Fair Play

Synopsis

In Fair Play, Tove Jansson offers an intimate portrait of a long creative partnership between two women, Mari, a writer, and Jonna, an artist. They live in separate apartments at opposite ends of the same building, connected by an attic passageway that becomes a physical and symbolic link between their independent lives.

Rather than following a conventional plot, the novel unfolds through seventeen luminous episodes drawn from the women's everyday existence. They argue about art, watch films, travel, work on their respective projects, spend time together on a remote island, and occasionally retreat into solitude. Their relationship is built not on constant closeness but on an unusual respect for each other's independence, creativity, and need for space.

Jansson is particularly interested in the relationship between art and ordinary life. Conversations about books, films, painting, memory, and work become ways for Mari and Jonna to negotiate love and friendship without sentimentality. Their lives are deeply intertwined, yet neither woman is required to surrender her individuality.

First published in Swedish as Rent spel, Fair Play is one of Jansson's most personal works for adults. Tender, witty, and perceptive, it is a distinctive love story about companionship, artistic freedom, aging, and the pleasures of sharing a life without possessing another person. This NYRB Classics edition includes an introduction by Ali Smith and Thomas Teal's award-winning translation from the Swedish.

About the Author

Tove Jansson (1914–2001) was a Finnish-Swedish writer, artist, illustrator, and painter. She is best known internationally as the creator of the Moomins, but she also produced a substantial body of work for adults, including novels and short stories concerned with art, relationships, solitude, family, and the natural world.

Jansson was also a celebrated visual artist. She studied art in Stockholm and Paris and worked as an illustrator and political cartoonist before creating the Moomins. Her adult fiction includes The Summer Book, The True Deceiver, Sun City, and Fair Play. She lived for many years with the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, who provided inspiration for the relationship between Mari and Jonna.

Thomas Teal is an award-winning translator of Swedish literature. His translation of Fair Play received the Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation for 2007–2009.

Ali Smith is a Scottish novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and essayist whose introduction accompanies this edition.

Publisher

New York Review Books Classics

Publication Date

March 15, 2011

Format

Paperback

Pages

120

Subjects

Literary Fiction; LGBTQ+ Fiction; Lesbian Fiction; Women; Female Friendship; Artists; Writers; Creativity; Love; Relationships; Finnish Literature; Swedish Literature; Fiction in Translation

ISBN

9781590173787