two fiercely separate beings in a close space, though with Jansson, the pairs in the novels Fair Play and The Summer Book are so integrated into their surroundings that they become a part of the landscape, and the spaces between feel them feel both generous and inexorable. Jansson’s books for adults, beloved to a somewhat smaller crowd than those who love her enchanting, impossible Moomins and their friends, pay close attention to the intricate textures and spaces between and around close relationships. She and her partner of more than forty years, visual artist Tuulikki Pietilä, spent winters in Helsinki and nearly thirty years of long summers alone together on the tiny island of Klovharun in an archipelago off the coast of Finland. She came from a family of artists and, in addition to being a writer, was serious about her painting and illustration. Tove Jansson knew these empty spaces well. There are empty spaces that must be respected-those often long periods when a person can’t see the pictures or find the words and needs to be left alone. They never asked, “Were you able to work today?” Maybe they had, twenty or thirty years earlier, but they’d gradually learned not to.

She could pause on the way to listen to the rain on the metal roof, look out across the city as it lit its lights, or just linger for the pleasure of it. Mari liked wandering across the attic it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains. They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbor, and between the studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man’s-land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson