There is a difference between silence that anticipates and silence that is final.

Letters to an idol
Tove Jansson

The Listener is Tove Jansson’s debut collection of short stories. Aunt Gerda – the good listener – fears the encroaching forgetfulness of old age. Her solution is to create an artwork that will record and, inevitably, betray the secrets long confided in her.

So begins Jansson’s short story debut, a tour de force of scalpel-sharp narration that takes us from a disquieting homage to the artist Edward Gorey, to perfect evocations of childhood innocence and recklessness, to a city ravaged by storms, or the slow halting thaw of spring. These stories are gifts of originality and depth.

The collection contains these short stories:

The Listener
Unloading Sand
The Birthday Party
The Sleeping Man
Black-White
Letters to an Idol
A Love Story
The Other
In Spring
The Silent Room
The Storm
Grey Duchesse
Proposal for a Preface
The Wolf
The Rain
Blasting
Lucio’s Friends
The Squirrel

The Listener on the publisher Sort of Books’ website.

The book was first published in Swedish as Lyssnerskan in 1971 and was translated into English in 2014.