Fun typographical error from Tove Jansson’s Sun City, NYRB’s most recent book club pick.

Like presumably many others I primarily know Jansson as an illustrator and the creator of the Moomins, but Sun City has me curious to dig further into her prose. Her “style is not at all ‘poetic,’” Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote in The Guardian. “Quite the contrary. It is prose of the very highest order; it is pure prose. Through its quiet clarity we see unreachable depths, threatening darkness, promised treasures.” Moving from form to content, the setting of Jansson’s novel — St. Petersburg, FL, the titular “Sun City” for the elderly — feels like the seed of at least two Joy Williams novels, either the surreal retirement home of The Quick and the Dead or Willie and Liberty’s picaresque ramblings in Breaking and Entering, which feel almost like an echo of Jansson’s character Bounty Joe awaiting the Second Coming on his motorcycle. Cue the “Sisters” from Vineland…

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