Fair Play

A New York Review Books Original

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation

Two women, both artists, no longer young, live and work on opposite sides of a large apartment building, their studios connected by an attic passageway. They have loved and argued for decades, long enough to anticipate the other's next words and to guess her next move. Yet no matter how many times they've played the game, it is always capable of surprising them.

Tove Jansson tells the women's story in a series of brief, spare episodes, which bear the fitness of parable and the nuance of portraiture. We see the two as they watch Fassbinder films and B Westerns, critique each other's works in progress, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's The Summer Book), and travel through the American Southwest. The type of love story that is rarely told, Fair Play is a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

A New York Review Books Original

 

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation

 

Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating. 

Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art. 

 

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland's Swedish-speaking minority. She created and illustrated the adventures of Moomintroll, the Moomin family, and their curious friends in a long-running comic strip and in a series of books for children that have been translated throughout the world. Jansson also wrote novels and short stories for adults, of which The Summer Book and The True Deceiver are available as NYRB Classics.

Ali Smith is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2001, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award in 2005 and was short-listed for the 2005 Booker Prize.

Thomas Teal has translated Tove Jansson's Sun City, The Summer Book, and The True Deceiver.