Hans Arnold, 1925-2010.

The Swiss-Swedish artist and illustrator Hans Arnold has passed away. Known in particular for his illustrations of books — like the 1973 re-issue of Astrid Lindgren's Allrakäraste syster (Most Beloved Sister), Gunnel Linde's Jag är en varulvsunge (I am a Werewolf Cub), and Bland tomtar och troll ("Among Gnomes and Trolls", a popular folklore and fairy tale annual) — animated films like Matulda och megasen, and the Gothic horror sleeve of ABBA's Greatest Hits, Arnold's unique blend of erotic and mildly horrific themes ensured him a status as "cult" artist.

Born in Sursee, Switzerland, Arnold's first artistic endeavours included crafting caricatures of particularly draconian school teachers, which he'd peddle among his class mates. Having completed his artistic education at the Hochschule Luzern (the Lucerne School of Art and Design, Switerland's oldest arts school), Arnold spent a couple of years in Paris, before moving to Sweden in 1947. His intricate style, rich in detail, often referenced the text his illustrations complemented in such a way that they practically became puzzles in themselves.

Arnold's weekly visual contribution to the magazine VeckoRevyn ("Weekly Review"), which appeaered regularly between 1954 and 1979 under the heading "veckans chock" ("the weekly shock"), made him a household name in Sweden. Despite more recently fading from public view, his dense fusion of surrealism and underground art inspired a broad range of artists in a variety of fields. Examples of his work, as well as images from one of Arnold's last retrospectives, can be seen here.

Canada Book Day.

April 23 is Canada Book Day, as well as World Book and Copyright Day, devised to raise awareness and interest for books, to promote reading, publishing, and — in the case of the international day — the protection of "intellectual property" (an unfortunate euphemism that leads to all manner of faulty reasoning about knowledge.)

The day is intended to be a celebration of books as a key instrument of knowledge and freedom, as well as an opportunity to consider the contribution of books to humanity's wealth and cultural heritage. Canada Book Day was first organised through the Writers' Trust of Canada, a national, charitable organisation supporting anglophone literature. Which — for the second year in a row — has no plans for any special events this year worth communicating to the general public.

No other organisation or level of government has stepped in to lead celebrations, and the day has been preceded by no promotion whatsoever. In fact, most Canadians are unware the day has supposedly been the focal point of Canada Book Week since 2003.

World Book and Copyright Day on the other hand is organised by UNESCO, which adopted the day at its General Conference in 1995. The date was selected as it had been celebrated since 1923 as el dia del llibre (The Day of the Book) in Spain. There, a thrifty bookseller in Barcelona — the publishing capital of both Catalonia and Spain — had begun to promote April 23, also known as el dia de la rosa (The Day of the Rose) or St. George's Day, with a combination of books and roses.

The idea was ostensibly to honour the nearly simultaneous deaths of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare; the date also happens to be the date of birth of other prominent authours such as Halldór Laxness and Vladimir Nabokov. It has since become one of the world's largest book swapping events, with half of the the total yearly book sales in Catalonia (estimated at 400.000 titles) taking place on April 23.

This year, UNESCO hopes to highlight "the need to preserve creativity from piracy" during the day, hoping to impress readers worldwide that "there can be no book development without respect for copyright". Yet the agencies' botched website mainly reveals a most casual interest in the issue, perhaps fostered by the assumption (particularly in the so called "developed world") that the business of books is thriving, and reading therefore in no need of special support.

Despite the arrival of e-books and the ascendency of electronic media, printing is still a booming business with more than half a million publishing houses worldwide. Rather than replacing the traditional media the new technologies seem only likely to augment and complement printed reading matter, presenting no more a threat to its existence than elevators do to stairs.

Certainly, in the so called "developed world" books and reading do not appear imperiled. Only 31% of Canadian adults reported not reading a single book for pleasure in 2007, while those who read regularly consumed more than 20 titles during that year. On average Canadians spent 4.5 hours reading per week, though with roughly 50,000 titles published annually in Canada that's barely time to keep abreast. Little wonder the Writer's Trust perceives no need for a day of special events and celebration.

Nevertheless, the glowing numbers in Canada and elsewhere obscure the glaring imbalance and extreme difficulties in accessing books that persist worldwide. Even in Canada access to books could easily be threatened: in 2006, Indigo with 230 stores nationwide accounted for 44 % of domestic book sales — 67% if online, mail-order, and sale at university and college bookstores are excluded. Which potentially means that if Indigo choses not to carry a book the publisher of that title loses access to half of the Canadian retail channel.

Since special events appear to be few and far between this coming Canada Book Day, and World Book and Copyright Day, one suggestion would be to simply read at one's own behest. Another, as the date alludes to the Catalonian tradition of book swapping, would be to gift someone a book. Or to visit a local library — maybe even bring a contribution or two to its collection.

Note: this is a slightly updated version of an article originally published on April 21, 2009.

Freedom to Read Week.

Now in its 26th year, Freedom to Read Week is an annual event aimed at raising awareness among Canadians of the intellectual freedom guaranteed them under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 19). Organised by the Freedom of Expression Committee of the Book and Periodical Council (an umbrella organisation for associations of writers, editors, publisher, manufacturers distributors, sellers, and lenders of books and periodicals in Canada), it's marked with numerous events across the country between February 21 and 27.

Most of us take our freedom to read for granted, but even here, in Canada, books and magazines have been banned at the border, and are frequently challenged and removed from libraries, schools, and bookstores. These infractions on our freedom of expression are seldom reported widely, yet affect the right of all of us – not just Canadians – to decide for ourselves what we chose to read. Although government-instituted censorship has apparently been abandoned in the Western world, public concern over "offensive" literature hasn't subsided.

In Canada, a majority of us accept the Supreme Court's authority and prerogative to restrict reading material; we trust the court to interpret the Charter and determine the reasonable limits to our freedoms. A majority of us also accepts that a stable, vibrant democracy can withstand disagreement and a wide range of beliefs. However, this doesn't prevent private entities and individuals from attempting to limit, sanitise, and censor literature and information that doesn't fit their particular position. These attempts to "protect" society, by arbitrarily deciding what others can read, merely smother creativity and stifle open debate of controversial issues.

Public libraries are in fact expected to act as benevolent guardians of literature in many places, particularly concerning books for young readers. Even in notoriously "liberal" countries like Norway and Sweden, which introduced some of the earliest laws regarding freedom of the press, scrutiny of public and school libraries remained a concern throughout the 20th Century. The die-hard tradition of literature surveillance in America is perhaps less surprising, where various groups intent on choosing what others should read constantly demand the removal of books they deem contain "questionable content".

Canada is no exception: the Canada Border Services Agency, parent groups, and religious organisations have all tried to ban books for reasons varying from sexual orientation, racial or religious content, to explicit language and witchcraft. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series remains among the most challenged books in this country; Robert Munsch’s Thomas' Snowsuit was banned by a Catholic school board because Thomas' refusal of a snowsuit was deemed disrespectful to school authorities.

Only last year the Toronto District School Board, having removed Deborah Ellis' Three Wishes from its public school libraries on the grounds that its inclusion of interviews with Palestinian as well as Israeli children offended the Canadian Jewish Congress, considered restricting access to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - winner of the Governor General's Award in 1985 and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987, and a seemingly permanent top-40 fixture on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most frequently challenged books in the 1990s.

The undermining and obliteration of independent, local booksellers by large chains of big-box retailers poses yet another serious challenge to what literature and information we can access. Take Canada's largest bookstore chain Indigo Books & Music Inc. for example, a retailer with the publicly stated goal of becoming "the world's first cultural department store", which doesn't shelve books or magazines its owners personally object to, and whose profits are funnelled into dubious martial projects that have little in common with literature, never mind Canada.

Like their electronic counterparts, Indigo isn't a library but a business, with a right to stock whatever it wants. But it's a right that becomes problematic when a bookseller dominates the market like Indigo, Amazon et al do. Any titles they, and the other three or four major players, decide not to stock become harder to find, and - by extension - to publish. Supermassive booksellers can also exert pressure on publishers (as Amazon has done in the past) to offer greater discounts, and interfere with publishers direct sales, thereby undercutting the profitability - and ultimately, the existence - of small publishers in particular. It's censorship by proxy.

However, Freedom to Read Week serves not only as a reminder to remain vigilant of the challenges, but also as an opportunity for Canadians to celebrate our freedom to chose what we read, and to reach out to our neighbours across the world. We can acknowledge it by reading and making up our own minds about some of the books challenged in Canada, patronising our remaining local independent booksellers, or checking up on the state of libraries and information in the rest of the world. We could even indulge in some banned literature online. After all, the only thing worse than suppressing, banning or destroying books is not reading them.

Note: this is an altered, updated version of an article originally posted on February 19, 2009.

Shelf Aware: The Naked Lunch.

Ceci n'est pas un livre. This is not a book. It looks like a book, feels like a book, smells like a book. Parts of it even read like a book. But a book it is not. It's an art object, William S. Burroughs' (1914-1997) most infamous invocation of the objet d'art that is a book. Its non-linear text can - intentionally - be read in no particular order, beginning practically anywhere.

What narrative there is doesn't so much unfold as writhe, convulsively convoluted, retracing its own tropes. Its short spurts indulge in wordplay, anecdotal slivers of conversation overheard somewhere smoky over the din of some drunken jazz band across filthy alleys upstairs some dingy hotel room, over sirens and noisy neighbours, trains rumbling underground cars roaring overhead. Spoken word snatches of the city soundscape, the buzz and verve of the urban landscape.

Cataloguing Burroughs' obsessions, in particular pharmacological terminology and hustler's jive, The Naked Lunch samples the lingo - not so much a cut-up as a mash-up - reveling in the qualities of highly specialised talk. A word hoard embellished by "routines", like the one about the adolescent who - literally - gets "his first piece of ass" (in a manner that would make Shylock's detractors faint), or the infamous parable about the man who taught his asshole how to talk.

It roisters in all the stuff that comes out of us, is produced by us, in its undisguised form - the naked us - blending maxims, quotations, antiquated expressions, frequently veering from hip to technical jargon within the same sentence. The anarchy isn't solely designed to shock, but to utterly trash bourgeoise notions of "good taste". Burroughs has it out with practically everyone he couldn't abide: pretentious puritans, fanatical fundamentalists, mercenary merchants, rabid racists, and insipid imperialists. All seen fit for flogging.

Curiously, The Naked Lunch also manages to depress the last half-century's global political hot-buttons: consumerism, bigotry, terrorism, xenophobia, drug and disease pandemics. Proving perhaps that the current struggle is always about the past. Despite his obfuscating manner, Burroughs strove to expose readers to the true state of things; the world through the eyes of a gay man attempting to escape in every manner possible the confines of closeted middle American life.

His writing explored the nature of obedience and manipulation, in order to locate the methods of control which perpetuated the sad state of world affairs, and - if not destroy them outright - disrupt them. For without them society as it had been organised couldn't exist. To Burroughs, the church, the state, and the suppression and repression of sexuality represented the primary tools with which populations could be kept subservient.

"Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference. They would like to jump down into their stomachs and digest the food and shovel the shit out."

The Naked Lunch plunges readers into a fast-moving world of constant, frenetic action, lightly mirroring Burroughs' own itinerant existence, rushing from place to place, from hit to hit, vaguely following an ambiguous clandestine entity whose raison d'être is to bring about the collapse of all systems. It stirs up conflict, chaos, panic, confusion, wherever it appears, engaging in evil regardless of its utility. Like an exceptionally malignant virus.

Burroughs had a particular interest in the constraints imposed by language, the way its limitations determine our ability to define reality. It may be universally agreed that two plus two equals four, but what we mean by "two", and what "four" represents says a lot about who we are and where we come from. Burroughs particularly wanted to expose the culinary camouflage we employ to disguise that which would be hard to swallow if we only took the time to examine what we "actually eat and drink". We may call what quivers at the end of the fork chateaubriand, but that don't change the fact it's a piece of flesh ripped from a living creature.

The manner with which Burroughs rouses the reader may be disagreeable - the multiple fetishistic hangings interspersed with explicit homosexual and heterosexual sex, intended as a critique of capital punishment were once labeled "obscene" and "pornographic" - but sometimes the only way to snap people from their stupor is a slap across the face. Which is what reading Burroughs frequently feels like; as painful as enjoyable. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, to get hung up on Burroughs style is akin to complaining that the man who bangs on your door in the middle of the night isn't particularly eloquent when announcing that your roof is on fire.

Regardless of which version of the text one may be reading - the first published in August 1959 by Olympia Press, the first American edition published by Grove Press in 1962, or the 2001 restored text - The Naked Lunch resists interpretation precisely to point out interpretations' limitations, revealing how in order to perceive a cohesive whole certain things must be ignored. Its antiexpressive, antidiscursive antinarrative calls into question both "expressiveness" and "intentionality" in literature, expanding the concept of writing far beyond its formal limits and intentions.

As such, it has been a source of inspiration for all artists venturing outside the "normal" limits of expression - particularly in film and pop music (there are those who blame Burroughs for Cyberpunk, but they've presumably never heard of Alfred Bester). But despite being the origin of "heavy metal" and numerous band names, most of Burroughs' admirers seem more enamoured with his image than his writing.

Hence his impact on popular culture has been greater than his influence on literature, touching even those who've never read him. The idea of Burroughs - a man who stared into the abyss and came back to report on it - always more appealing than the man himself or his writing ever was. The iconic Burroughs is a middle-aged, deadpan expressionless businessman, neatly attired in a three-piece suit and tie, practical haircut, who'd taken all manner of drugs known to man, and spews notions - with the voice of a St. Louis banker - that would make your parents froth at the mouth.

"That's the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between bureaus, because there's always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness..."

The Naked Lunch is the text that created this cult figure, banned and narrowly escaping censorship in a trial that established the American obscenity standards for the following decades. It follows that the work itself is obscured by myth - often embellished and perpetuated by the writer and his cohorts themselves. There's claims the writer was doped while writing, that it was assembled from jumbled sources in a mad rush two weeks before first being printed in Paris, or that it's Burroughs' first foray into cut-ups.

The last is easiest to dismiss, as Burroughs was first introduced to the technique by Brion Gysin nearly a month after the first edition of The Naked Lunch hit the stands. It's possible Burroughs was writing under the influence, but it's not entirely clear of what: drugs, or his unrequited love for Allen Ginsberg. More likely he simply wanted to obscure just how much of his own experience he (consciously) imbued the text with - particularly his personal politics, which at the time leaned more towards the cooperative than the libertarian.

The order of the text's that comprise The Naked Lunch isn't as random as purported either. While the different editions have differed significantly, the main part of the manuscript - some one hundred pages - had been written by early 1957, and remained largely unaltered since. Towards the end of 1956, Burroughs had kicked his habit for the first (but not last) time, and it's the beginning and end - if, indeed, they are such - that bear the marks of three different pairs of hands (Burroughs', Ginsberg's, and Jack Kerouac's) attempting to cobble a book together on at least four different occasions.

The myths are partially a byproduct of the main dish, a particularly runny concoction, threatening to "spill off the fork in every direction" practically all of the time. They may provide the hapless reader with some semblance of cohesion, yet simultaneously threaten to counter what may be the work's intended purpose. Half a century since it was first published, The Naked Lunch remains a baffling and fascinating indelible stain on the American literary landscape, and has become a preeminent classic of Beat literature.

My Winnipeg.

Winnipeg.

Winnipeg, Winnipeg, Winnipeg.

Heart of the continent. The Winnie in the Pooh. Slurpee Capital of the World (tenth time in a row in 2009). Home of the world's longest skating rink, Dickie Dee ice cream, Domo Gasoline, Canwest, Porno Pizza, Ben Moss Jewellers, McNally Robinson, Salisbury House restaurants, and New Flyer buses. Cradle of K-tel, E-Children, Harlequin Enterprises, Nygård International, The Guess Who, the Crash Test Dummies, and Motor Coach Industries.

Home to the Royal Canadian Mint, western Canada's oldest civic gallery (world's largest collection of Inuit art), Le Cercle Molière (the oldest continuously running theatre company in Canada), the first Hudson Bay Company department store, and the first A&W in Canada. Winnipeg - the capital of a frigid prairie province, held in winter's grip two thirds of the year. An isolated outpost surrounded by a landscape so prostrate, it's said you can watch a dog run away for three days.

Winnipeg: where Tommy Douglas witnessed the General Strike of 1919; where A. E. van Vogt began writing science fiction; where Marshall McLuhan switched his major from engineering to English; where Neil Young formed his first band. The place where Canada's first school patrols were established, and the 9-1-1 emergency telephone number was introduced to North America. The only city on the continent occupied by "Nazis" during the Second World War.

Birthplace of Louis Riel, William Stephenson (the real James Bond), Robert Hunter (co-founder of Greenpeace), Bob Rock, Terry Fox, and - incontrovertibly - G. Arthur Maddin. For nearly a quarter of a century, Maddin - the banker turned auteur - has endeavoured to resurrect once avant-garde techniques like iris shots, breathless titles, shock cutting, staged poses, and melodramatic acting, through hermetic, studio bound celebrations of cinema's artifice. His style seems at first regressive, but is quite cleverly postmodern and surrealist in a very Magritte manner.

Four years ago, Guy Maddin managed to weasel funding from the Discovery Channel for a feature film about his city of birth. Though only a documentary of the metropolis in Maddin's experience, My Winnipeg presented a place so enchanting, it could quite frankly strike anyone who's never actually visited it as the most exciting city in North America. So exotic was Maddin's vision, born and bred inhabitants had problems identifying that positively enthralling place with the dreary, frigid black hole most of them have unsuccessfully sought to escape all their lives.

"Back in Winnipeg's earliest years, the Canadian Pacific Railway used to sponsor an annual treasure hunt. This contest required our citizens to wander the city in a day-long combing of our streets and neighbourhoods. First prize was a one-way ticket on the next train out of town. The idea being that once someone had spent a full day looking closely at his own hometown he would never want to leave."

Now, Coach House Books has published the script - or, rather, the guiding narrative - of My Winnipeg, and as if to compound the reputation of the "gateway to the prairies", they've done so in a flimsy quarto paperback (complete with typos). Although some copies have had pockets containing the DVD pasted into them, the presentation seems to reinforce the pulpiness of Maddin's fiction. Despite claims of extensive annotation, and "a cornucopia of illuminating arcana", those interested in Maddin's process will learn little new.

The annotations mainly consist of further outrageous claims, either excised from the filmed version or simply added for heightened befuddlement, while the "illuminating arcana" shed but brief light on the contents of the darkest recesses of Maddin's mind. Lovers of ephemera, in particular (North American) cinema and hockey trivia, will have a field day - as will the select species of Winnepegophilists. Scholars of drama and the moving image will likely gain more insight attending one of Mr Maddin's lectures at the University of Manitoba.

However, the book - like the film - does indeed contain a number of quite true (or, at least, difficult to disprove), curious and interesting facts about Canada's seventh largest municipality, as well as a lovely introduction of Ann Savage - who's last film My Winnpeg was. It doesn't reveal how Maddin managed to cajole out of retirement that most fatal of cinema's femmes - capable of making even Bette Davis cower - to play his mother, nor how he convinced her to do so in a city frozen in amber (never mind ice) time and again when commerce found alternative routes across the continent.

The conversation with Michael Ondaatje and the contributions of several Maddin collaborators that supplement the volume, further adroitly blur the line between fact and fiction, leaving lifelong Winnipeggers - even those acquainted with the most obscure city lore - on an equal footing with everyone else: flabbergasted. If not bamboozled. But Maddin's intent is far from malicious; his isn't a quest for achieving trivial superiority.

Infamous for his loathing of research, Maddin has minted myth from a handful of actual circumstance and a truck-load of half-remembered rumours to not only re-awaken its sleepwalking inhabitant's interest in their surroundings, but also explain what keeps them - and Maddin in particular - in Winnipeg. Emulating what Canada's neighbours to the south have elevated to a science, Maddins fanciful cinematic ode to his hometown tries to remedy a deficiency in Canadian culture: the ability to revel in the history and contemporary culture of the places we inhabit.

In a nation made up to such great extent by the uprooted, leading a protracted nomadic existence - always en route or desirous to go somewhere else - in self-contained bubbles imposed by an almost implacable, immense physical remoteness, Maddin's mythmaking is license to rediscover our shared cultural geography, and consider it as exciting, inviting, unique, and worthy of reverence as that of other nations.

Moomin.

To the delight of Anglophone Moomin fans everywhere, Montréal's Drawn and Quarterly have published the fourth volume of the classic Moomin comic strip. Originally created by artist and writer Tove Jansson (1914 — 2001) at the request of the British Associated Newspapers comic strip syndicate in 1953, the strips have since appeared in some 120 publications in 40 countries, reaching over 20 million readers daily worldwide: likely the most successful Finnish comic ever published. The D&Q reprint, published in yearly instalments since 2006, provides readers with no knowledge of Swedish with an excellent introduction to the world of the Moomin trolls, having been created specifically for an international audience.

The quarto hardcover volume, largely resembling the classic Scandinavian ones, is quite beautiful in itself; printed on thick paper subtly tinted light yellow with pictorial cloth grain paper covers. Unnumbered, distinguished (as the previous three) mainly by the colour of its spine, and slightly different jacket bands, it features the same introductory essay by art professor Alisia Grace Chase as do its companions, as well as an impressed quote on the back board, unique for each volume. The sole complaint would be the utter lack of bibliographical information; particularly pertinent to the fourth volume which collects the first stories written by Tove's younger brother Lars Jansson between 1957 and 1958. Nevertheless, the thoughtfulness and philosophical slant of the Jansson's stories will likely be enough to keep parents awake long after the little ones have gone to sleep.

Tove Jansson's brilliant Moomin novels — from which the settings and characters of the comic are drawn — are considered classics for readers of all ages, though unfortunately many adult readers entirely miss the references to the adult world, the parody and satire of its culture. They helped usher in a golden age of Swedish children's literature, with the first being published in 1945, the same year the other two giants of Swedish kid-lit, Lennart Hellsing (Krakel Spektakel) and Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), published their first works. The popularity of the Moomin trolls and their escapades have made Tove Jansson the most read Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, translated into 34 languages, with the comic strip introducing readers far beyond Scandinavian shores to the happy-go-lucky troll family.

The Moomin valley is a paradisiacal utopia with touches of both enchanted exoticism and familiar - from a Scandinavian perspective - coastal archipelago. The stories, in the novels as well as the comic, are characterised by their dynamic alternation between the sheltered life in Moominmamma's aegis and various threatening perils and catastrophes, the plot only lightly obscuring various existential queries. It's perhaps their anarchy that captivates in particular; the Moomin trolls continuously challenge and break with convention. Like a Winnie-the-Pooh with brains, they appear completely devoid of that particular gene that encourages practically everyone else to cower before authority.

In this volume, the Moomin family's adventures commence when Moominpappa decides to simultaneously repair Moominmamma's sewing machine and the family clock. Neither need repairing, but Moominpappa feels that as the man about the house, repairing them is precisely the kind of thing he should be doing. In the process he manages to inadvertently construct a time machine. And as there's few things the Moomin family like better than an outing — complete with a picnic basket prepared by Moominmamma — they're soon off on adventure. First they travel to the Wild West, which isn't quite as they expect it to be. Its settlers are less concerned with adventure than getting the time-travelling trolls off their property and keeping them away from the cattle, while its natives seem entirely preoccupied with commerce. Eighteenth century Moominvalley proves equally unromantic, its inhabitants so persistently preoccupied with either reason or etiquette they actually accomplish very little of essence.

"I'm off to the shore.

Think of all the seashells

we haven't found yet."

Though the Moomins set off with good intentions, they can't help but alter the past, the most important lessons learned being that bygone days are rarely what one imagines them to be, and that the Moomins can scarcely inhabit a past era when they are considered too liberal and emancipated even in their own. As if aware of this constant (and obvious) criticism aimed a their creation, the Janssons address the Moomins perceived lack of responsibility in the episode on conscientiousness. The family of bohemian trolls try hard, though not successfully, to conform with societal norms - and it's Snufkin (Moominvalley's proto-slacker) to the rescue. The most apprehensive, and perhaps therefore most rewritten story, is Moomin and the Comet, the comic strip version of the second Moomin novel, Kometjakten (Comet in Moominland).

Originally published in 1946, and finally rewritten in 1968 as Kometen kommer, it was in fact the basis for the very first Moomin comic strip, which ran in Folktidningen Ny Tid (at the time a publication belonging to what practically was the Finnish Communist Party) between October 1947 and April 1948 (collected in a book as Jorden går under! (Moomintroll and the End of the World) in 2007). The comic version included in this volume, originally published in 1958, shares the premise of a comet apparently heading for the Moomin valley, though the details of the plot are quite different. However, at its core it remains an allegory of nuclear warfare, constructed in a manner similar to the very first Moomin novel, Småtrollen och den stora översvämmningen (The Moomins and the Great Flood), which sought to provide an outlet for the anxiety war and invasion causes in the minds of those not quite yet grown-up enough to grapple with the complexities of such conflict.

Though the Moomins can currently be found on sneakers, towels, mugs, jewellery, t-shirts, pens, stationary, beverages, as a variety of toys, in their very own Moomin World near Naantali (drawing some 220,000 visitors yearly during the two summer months it's open), a museum in Tampere - and besides the novels and comics even in a cook book - they're not quite as common currency as other children's favourites from around the world. Moomin Characters, chaired by Lars Jansson's daughter Sophia, is charged with protecting the Moomin legacy and tends to be quite strict with how the characters can be applied. Not that continuing in Tove's spirit has hindered the company from becoming one of Finland's most successful businesses, with a yearly turnover of nearly C$ 3 million. Disney did offer to buy at one point, but was turned down. The Moomin trolls aren't an expansive venture, after all. The interest in them may be international but far from global, the core audience residing mainly in Scandinavia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and to a somewhat smaller extent in Germany, Great Britain, and Poland.

"It's sometimes better to

look at things than own them.

Owning means anxiety and

lots of bags to carry around."

Tove Jansson delighted in scaring those even smaller and more frightened than she was herself. She didn't enjoy being an idol, and imagined inhabiting a gilded pedestal rather dull. Like most of the greatest children's writers she wasn't one for sitting around telling stories to litters of little kids. Her father, sculptor Viktor Jansson, was a bohemian artist who desired to create freely, without much concern for the economics of family survival. It was Jansson's mother, Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, who put food on the family's table through her commercial work as an illustrator and cartoonist (she designed 173 Finnish postage stamps, as well as bank notes and bonds). Young Tove too, though encouraged to indulge her talent and imagination, felt pressure to contribute.

Which may perhaps explain why she turned her family environment into the playful fantasy that is Moominvalley, a place where work and responsibilities have a remarkably small presence. With the exception of Moominmamma of course, constantly attending to the welfare of her family, their various relatives, friends, guests, and acquaintances. Quietly working in the background, she's always prepared to lend an ear or extend a comforting embrace, a measured voice of reason in their midst. Though Tove made the Moomins' indifference to material possessions a key part of their charm, she also steered clear of idealising their bohemian lifestyle. Making the Moomins not only ideal observers of modern capitalist society, but also of the "alternatives" that regularly populate its fringes.

Despite publishing thirteen books that had nothing to with Moomin trolls, they remain Tove's most famous creation. Throughout her artistic life she'd remain torn between trolls and paintings, between duty and the desire to create something new. As the Moomins grew (clearly discernible to those who compare the trolls' waistline in the 1940s to that of the late 1960s) they sapped more of their creator's energy, their success smothering her. Trollvinter (Moominland in Midwinter), the sixth novel published in 1957, is generally viewed as a pivotal moment. Suddenly, there were serious problems in Moominvalley, there was more fear, more brooding, and more introspection, as Moomintroll, having woken up from hibernation in the middle of winter, was forced to deal with his loneliness and make his own way until spring with his family still deep in sleep all around him.

Though Jansson occasionally referred to the trolls as an "artistic straightjacket," the reality of her relationship with them wasn't as black and white, just as things never are in Moominvalley. Though she sought the kind of privacy popular artists can rarely have, she was involved in the commercialisation of her creation right from the very beginning: as early as the 1950s there were Moomin toys, bed sheets, curtains, wallpaper, wrapping paper, neckties, candles, mugs and plates. The Moomin comic strip began its regular run in London's Evening News on September 20, 1954. Tove enjoyed the assignment at first, as it entailed a steady income, euphorically confiding to her brother Lars that the paper only demanded six strips per week. But with time, the work became a chore of constantly looming deadlines, and after struggling alone for five years Tove enlisted the help of Lars.

For the most part her travails aren't easily discerned in the comics themselves, except in the final episode included in this volume, which deals with sudden celebrity. It's the volume's most personal story, the last written by Tove before her brother took over — though she illustrated another seven stories Lars wrote — but it's by no means gloomier than the rest. Tove genially satirised her own life, family, and career, as well as everything around her in the guise of the softly rounded Moomin world. Though regardless of how many cuddly toys the carefree family of trolls have inspired, Tove's images always contained a little darkness. Black crags surround the flower filled meadows (a truly Scandinavian image), looming shadows fall on a blooming corner of the garden.

Overall, Tove's and Lars' comic strips remained cheerful, simple, and elegant, with as many references to ancient myths as to contemporary pulp fiction. Even without delving into the underlying significance of the stories, the drawings themselves are rewarding to study - despite methodically sticking to three frames per panel. Their playful framing breaking the fourth wall, the simple lines of the Moomins' noses and eyes, their ability to express a wide range of emotions with a simple cocking of a hat, a concerned eyebrow, a curious ear, or two happy eyes being some of the many reasons generations of children and adults alike have cherished immersing themselves in the tales of Moominvalley: a world so different yet so similar to our own.

Phyllis Gotlieb, 1926-2009.

Novelist and poet Phyllis Fay Gotlieb, one of the first published writers of contemporary Canadian science fiction, has passed away. A quintessential Canadian writer, preoccupied with what constitutes identity and communication between peoples, Gotlieb first came to prominence as a poet before trying her hand at SF to cure a bout of writer's block. Following years of rejections, Gotlieb broke through in 1964 with her first SF novel, Sunburst, for which the annual Canadian prize for SF literature is named.

Shelf Aware: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Though many viewers of the purportedly unscripted television show Big Brother may be aware of its title's origin in George Orwell's last novel, to a vast majority it simply seems to denote the omnipresent arbiter of the show. Its quite malignant connotation appears to have evaporated from the public consciousness in the six decades since Nineteen Eighty-Four was published - perhaps in the wake of ordinary people's surprising eagerness to exhibit themselves, warts and all, on television. Despite lasting linguistic contributions - neologisms like "thought police" lifted straight from its pages, or the practically universal reference to anything repressive as "Orwellian" - the novel appears relegated to the heap reserved for Cold War relics. Which is a pity, for though its dystopian account of life under a totalitarian heel is far from unique, Orwell's exploration of what motivates such systems - what makes them tick - remains one of the most perceptive, and has aged surprisingly well. While clearly referencing the time and place in which it was written, it reveals how people can be crushed mentally as well as physically by restrictive, authoritarian, and mendacious governments of any stripe. Every libertarian provoked by society's impositions may well reach for it to decry curtailments of personal freedom, but Nineteen Eighty-Four doesn't particularly promote nor vilify any specific ideology. "Ingsoc," Orwell writes, "grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology," but only paid lip-service to its ideals. So, despite charges of being "pro-Communist," or assertions of the opposite, it pertains to any regime or self-aggrandising autocrat striving to shove their particular brand of "truth" down people's throats.

It's a much darker and more complex novel than Orwell's more popular Animal Farm, particularly in its fascination with the morality of language. That aspect alone makes Orwell's prescience increasingly impressive in an era of readily available editing tools and alarming impermanence of records. But it mainly retains its currency because totalitarian regimes as well as attempts to corral reality are still common in our world. The blocs and spheres of influence may have shifted, but the oppression continues unabated. In view of the last decade, Nineteen Eighty-Four appears even more prophetic as even nominally democratic governments around the world claim it necessary to record all private communication in the "fight against terror." An archetypal Orwellian concept; a conflict virtually without end against a vague enemy practically anyone could be accused of colluding with. An enemy portrayed every bit as pervasive, shrewd, ruthless, and imperceptible as the poorly defined adversaries in Orwell's novel. Requiring our constant vigilance and, likely, the sacrifice of our essential right to privacy - as mass surveillance is persistently presented as the ultimate remedy for terror. Yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a bold prediction so much as an account of the forces that have always threatened liberty. It seeks to expose how expedient lies enable those in power to exploit the ruled. It remains a vital protest against the authoritarian in each of us, against the passive conformist in each of us, and against the orthodoxies we leave unquestioned.

It was written in the wake of both personal tragedy and public success, in circumstances that very likely contributed to the writer's death. In 1946, despite the international success of his fifth novel Animal Farm, George Orwell was a struggling widower and single parent. His chain-smoking black rolling tobacco exacerbating the decline of his health. Following his wife Eileen's death the previous year during a routine hysterectomy, Orwell supported his infant son Richard and himself as a contributing writer to several publications. He'd been a literature reviewer and correspondent with The Observer weekly since 1942, and its editor David Astor now offered to lend Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to complete his next novel. In May 1946, shortly after his older sister Marjorie died of kidney disease, Orwell arrived at the abandoned Barnhill house on the island of Jura. Twelve kilometres from the nearest phone, forty kilometres from the nearest pub. Far from the hubbub of literary London, Orwell - whom the locals knew by his real name, Eric Blair - shared four small bedrooms over a spacious kitchen and a large bedroom that doubled as a storeroom with his younger sister Avril, his son Richard, and - for a while - his housekeeper Susan Watson. No electricity, a battery-powered radio the only link to the world at large. The spare surroundings may have influenced those of Nineteen Eight-Four almost as much as the atmosphere of constant conflict and random terror in wartime London must have done. The winter of 1946-1947, which Orwell spent in London, likely contributed as well. One of the century's harshest, the national fuel shortage left the writer no choice but to burn his furniture and his child's toys to stay warm. Having visited Jura in the New Year, Orwell left London for good in April 1947.

The idea for his new novel had germinated sometime in 1943-1944, with the working title The Last Man in Europe. Orwell later claimed the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt with Stalin - one of the aggressors of the Second World War - at the Tehran Conference served as inspiration. Orwell was convinced the recently allied leaders consciously "divided the world up" among themselves. But he only began working on the novel in earnest in 1946, eight months after reviewing a French translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1924 novel We, from which he borrowed several elements. In May 1947 Orwell had completed a third of the draft, and informed his publisher that he expected to have it finished by October. However, Orwell, Avril, and Richard nearly drowned in the Jura sound's Corryvreckan whirlpool - the third largest in the world, practically within earshot of Barnhill house - upon returning from a boat trip along the coast in August. The incident did Orwell's frail health no good, and in November the writer collapsed with pneumonia. The draft of the novel was a mess, two-thirds of which in Orwell's own estimate needed rewriting. Just before Christmas 1947 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. There was no cure for TB in 1947, but to Orwell's - and many future reader's - benefit his mentors managed to procure a small amount of an untested drug, streptomycin, imported to the UK from the US for experimental purposes.

It's possible that Orwell received excessive doses of the recently discovered antibiotic, as the side effects he experienced were quite horrific. One can easily imagine how the throat ulcers, the blisters in his mouth, the loss of hair, peeling skin, disintegration of toe and fingernails inspired the physical degradation that Orwell's protagonist comes to experience in the novel. Yet after three months of treatment Orwell's TB symptoms vanished, and the writer returned to his draft - with added pressure from his publisher to finish by the end of 1948, earlier if possible. Again it would be easy to imagine a further autobiographical tinge, as Orwell might have felt as much a shell of his former self as his protagonist becomes towards the end of the novel. He finished the draft by October 1948, though had still not decided whether to stick with the original title, The Last Man in Europe, or Nineteen Eighty-Four - a date derived from the fact that (in the draft) the narrative occurs successively in the years 1980, 1982, and, finally, 1984. Ultimately, Orwell's publisher Fred Warburg suggested that the latter was a more marketable title, and the many popular explanations of the title's "mysterious" origin are little more than publishers' hype. A perennial favourite among the many myths is one originated by the novel's American publisher, later furthered by the conservative Anthony Burgess in his reactionary rebuttal 1985, claiming that Orwell simply reversed the last two digits of 1948. As if the terror he sought to describe didn't exist regardless of time. With this novel Orwell made clear it can occur anywhere, whenever we become negligent of the challenges to liberty. In fact, the reason why Orwell chose to set his story in (what was then) the future could be to convincingly describe a totalitarian state at its fullest extent.

By November 1948 the now bedridden writer had typed up the draft himself, and had it delivered to London - as promised - in December. In January 1949 Orwell left Jura for a TB sanatorium in the Gloucestershire village of Cranham. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in June, and during that summer the Orwell's fortunes appeared to be looking up. But though the writer's finances improved his health continued to decline. In September he was transferred to the London University College Hospital, and though he was "rediscovered" by many old acquaintances, Orwell appears to have been increasingly lonely. In October he married Sonia Brownell, whom he'd unsuccessfully courted nearly four years earlier. But despite plans for the future and a steady stream of visitors, on January 21, 1950, Orwell suffered a massive haemorrhage in his lungs and died alone. His sister Avril and son Richard, who were still living on Jura, first heard of his death on their battery-powered radio.

"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism. ... The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere."

George Orwell, June 16, 1949.