Aug 19th 2023

The Summer Book, Tove Jansson’s novel about love, family and nature, will make you nostalgic for your own childhood

by Barbara Tesio-Ryan

 

Barbara Tesio-Ryan is Information Services Supervisor, The University of Edinburgh

 

A short novel of rare beauty, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972) tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl spending the summer with her grandmother on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland.

Jansson is best known for the Moomins, the small hippo-like creatures she started drawing in her youth, and which later made her famous around the world. But she was also a remarkably prolific artist, who explored satirical illustration, painting, children’s literature and novels.

Finnish-born and Swedish-speaking, her writing sits comfortably within two major traditions of Scandinavian literature: one of imaginative children’s writers, from Hans Christian Andersen to Astrid Lindgren, and the other of fierce women writers that included Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame) and Selma Lagerlöf, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909.

Born into an artistic household – her father Viktor was an artist and her mother Ham an illustrator – Jansson and her brother Lasse grew up during the Finnish civil war and spent most of their youth in the wake of the second world war. Art became Jansson’s escapism and also a way to voice her political dissent.

She published satirical cartoons in various newspapers, and eventually her first Moomins story, The Moomins and the Great Flood, in 1945. If dreaming up Moomin adventures helped her during and after the war, writing The Summer Book helped work through the grief of losing her mother on whom the grandmother character is based.

The little girl is based on Jansson’s niece, Sophia, and the girl’s father on her brother, Lasse. The house on the island was inspired by the Jansson family summer house on a little rocky outcrop called Klovharun.

Making the everyday magic again

There is no better time than the end of summer to read this book. It will remind you of your own childhood summers, of that languid feeling of being a little bored and coming up with improbable games and pondering unanswerable questions like, “Are there ants in heaven?” or learning why you should never step on moss.

While it came partly from a place of grief and darkness, The Summer Book is an incredibly luminous book, a dynamic that is mirrored in Grandmother’s inevitable physical decline and Sophia’s buoyant growth. The descriptions are so vivid that you can almost smell the salty, cold beaches, picture the sunburned freckly noses and long for the endlessly bright evenings.

Most of all, it is a book about love and the importance of family bonds. The delicate relationship between Sophia and her grandmother is one of the most truthful descriptions of inter-generational relationships ever written. Very few authors are able to capture the depth of a child’s emotional world as well as Tove Jansson. The Summer Book is never sentimental and yet it is filled with love, wisdom and humour.

Nothing really happens and yet everything does. Every small adventure, from learning to gain the love of a shifty cat, to trying to plant new flowers on the island, becomes a metaphor for life itself.

The case for playing

The natural landscape of the tiny island is not just the backdrop to this precious novel, it also an important character itself. It is loud with the neverending wind, volatile with unexpected storms, and resilient like the moss and flowers that carpet the ground. The island is a small self-sufficient female universe, ruled by Sophia and Grandmother.

Sophia’s father, Papa, is there in the background, as reassuringly present as the landscape itself, yet silent. The dialogue is only between Sophia and Grandmother, occasional visitors and sometimes God. “Dear God, let something happen,” Sophia prays. “God, if You love me. I’m bored to death. Amen.”

Life on the island is a reminder of a simpler life that wasn’t simple at all. It is not described as an idyllic retreat from urban life – there is no electricity, the weather is temperamental, the sea can be deadly – and yet The Summer Book will leave you yearning for the chance to live a slower-paced, more deliberate, self-reliant life.

The coexistence of humanity and nature is one of the recurring themes in Jansson’s art, and on her island the two are in harmony. And if you are looking for yet another takeaway from this book, it must be this: to be inspired to live life as Sophia and Grandmother do on the island, with profound respect for their surroundings, and a joyous will to play – no matter what age you are.

And what better time to be reminded of this than when the sun is shining, the days are longer and the living is easier? For me, this book took me back to my own childhood and summers spent with my Danish family in a summerhouse not so different from Sophia and Grandmother’s.

With wild winds, unforgiving downpours and a brutally cold sea, time spent on the beach could be challenging. In response to my own (frequent) moaning, my grandmother, with the same unsentimental affection as Sophia’s, would shush me by saying: “Life is not easy, but it’s very interesting.”

And this is why we read books like The Summer Book. To remind ourselves of who we used to be, and of who we want to become.


 

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.


Barbara Tesio-Ryan, Information Services Supervisor, The University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Browse articles by author

More Literary Essays

Sep 3rd 2023
EXTRACTS: "Harvard historian Calder Walton confronts this challenge head on in a new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, which recounts the rise and role of modern intelligence capabilities through the history of the West’s competition with the Russian security services. It is an ambitious and entertaining story, but one that is also firmly grounded in academic research." ---- "But Walton does more than add previously secret details to old accounts. In an example of “applied history,” he uses his examination of the past to weigh in on current events,..." ---- "Thanks to President Vladimir Putin – a former KGB man himself – KGB alumni dominate the Russian elite, including its corrupt economic oligarchy, and lead the powerful coercive institutions that are transforming Russia into an authoritarian security state. Whatever their labels, Russia’s security services have formed the backbone of its ruling regimes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
Aug 19th 2023
EXTRACTS: "A short novel of rare beauty, Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book (1972) tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl spending the summer with her grandmother on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland." ---- "Life on the island is a reminder of a simpler life that wasn’t simple at all. It is not described as an idyllic retreat from urban life – there is no electricity, the weather is temperamental, the sea can be deadly – and yet The Summer Book will leave you yearning for the chance to live a slower-paced, more deliberate, self-reliant life. The coexistence of humanity and nature is one of the recurring themes in Jansson’s art, and on her island the two are in harmony."
May 4th 2023
EXTYRACTS: "Alain Badiou is undoubtedly among the greatest of living philosophers; one that may fairly be credited with rescuing philosophy from academic irrelevance,..." --- "Images of the Present Time (Columbia University Press, 2023) contains a series of three seminars delivered between 2001 and 2004. "
Jun 10th 2021
Fiction - but based in history.
May 23rd 2021
Fiction - Introduction by the Author: "The mind of a fly, such as it is, is a primitive thing – archaic and amoral, devoid of pity, remorse, forgiveness… and love. And yet. And yet we know within every species there is a great deal of variation: every species is, after all, an ingenious structure formed by Nature. Goethe – who we sometimes forget was as great a scientist as he was a poet – yes, the divine Goethe grasped two simple but essential truths. First, that species are real in themselves; not some mere classificatory device created by us. (I might add – inasmuch as it relates to the story that I am shortly to tell – that confidence in the reality of species as such was for the better part of the last century based entirely on the incontrovertible fact of reproductive isolation). Every species may indeed be viewed as a manifestation of planfulness. Yet we also know, and this is the second principle, by no means are species totally homogenous. There is always intraspecific variety, as they say – a flexibility in behavior and phenomena. The crucial point is that this diversity if you will – functional or otherwise – is the very raison d’être of the species. Is it any wonder then that Nature loves her eccentrics: every species has its individuals that wander along new roads – the honeybee, say, who returns carrying news within in his unique dance of hitherto unknown gardens and flowers, or a new tree in which to rear the hive. Insect behavior can be quite plastic."
Mar 18th 2020
EXTRACT: "In my essay Elie Wiesel’s Early Work I promised a return to the novels by Albert Camus (1913-1960), 1957 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Then the world as we know it changed with the onset of COVID-19 and the relevance of Camus’ novel The Plague, published in 1947, struck hard."
Jan 18th 2020
EXTRACT: "The harmful impact of air pollution caused by diesel exhaust fumes on our health is well known. It’s responsible for causing everything from respiratory problems to dementia and even certain types of cancers. But what most people don’t realise is that exhaust fumes aren’t the only cause of air pollution. In fact, up to 55% of roadside traffic pollution is made of non-exhaust particles, with around 20% of that pollution coming from brake dust. And as our latest research reveals, these particles may be just as damaging to our lungs as exhaust fumes."
Oct 26th 2019
EXTRACT: "We didn’t have emails or social media back then, so I’d usually call once a year and check in. Though I was careful not to ask, my ex-wife would graciously give me updates on “The Baby.” She told him about me early on and he just shrugged and said, “Okay.” The title of ‘father’ belongs to the man who raised him. She did once tell me there are times when she’s washing dishes or preoccupied, and he’ll come up behind her saying something, and she’ll turn around expecting to see me. "
Sep 10th 2019
Extract: "Khodasevich’s prose is as crystalline as his poetry, and this rendition by veteran translator and academic Sarah Vitali reads with such punch and verve that some of the personality sketches might have been written today for a mainstream magazine. Her endnotes add background and fascinating detail that put the forgotten era in context. "
Jul 17th 2019
Blurring the line between fiction and real life is one of the intrigues of good writing. Much of Saul Bellow’s wild antics in “Humboldt’s Gift” actually happened to him, but how much? Did Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” originate in his personal life?  Intriguing, perhaps, but none of this really matters if the story is credible and the writing holds up. Any reader with an analytical bent will wonder, however, where the truth is located in a good story. I certainly did, reading Mary L. Tabor’s new collection of twelve short stories, "The Woman Who Never Cooked."
May 31st 2018
Postcolonial scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on the legacy of Western empires – but despite a long history of foreign expansionism and domination, Russia, in its various incarnations, has never received the same amount of critical scrutiny. The Tsarist empire’s position outside the West proper, the Soviet Union’s stated opposition to imperialism, and the fact that Russia’s empire was a contiguous land empire rather than an overseas one all helped shield it from postcolonial critique. The result is a strange oversight – especially considering the fact that the heir to the largest continental empire in modern history clearly remains uncomfortable with the independence of many of its former subordinates.
May 24th 2018

At the age of 50, Henry James created a detailed portrait of an experimental novelist in old age, in his story “The Middle Years.” Terminally ill, the novelist Dencombe receives in the mail the published version of what he realizes will be his final work, a novel titled The Middle Years.

Apr 25th 2018
Ever since I first began listening to popular music on a transistor radio, I have been fascinated by one-hit wonders. Today, oldies stations can devote entire weekends to singers and groups who had one hit and were never heard from again, including such classics as the Penguins’ “Earth Angel,” the Teddy Bears’ “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” and the Murmaids’ “Popsicles and Icicles.” When I began studying creativity, I discovered that one-hit wonders were not unique to pop. Grant Wood’s American Gothic and Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial are celebrated instances in which the name of an artist instantly calls to mind a single work, and vice versa....
Apr 3rd 2018

Serious readers like to see a review or two about big, complicated novels before deciding whether to devote their life to them.  The thousand-page Russian classics all seem to carry this warning flag. 

Sep 23rd 2017

PRINCETON – This summer, at literary festivals and bookstores around the world, readers celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the debut of the first book in J.K.

Feb 1st 2017

Rarely does a musician with a Juilliard background and a Ph.D. in piano performance find the energy, much less the time, to conceive, plot, write and publish a series of well-constructed novels.

Jan 24th 2017

The Wall Street Journal has made an egregious error. I'm not talking about their coverage of Donald Trump, Russian hacking, or any other such ephemera. This concerns something much more serious: classic literature.

Jan 7th 2017

A Talmudic question has much intrigued me: Two men are stranded in the desert. Only one has water. If he shares it, they both die; if he keeps it, he lives and his companion dies. What should he do? Rabbi Akiva taught that the man has the right to drink it.

Oct 14th 2016

To the surprise of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel prize in literature.