Jansson’s books non-Moomin books were out of print for quite a while, but they were all released in new editions a while back, so I bought all the ones I hadn’t read yet, and I’ve slowly been making my way through them.
Most of them are very short (this one is just eighty pages long), and I guess you could say they’re kinda variable? Some of them seem very self-consciously “I’m writing for adults now, so there!”, and if I understand correctly, they weren’t well received in Sweden or Finland. And most of them were not widely translated. (I think that’s changed in the last decade or so.)
This one is absolutely wonderful. It’s not a novel per se, but it’s a collection of vignettes that are all about two women who live together, and they’re artists, and they spend a lot of time on a wind-blown little island outside of Finland. So it’s natural to read this as autobiographical, but I have really no idea whether it is or not: Of the two characters, the one that’s the analogue of Jansson’s partner is more of a viewpoint character than the one that’s Jansson’s analogue.
It’s a really sweet, funny and touching little book.
I’m not Swedish myself, but the language in the book seems more than a bit old-fashioned? That is, even if I’ve read Swedish all my life, there were more than a few words where I went “eh? eh?”. But perhaps that’s because Jansson is Swedish-Finnish (Swedish language but living in Finland), so the way of phrasing might be sorta archaic? I don’t know; just babbling.
Rent spel (1989) by Tove Jansson (buy new, buy used, 3.89 on Goodreads)