A review by foggy_rosamund
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

3.0

A strange, spare narrative set over one winter in a tiny Swedish hamlet. Cut off from the wider world, the neighbours spy on one another, as they fish, build boots, crochet, and keep house. Katri, the central character, is described as having "yellow eyes" and is followed everywhere she goes by her silent, yellow-eyed dog. She only cares about her brother, Mats, and wishes to create a more comfortable life for him. Anna Aemelin is an artist, living alone in a the village's only large house, maintaining a shrine to her dead parents, and drawing beautiful pictures of the forest floor. Katri decides that she and Mats will move in with Anna, to become her caretakers. A story unfolds, in which Katri forces Anna to face the lies she has been telling herself, and the lies she has been told by others. As they spend time with one another, Katri's own fiercely-held beliefs about the world begin to crumble too. A book infused with anxiety, capturing the small fears that can hold us back, and how deeply limited we can become when we refuse to see beyond our own small horizons. Like much of Jansson's later work, it is bleak but infused with spiky humour. I enjoyed this, but it didn't capture my attention in the way some of her novels do.