Stadt der Sonne

I'd like to help him but everything's become so difficult to explain, the things I say are neither accepted or dismissed, they're just something an old person said.

When Tove Jansson visited the US in the early 70s she saw a Florida retirement community and was astonished by it; an entire holiday resort where old people come to conserve whatever life they have left in a place where sunshine was guaranteed and the outside world wouldn't intrude. The Saint Petersburg she sets Sun City in isn't the real Saint Petersburg, FL, anymore than Moominvalley is the real countryside outside Helsinki; it feels more like a dream, like life suspended while waiting for the inevitable. The old women and men in the retirement home, carefully weighing their words to try and forge some sort of connection to the others (or avoid it, in some cases) without breaking the illusion that everything is perfect, are contrasted by Bounty Joe, one of the few young people around, who missed out on the hippie era and now only hopes for confirmation that Jesus is returning so he won't have to grow up.

Jansson's prose is beautiful as always, and the way she sketches characters more by what they don't say or remember than what they do, as if they've spent their lives walking on eggshells and can't bear to break them now. (Two characters are strongly hinted to be gay, as Jansson was and had to keep an open secret for years.) At the same time, while I don't really mind that the plot feels sort of non-existent, there's something about the setting that just feels ... off. I don't know if it's just that Jansson's experience with America is only barely more substantial than Kafka's was, or if it's deliberate to emphasize how artificial this sort of community comes across to an outsider.

Sleep is a blessing you can meet in many different ways.