The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson

[rachelmanija]

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.

Thank you very much, madam_silvertip! I loved it and I never even heard of it till it arrived in the mail.

Comments

[cija.livejournal.com]

This book is the best book. I can't remember why I bought it, last year--I've never read the Moomintroll books and the very names of them put me off--probably it was the alluring NYRB-Classics-reprint cover copy, they are the most convincing book packagers ever--anyway I never wrote anything about it because I use too many superlatives at the best of times and I thought it would be horrible if I were to explain how brilliant it is and people were not to believe me.

[chomiji]

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.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

I will have to read this book--I've read and loved many of the Moomintroll books (though, ironically, I thought that Moominsummer Madness was the weakest of those I've read), but never heard of this one.

High five for Mushishi, too.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I guess I should read this. I loved The Secret Garden when I was young. I did read one of the Moomintroll books, and can't recall at this late date precisely what about it turned me off - I vaguely recall finding it too emotionally bleak.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Also in this category is haiku-jaguar's Aphorisms. Happily all available free online.

[bravecows.livejournal.com]

This sounds fantastic. Must find!

The Peacock Garden, by Anita Desai

[livejournal.livejournal.com]

User asakiyume referenced to your post from The Peacock Garden, by Anita Desai (http://asakiyume.livejournal.com/641653.html) saying: [...] since reviewed it, describing it as a “secret garden” book. About secret-garden books, she writes [...]