"With their own lives" (Mark Sinker on Tove Jansson)

My friend Mark Sinker, on Tove Jansson (link):

except for readers in the US, where they never quite took off

E.g., me, for whom it is an unknown universe.

This, by Mark, is — seriously — one of the great descriptions I've read in my life, the entire paragraph, of which these are the final three sentences:

Here and there small unidentified beasts watch from the margins, odd little folk with their own lives stopping to gawk. Shining eyes peer through the foliage, one pair — from within a tree root at bottom right — gazing straight out at us. We meet these little characters nowhere in the text, but only as our attention ranges the less-described reaches of the image.

"With their own lives"!

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