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By the author of the Moomin books, which like many children’s classics are wise and strange, alternating comfort with manageable scares, and filled with the closely observed details of a world familiar to the author but alien to many readers. The same can be said of this adult novel, though the fears addressed are rather less easily manageable.
Jannson spent much of her life on a tiny island off the coast of Finland, and The Summer Book, which reads like a memoir regardless of its actual autobiographical content or lack of same, is set on a similar island. Sophia, a six-year-old girl filled with the irrational moods and passions of the very young, and her grandmother, filled with the layered experience and perspective of the very old, live on it along with Sophia’s father, who is a benign but occasional presence, and a great deal of wildlife.
There is virtually no plot, just a series of character portraits and incidents: a child visits to keep Sophia company and ends up annoying the entire family, a cat fails to live up to Sophia’s ideals, the grandmother creates sculptures in a forest, a family friend with an unnamed boat salvages floating whiskey and fireworks which don’t go off. Jansson gets more emotional mileage out of a flooded dollhouse than many authors get from a natural disaster.
Sophia’s mother has died, a fact which is mentioned exactly once, and her grandmother is in poor health; the submerged story is of mortality, of what it’s like to face the end of life and what it’s like to face the beginning. Both are frightening and require careful attention to the small details; both enable those details to be observed with crystalline clarity. Every word and image counts, the psychology of little children and animals is dead-on, and there’s a lot of dry, sardonic humor.
Some of my favorite books and shows and movies are in this genre, stories about people and places and the way things and jobs and ecologies work, with conventional plot either dispensed with or appearing as an afterthought: Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede
, in which the day-to-day work of a nunnery is prayer made physical; Anita Desai’s Peacock Garden Desai Long Ago
(no relation to the Godden book of the same name), in which a girl hiding from the violence of Partition within a mosque’s walled garden finds it a miniature paradise; the anime and manga Mushi-shi: The Complete Series
, which do have plots but are really about the intricate and beautiful workings of an entirely invented magical ecology; the movie My Neighbor Totoro
, with its soot sprites and the cat bus and spirits waiting with umbrellas; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden
, perhaps the prototype of all these stories of small worlds, of growing things and growing children, of life and death and profound spiritual revelations embodied in a single blade of grass.
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madam_silvertip! I loved it and I never even heard of it till it arrived in the mail.
Jannson spent much of her life on a tiny island off the coast of Finland, and The Summer Book, which reads like a memoir regardless of its actual autobiographical content or lack of same, is set on a similar island. Sophia, a six-year-old girl filled with the irrational moods and passions of the very young, and her grandmother, filled with the layered experience and perspective of the very old, live on it along with Sophia’s father, who is a benign but occasional presence, and a great deal of wildlife.
There is virtually no plot, just a series of character portraits and incidents: a child visits to keep Sophia company and ends up annoying the entire family, a cat fails to live up to Sophia’s ideals, the grandmother creates sculptures in a forest, a family friend with an unnamed boat salvages floating whiskey and fireworks which don’t go off. Jansson gets more emotional mileage out of a flooded dollhouse than many authors get from a natural disaster.
Sophia’s mother has died, a fact which is mentioned exactly once, and her grandmother is in poor health; the submerged story is of mortality, of what it’s like to face the end of life and what it’s like to face the beginning. Both are frightening and require careful attention to the small details; both enable those details to be observed with crystalline clarity. Every word and image counts, the psychology of little children and animals is dead-on, and there’s a lot of dry, sardonic humor.
Some of my favorite books and shows and movies are in this genre, stories about people and places and the way things and jobs and ecologies work, with conventional plot either dispensed with or appearing as an afterthought: Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede
, in which the day-to-day work of a nunnery is prayer made physical; Anita Desai’s Peacock Garden Desai Long Ago (no relation to the Godden book of the same name), in which a girl hiding from the violence of Partition within a mosque’s walled garden finds it a miniature paradise; the anime and manga Mushi-shi: The Complete Series, which do have plots but are really about the intricate and beautiful workings of an entirely invented magical ecology; the movie My Neighbor Totoro, with its soot sprites and the cat bus and spirits waiting with umbrellas; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, perhaps the prototype of all these stories of small worlds, of growing things and growing children, of life and death and profound spiritual revelations embodied in a single blade of grass.Thank you very much,
madam_silvertip! I loved it and I never even heard of it till it arrived in the mail.
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Isn't it great? I had the same feeling. What makes it wonderful is exactly what makes it hard to explain why anyone would want to read it.
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And thank you so much for describing the peculiar quality of the book and why someone would like just this sort of thing. I do and have another reason for being grateful that you do and said why: I just wrote a long section of my novel that is very much in this style. The protagonist is just home from the hospital and can't do much of anything, and is watching life unfold around him in just this fashion, and I was worried all the way through that I was writing the most boring and self-indulgent thing ever...but my model was "The Summer Book" and a little bit "Moominvalley in November," as beacons of It Can Be Done.
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I am also rather curious about Sculptor's Daughter, but I'm not a fan of interlibrary loan --microfilm is awkward and I hate time limits on my reading-- and I just have to laugh and laugh when ABEbooks tell me they have found a used copy for sale for $500 or $2000. Um, no, I'm curious, but not THAT curious.
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This is an old, old favorite of mine. I think that it contains one of the most amazingly dreamlike scenes I've ever read, when a sleepy Sophia starts thinking about the trunks and suitcases in the attic floating away .... "and none of them ever came back." And the chapter about the Haunted Forest was great. I also love the flooding of Venice, and Grandmother's closing words in that chapter.
I really treasure the fact that Sophia is un-cute. She's shy and unsocialized and judgmental, just like a real kid.
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High five for Mushishi, too.
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The Peacock Garden, by Anita Desai