After the Moomins, Tove Jansson wrote a few novels. This one seems to draw from her life - an old artist of international fame retired from the world in a village. A strange woman flanked with an unnamed dog devises a plan to get closer to rob her of her innocence rather than her money. This is the story of the meeting of two figures and the friction when two worldviews collide (here, their caricatures would be the Accountant and the Artist).
Although not groundbreaking, this is a pretty delicate story to tell. You can easily fall into caricatures (see the many Hollywood feel-good movies with a rich grumpy old guy/woman getting changed by a relationship with a cute disarming kid with divorced parents or a cute disarming poor neighbour or a cute poor black driver or whatever). Here, the Accountant is far from being cute, and she has a plan of her own. She teaches the rich Artist to count, and the Artist loses her trust in the world. Their meeting is costly for both : the Artist cannot see anymore, the Accountant cannot control anymore. Then, time and coexistence do they work. The Artist can see anew, differently, the Accountant gets to make a dream come true. Everyone loses and gains something out of people, and it is made very apparent in this relationship between someone who refuses to be transactional and someone who does not know how else to be.
Jansson stays away from the clichés and describes the messy gain and loss of the self forced to coexist and the turmoil that goes with watching parts of yourself dying for good, and the surprise at seeing new parts being born.