‘The forest was full of signs and portents, its own secret written language.’Tove Jansson, the world-renowned creator of the Moomintroll characters, succinctly harnesses the power and glory of a seaside summer season in the twenty-two elegant vignettes contained within The Summer Book. Here is a book in no need of magic or any other fantastical adornments as she reminds us that we can discover pure, beautiful magic in the natural world all around us if only we quiet our lives and open our eyes to it. Set upon a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland much like where Jansson’s own family spent their summers, Summer Book chronicles the interactions and adventures between a young girl, Sophia, and her grandmother as they embrace the world and all the facts of life that surround them. Tender and subtle, yet laced with poignant investigations of life, love and death, Jansson’s words caress the soul like a warm breeze carrying with it the effluvium of the sea and all its majesty. The childhood vacation home of Tove JanssonThe Summer Book is a book where almost nothing happens, yet everything happens. It is a quiet little book that that only hints at the powerful undercurrents that charge the events that transpire. Each vignette details what initially appears to be seemingly inconspicuous moments in the lives of young Sophia and her grandmother, yet unveil guideposts leading to deeply penetrating insights into the human condition, much like the wooden animal figurines created by the grandmother. She cut the them from branches and driftwood and gave them paws and faces, but she only hinted at what they looked like and never made them too distinct. They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest... Grandmother worked only in old wood that had already found its form. That is, she saw and selected those pieces of wood that expressed what she wanted them to say.Jansson doesn’t force meaning or preach morality, she simply selects sublime moments of human interaction and lets them point towards something far greater. In this manner, Jansson avoids the pitfalls of choking the reader in oversentimentality and soars to great heights of succinct poetic grace. Accompanying her awe-inspiring words are her gorgeous illustrations, which make a perfect match by being both simple, yet magnificent. An island can be dreadful to someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, ad at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.Each vignette is as self-contained as an island, with one event gesturing towards one idea, and then never returned to again, much like children’s cartoons where each episode is irrelevant from the next, which only furthers the glorious childlike feelings that emanate from each page. There is no need to establish a time-line—the months moving back and forth across the summer season may imply that it occurs over several different summers, yet there is no indication which summer it is or if Sophia has aged—or for events to be considered in light of later events. It is a blur of summer grandeur. Nothing really progresses, yet nothing really has to because The Summer Book is a vacation from the stresses and hustle of life. It moves to the gentle rhythm of a bobbing sea quietly breaking on shore as you read in the long grass beneath a sweltering sun. There is only one major event that directs the course of the action: ‘Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.’ This is the only mention of Sophia’s tragic loss, and while it sits hushed in the peripheries of the margins, it casts an omnipresent shadow that is always lurking in the back of the reader’s mind. Jansson wrote this book a year after loosing her own mother. After witnessing a worm cut in two and learning that both halves will continue on, Sophia dictates a study on worms to the grandmother in which she say ‘They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.’ Sophia must live her life without her ‘other half’, not knowing how it is affecting her, but only knowing that it is affecting her. Amidst the joyful effervescence of summer are the grim realities of mortal lives that must interact with one another. Jansson does not depict a world full of eternal sunshine and happiness, but one where the sky may break into a furious storm at any moment to rattle us like a house being tugged from its foundation in gale force winds. ‘’It’s funny about me,’ Sophia said. ‘I think nice weather gets to be boring.’’ Once again managing to avoid being overly sweet, Jansson creates a cast of flawed, yet very human, characters. Sophia often flies into an angry rage, often irritated that the world doesn’t fit her idea of how it should be, and has a fierce need to test boundaries and assert her independence and identity, whereas the grandmother is cantankerous and rather unsentimental. The two make a wonderfully comedic pair, bickering as equals and passing time together, being both too young and too old to partake in much of the activity around them—such as a booze-filled party on a boat the father leaves them for—and having to find ways to assert their existence in the world in spite of it all. Jansson illuminates a world that is indifferent and unsentimental, yet manages to create a passionate tenderness out of embracing reality as it is. We must make the best of the world we have and learn to love it if we are to find true happiness in our lives, and this book is a wonderful example of finding this love.As the pair face the world, the readers are given small glimpses into their hearts and souls. Many of life’s big issues are addressed and handled with finesse, such as the way in which we love even what hurts us. Sophia is disgusted by her cat because it is a killer, always bringing dead mice to the door, and trades it for a different cat only to miss her original cat. ‘’It’ll be awful,’ said Sophia gravely. ‘But it’s Moppy I love.’’ A wide assortment of life’s toughest realities, all its joys and sorrows, are viewed through the innocence of a young girl finding her way in the wild, and the result is immensely moving. Nothing last forever, and our summer of childhood must come to an end. We must shoulder the cold of the world and move on into our seasons of adulthood, carrying with us the lessons we learned as wild-eyed children trying to decipher the mysterious signs of nature.Each page of The Summer Book rolled across me in waves of nostalgia for idyllic childhood summers spent in a cabin rented by my parents on Sunset Lake in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. With each luminous description of the luscious landscapes I was transported back to the sights, sounds and smells of the waves, trees and summer air of my childhood and sat back in wonderment as I watched my memories play back images of my younger self encountering the mysteries of the world. This truly is a beautiful book that instilled an emotion in me so delicate and beautifully ineffable that I had to get sloppy drunk enough to have the audacity to tarnish it’s power by attempting to convey it through the dingy pipelines of my own words. This is a subtle little novel that immerses you into nature and reminds you that you are just a tiny dot in a vast universe. While nothing appears to be immediately meaningful, there is a vast depth to be uncovered if we just sit back, relax, and let ourselves be engulfed in Jansson’s prose. Which is much like the magic of the world around us. We miss so much if we rapidly hurtle through the world, trying to leave a mark upon it as we attempt to ensnare some sort of meaning that we can hold onto and bottle up in an airtight jar of our own identity. Instead, Jansson asks us to take the slow, scenic route, and transcend beyond our own identity, to become a small part of nature, a tiny part of something greater. There is where the true magic of existence is found, listening to the orchestra of nature all around us and seeing the power and beauty in the tiniest of interactions, in seeing each interaction with another consciousness as a gift in itself, and finding peace in our small corner of the world. Jansson expertly harnesses the aura of summer, and its nights that are, as Bruno Schulz once wrote, ‘as vast as the megalomanic aspirations of young lovers.’ This book is utterly cleansing to a weary heart, like a brilliant ray of sunshine through a dusty attic, and makes for a perfect summer get-away for readers of any age. This book makes me glad to be alive.5/5‘To the final landscape of our old age, as summer fades. This is a fine moment. Silences settles all around us, each of us wanders his own way, and we all meet by the sea in the peaceful sunset.’
As luck would have it, there was a Tove Jansson exhibition on at the Helsinki Ateneum while I was in town – August marks the centenary of her birth. (It's still strange to me to realise that a hundred years ago is only the twentieth century now. To me, ‘last century’ still suggests Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy.) Amidst all the seascapes, moody self-portraits and Moomin sketches, I was fascinated by a video exhibit that showed a loop of grainy home-movie footage: Tove and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä on their island in the Pellinkis, laughing in the sun, wearing baggy knitted jumpers, and looking – as people always do in grainy home-movie footage – especially dead.In some ways death is the central theme of this book, but to say so gives entirely the wrong impression – it is light, charming, funny, enriching, very alive, not remotely morbid or depressing. The island where it's set is not quite the one from the home movies, but it's very nearby. Much of the flora and fauna – bird-cherry trees, long-tailed ducks – are also common in the Kalevala, and consequently these species now seem to me, rightly or wrongly, to be archetypally Finnish. Anyway, this small rural island provides a closed (literally insular) world within which our two characters – little Sophia and Grandmother, only ever so called – can talk, play, learn. This could so easily be twee or trite (ha ha, kids say the funniest things and old folks have lots of homespun wisdom to impart) but it's not, it's brilliant. I believed every word. The chapters are independent anecdotes which blend into each other in the way that summer days do when you're very young.I find this sort of writing – which has no real plot but is all about exploring characters – very hard to do and I am always lost in admiration when I see it done well. Sophia and Grandmother strike me as absolutely real, but even the cameos are brilliantly described – Jansson has a real flair for these thumbnail character sketches, unusual and specific:Eriksson was small and strong and the colour of the landscape, except that his eyes were blue. When people talked about him or thought about him, it seemed natural to lift their heads and gaze out over the sea […. A]s long as he stayed, he had everyone's undivided attention. No one did anything, no one looked at anything but Eriksson. They would hang on his every word, and when he was gone and nothing had actually been said, their thoughts would dwell gravely on what he had left unspoken.Sophia's endearing curiosity and strong-mindedness, her grandmother's no-nonsense brand of wisdom, are things that readers will have to discover for themselves, resistant as they are to being captured in quotations. One of my favourite chapters was the one where Grandmother was visited by an old friend, and we see her for the first time away from Sophia and talking to another grown-up: we realise that talking to adults requires just as much care and dissembling as talking to children.Suddenly he burst out, ‘And now Backmansson is gone.’‘Where did he go?’‘He is no longer among us,’ Verner explained angrily.‘Oh, you mean he's dead,’ said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.Jansson manages to have her cake and eat it too. She allows us to enjoy Grandmother, in all her magisterial forthrightness; but she herself as a writer is anything but blunt. She is subtle, and the book's themes accumulate gradually while you're concentrating on something else.It has to be said too that the (American-) English translation from Thomas Teal is outstanding, almost flawless. Sort Of Books, who reprinted this in Britain, went on to commission translations of all Jansson's other fiction for adults, including more from Teal once they'd tracked him down (he produced The Summer Book in the 1970s, and temporarily retired from translating soon after to concentrate on speechwriting). Sort Of also paid him accumulated royalties even though he didn't own any of the copyright – he tells the story here, and it's likely to endear you to this very small publishing house, which only releases two or three books a year.This and the NYRB edition also include an introduction from Esther Freud (with whose Hideous Kinky I now see many connections), in which she meets the real-life Sophia, who is now of course a grown woman. The very idea of this is heartbreaking to me – but then that's one of the lessons this book teaches you so painlessly, like the deliciously sugared pill it is, allowing you to smile honestly even as you watch Super-8 footage of someone turning to the camera on a beach sixty years ago, desaturated, a little jerky, laughing over and over again as the tape loops round.
What do You think about The Summer Book (2003)?
"The Summer Book" by Tove Jansson, telling about a grandchilds' and a grandmothers' summer vacations on their island, is praised as one of Scandinavia's modern classics, and it is easy to see why. The novel brings a typical quiet Scandinavian summer to life; just the type of "still-holiday-but-also-something-else-entirely" that I remember having with my family when I was younger.The chapters are quite short (ten pages at most I think), and one doesn't need to read them all in one go, which makes this book perfect for taking it along on such a holiday, or for reading out loud. The changes coming to the island, by ways of the granddaughter growing up, the grandmother growing old, or just intruding from the outside world, are very subtle, but still noticeable. Especially when things are destroyed or one of the two feels lost or alone, the emotions are very strong. Despite this, I missed a growing understanding between the grandchild and the grandmother, perhaps because I felt the book ended a bit too early, or because I felt the connection was already there in one of the first chapters, and I didn't see the need for anything else.In any case, I'd recommend this to just about anyone (despite those who seek "action" ;)). Lovely book in between. :).
—SilverRaindrops
Sophia and her father and her 85-year-old grandmother move from their home elsewhere every summer to an island in Eastern Nyland in the Swedish-speaking part of Finland. In the book’s second chapter we learn that young Sophia’s mother has died, which is why they’re living with the grandmother, her father’s mother. The Summer Book consists of chapters on different vignettes that occurred over a series of summers.I never knew my own grandparents, but I hazard that they were nothing like this contradictory octogenarian. Excessively blunt, the grandmother is given to embroidering tales to humor the mercurial Sophia and can sometimes seem harsh. Yet, the grandmother is also kind enough to leave the door to her island home open so that anyone shipwrecked on the island over the winter can take shelter. She leaves this note: Don’t remove the window covers or the fall birds will try to fly right through the house. Use anything you need, but please carry in some more wood. There are tools under the workbench. Enjoy yourselves.Jansson first published this book in 1972, after the death of her own mother; the two were very, very close, and Jansson was bereft. Was the grandmother modeled on Jansson’s mother? Or grandmother? Either way, the grandmother and grandchild recall a simpler, less frenetic day. Read The Summer Book if you wish to recall your own idyllic childhood. But I recommend it even more for those younger people who’ve never known a time without hand-held games and iPhones so they can live vicariously through Sophia.
—Ivonne Rovira
This is not the sort of book I'd normally pick up - I think that's part of the joy of the 1001 books challenge - it has introduced me to so many books that I would normally walk straight passed in a book shop. It forces me to re-examine my all too fixed ideas about what I like, what I read and why I read it. Also reading from a list has clear appeal when it comes to my literary OCD. Jansson is most universally famous for giving the world the gift of the Moomin Troll, those tiny pastel coloured hippo creatures. A much better quality of troll than those sinister baby-faced plastic dolls with the crazy multi-coloured vertical hair-dos. If you were born in the 1980s you will remember when these things were a weird craze. No accounting for taste.Sadly this book is a Moomin troll free zone (no, not even a walk-on, walk-off guest appearance). Instead this is a more autobiographical offering concerning an elderly writer and her young grand daughter spending the summer together in splendid isolation on a small picturesque island. Bridging the age gap, appreciating nature and companionship are some of the core themes but the wonderful descriptions of the island and its majestic beauty are probably the highlights. Jansson depicts a world which revolves around the sea and its various moods. More of a series of short stories or rememberings than a tightly written novel, but that is part of the appeal.
—Shovelmonkey1
