READIN

Our bedtime story tonight was Chapter 3 of Moominpappa at Sea. Here are a couple of nice things.

• Moomintroll discovers a glade, which he wants to make his secret hiding-place. Unfortunately it is already inhabited by belligerent red ants. Here is Moomintroll's rationalization of why it's alright for him to seek to evict them:

  Naturally, they were living there before he had appeared on the scene. But if one lives in the ground, one just doesn't see anything of what's up above; an ant has no idea of what birds or clouds look like, or for that matter doesn't know anything about the things that are important to a Moomintroll, for instance. [Sylvia interjects here, like his tail is important to him. -- Because in the previous paragraph, the ants had bitten his tail.]

  There were many kinds of justice. According to one kind, which was a little complicated, perhaps, but absolutely fair, the glade belonged to him and not to the ants.

  I love this examination of his thinking. It goes directly to the heart of the matter, tersely poetic. There is also a reference of a sort back to the trial of Thingumy and Bob in "Finn Family Moomintroll", in which their defense was that they thought the King's Ruby was the most beautiful thing in the world, whereas the Groke only thought it was the most expensive. And that seemed pretty convincing in that case, more obviously self-serving here. (Speaking of the Groke, she is portrayed again in this book, and with more depth than before, if still as a monster.)

• There is a picture of the sea-horse, with whom Moomintroll is going to fall in love, for the first time in the book -- she has been mentioned before but not shown. Sylvia says, "Hey that's not a seahorse! That looks like a galloping horse!" And I think, "Wow, now for the first time I understand why they call seahorses that." Because the illustration combines the curvy seahorse body with the body and legs of a horse and it looks very natural.

• Chapter 4, which we will read tomorrow (or Monday -- tomorrow is Sylvia's birthday party and she may be too tired out afterwards to want to think about Moomins), is called "The North-easter". When Sylvia heard this she pricked up and said Chapter 3 had been called "The West Wind" and that the two chapter titles were similar. I had totally not thought of that at all -- I had forgotten the title of the chapter we were reading. So props to Sylvia for seeing something about the frame of the story.

posted evening of Saturday, September 17th, 2005
➳ More posts about Moomins
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