Tove Jansson is world-famous for her Moomin characters, a legendary cartoon made for children. It would be easy to think of her as only a writer for children, but in fact she has written 11 novels, with only two of them translated into English.
Published in 1972. Fragmented, Beautiful, Simplistic.
The Summer Book was yet another recommendation from my dear Finnish friend, Jenny. She included this book in my Finnish Literature pile, because it is a modern classic in Scandinavia. It was with great pleasure that I began reading this little book.
Quick to read and written in a simplistic style--as if Jansson collected snippets from postcards or brief journal entries-- it was not a quick novel to process. This book is an intense examination of the relationship between a young girl Sophia and her aging grandmother. Sophia recently lost her mother, and her grandmother spends much of her time while on their summer island reflecting on her stage of life.
Attempts to understand unexplainable forces such as death, love, and the passage of time, is what is truly at the heart of this novel. The frank dialogue between these two distantly aged people is at times jarring. Beautiful, yet striking. At times it reads as two adults speaking with each other instead of a young girl and an old women. We slowly glean that the family, and island, are autobiographical. I often wonder if the this novel is more about the island itself, than about the people who inhabit it.
A Finnish Summer Cabin
It is not surprising that this book has never been out of print since it was first published. As I was reading it, I couldn't help but feel the allure of the Summer, and think about what Summer must mean for a nation that is in the dark for most of the year. As I sat and read this during the tail end of a murky-skied Pacific Northwest Winter, I recalled with pleasure the activities that Sophia and her grandmother did during the long summer days. "They make animal sculptures, and carve boats from bark, they gather berries, driftwood and bones. They draw "awful things", tell stories, build Venice in the marsh pool, row across to other islands, sleep and swim and talk."
Grandmother drops her cane into the water and Sophia climbs down from a channel maker, where her father's forbidden her to go, to fish it out: "You're a very good climber," said Grandmother sternly. "And brave too, because you could see you were scared. Shall I tell him about it? Or shouldn't I?" Sophia shrugged one shoulder and looked at her grandmother, "I guess maybe not," she said. "But you can tell it on your deathbed so it doesn't go to waste."
This feels like one of the projects Sophia and her grandmother would make on a long, lethargic summer day.
Oh, Tove Jansson. Such a beautiful book to add to your incredible body of work.
Truly a beautiful book. Have only just discovered it and now it will be with me forever. Can't rate it highly enough; its intricate detail of what is said, and what is not said, leaves with you a true sense of our relationships to one another and to our environment. Tove Jansson was perspicacious indeed.
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