Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colors everywhere had deepened. Sophia does become somewhat anxious about superstition towards the end of the book and of how all manner of signs may affect her father, but this is a little late to rescue his shadow in the pages of the book. I don’t have the strength to go on loving him, but I think about him all the time. Different things seem of value or importance to Sophia and the grandmother battles to keep up with her energy and fast, flitting mind. But several years later she relented and provided pictures for a new German edition, producing some of her finest – and final – black and white line drawings (available in this US edition). It is all that the world holds in the moment.


Grandmother is a catalyst for the myth-building that can often take place in children: she carves from old pieces of wood and the two of them take the carvings to the ‘magic forest’ at, and only at, sunset. Jansson also spent time on the island of Klovharun with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä. We think that we can’t let the pages run out. Often, Sophia and her grandmother’s conversations are humorous due to their wildly different perspectives on life. Both characters can be delightful, but they are both flawed and far more likeable than their more perfect counterparts that appear in similar (and infinitely lesser) novels. Freud believed it was the book’s alluring images of summer that captured the imaginations and hearts of the Finns, and turned The Summer Book into a national bestseller. This is a marvelous, beautiful, wise novel, which is also very funny."

The Summer Book is filled with clean, efficient, beautiful language. Published in 1972, The Summer Book is written in a clear, unsentimental style, full of brusque humour, and wisdom. ( Log Out /  Discover great books and go on an epic literary adventure around the world. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. The NYRB Classic edition of The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is described on the back cover as “the essence of summer” and, after reading this delightful slim volume, I can’t disagree. Jansson lived for much of her life on an unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland, and "The Summer Book "is her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world. On Body-Mind Feedback Loops: How is it That the Affect of Writing is? Of course, I’ve come across children with better vocabularies than others, and family members and other social factors do come into this, I suspect, but the writer in me also wanted Sophia to be someone who I could more readily/fully associate with. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rain forest of lush, evil leaves and flowers…(p. 5), The short vignettes dealing with the adventures, games, and minor dramas of six-year-old Sophia and her elderly grandmother are simple but beautifully expressed, capturing the spirit and selfishness of youth as well as the exhaustion and bluntness that comes with age.

When a potion is made, an elixir, to help ward off the potential of harm to her father, Sophia announces:  ‘I’ve turned superstitious’, and when Grandmother says that her father won’t drink it anyway, Sophia replies that ‘Maybe we could pour it in his ear.’ Jansson presents this matter-of-factly and it resonates with a truth. Jansson’s island is based on a true place, as are the two main characters of Sophia (who starts off in the book as a six year old) and Sophia’s Grandmother (based on Jansson’s own mother, Signe Hammarsten). ( Log Out /  Sophia is, by and large, real enough. This is what must be done with such well-crafted works. After all, she spends months at a time with no one but her father and grandmother. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account.

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Falmouth Uni grad. I adored this book when I read it earlier this year. The question arises though, in this reader’s awareness, of whether Sophia can be seen as ‘a real child’. Where The Summer Book is most perplexing though is in Jansson’s treatment of the shadow figure that is Sophia’s father (Papa). The nuanced readings add a certain magic and makes this a good book to revisit. So, rather than our regular book review (usually written by Tessa’s co-founder, Betsy) we have a brief introduction to the extraordinary life of Tove and to The Summer Book – a piece of writing that inspired our spring campaign. It is, instead, a string of beautiful arrangements told in the time of a small island in the Gulf of Finland. Lovely review, Claire, and so glad you liked it – TJ is one of my favourite writers, and I’m saving up the latest reprint (Travelling Light) – although I’m almost tempted to wait til winter. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Better than A Winter Book, and I said the same thing about that. Through all my lenses combined, I read it as a daughter’s love story for her mother. Creator of the beloved Moomin cartoons for children, Tove Jansson also penned a number of books for adults, including The Summer Book.. Creator of the beloved Moomin cartoons for children, Tove Jansson also penned a number of books for adults, including The Summer Book. ‘A sanctuary for someone with work to do, a wild garden for someone growing up, but otherwise just days on top of days, and passing time.’.
A beautiful, understated examination of platonic love and profound friendship from the Scandinavian maestro, The Summer Book basks in the glow of a long Finnish summer. I enjoyed your review and particularly your essay about play in The Summer Book. However, in summer the Finns experience an exquisite natural phenomenon known as the Midnight Sun, where daylight appears for 24 hours. Where Sophia comes across well is in the details such as an episode involving a cat who, it transpires, kills birds, and this disturbs Sophia. If these short vignettes are read slowly and thoughtfully, the characters of Grandmother and Sophia start to enmesh in a deepening relationship in which there is, at once, a delicate form of co-dependency and the slightest of tensions inherent in the generational dissonances. Tove Jansson’s Summer Book is as delicate and as beautiful as an object found on a beach. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. I’ve just read your own take on Jansson’s Summer Book at your site. The first page describes Sophia taking a morning swim in the sea and I found myself wanting to slip into the water too. Perhaps Sophia is not an average child. What we find herein are twenty-two ‘chapters’ or vignettes, spread over unspecified summer time. However for the most part the descriptions hone in on the flowers, the moss, the faded blue paint on the house. Passionate about literature, culture and travel. Ebook available via the Bookshop page above.

Inspiration was not only taken from the island, but from the people that stayed there, as Sophia and the grandmother were inspired by Jansson’s niece and mother. She expresses herself in ways that are certainly true (‘How’s the water?’ Grandmother said . Flawed characters are so much more loveable, a lesson that Sophia learns in a chapter entitled “The Cat.”. I don’t know this author, but I’ll look for this book. Anyone who loves remote exploring will feel right at home on this small island – a place where the wider world doesn’t seem to matter, ‘as if the world ended at the horizon.’ It is also a touching and realistic portrayal of a relationship between a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia. This is a book of love, essentially: a book in which Jansson manages to sculpt the Grandmother’s character as benevolent, wise, humble, playful. In contrasting the two characters, Jansson writes of Grandmother: ‘And because it was June almost all of the wildflowers they had picked were white,’ (and we bow down to the nature knowledge and suppose that it is true); on the mainland, Sophia sees a bulldozer ‘an enormous, infernal, bright yellow machine that thundered and roared and floundered through the woods with clanging jaws . July 31, 2010 by Claire (The Captive Reader). There is a degree of ‘head hopping’ taking place in the writing, but it hardly matters.