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I am so late getting my thoughts on ‘The Summer Book’ up for The Slaves of Golconda readalong, because I’ve been having some external device + laptop issues in the last few days. Of course these wouldn’t have stopped me posting if I’d written this review right after I read the book at the begining of the month and pre-scheduled it, but I didn’t (no excuses I’ve been equal parts lazy and buried in other books). So instead of joining in with my own post I’ve been catching up on other people’s thoughts. Have I mentioned this is why I love small group readalongs so much? All these other thoughts appearing on a book you finished recently is kind of wonderful in its quiet bookishness. Now I’m putting my own thoughts out there, in the hope that the other members of the group (and you even if you didn’t readalong) will find something to enjoy here.Tove Jansson’s 'The Summer Book’ is the story of of a young child called Sophia and her grandmother, who spend time together on an island in the Gulf of Finalnd, which Sophia’s grandmother has lived on for forty seven years. Esther Freud’s introduction to my edition explains that Sophia is based on Jansson’s niece and Sophia’s grandmother is based on Jansson’s mother (Freud's introduction is a short piece that combines facts, literary criticism and a personal story about her visit to the island that inspired the book, with Sophia Jansson).
The novella is made up of a series of chapters that are each a seperate, complete story. Maybe each one could be called a vignette chapter, as they’re quite short and capture specific moments of the characters life on the island. In any case, each chapter could be read independently, or out of sequence without any confusion. However, when read one after another in the order Tove Jansson has set them in, connections begin to form between the seperate stories.
As the novella progresses the pronounced seperateness of the individual story each chapter contains emphasises the gaps that surround these glimpses of life. Life outside of the island isn’t refferred to much, but the occassional detail is dropped in that suggests the characters have other complicated, full lives outside of immediate island life that the reader is not seeing. The contained way in which life is presented to the reader, as if little exists beyond the particular incident that they are reading about, encourages readers to feel that they are arriving in the middle of life, because they aren’t given any lead in, explanatory detail of what led to this moment. The third person narrator seems to presume readers are already familiar with the two characters lives, by declining to provide much detail from outside the immediate moments described. This lack of detail, not only intrigues the reader, making them hungry for every detail of the characters wider life, but also encourages the reader to care about the characters, because they are already being addressed with the casual lack of explanation that signals an intimate friendship. I always find this technique of telling the reader that they’re already involved and engaged with a story a powerful draw.
The vignette style also creates a sense of time passing, without often directly mentioning the time that has passed between each chapter. The absence of description of life outside the island, or life outside of the specific moments readers are allowed to see, as well as the way readers are dropped into situations with little introduction, suggests that other things have happened around the events that readers have been shown. At the same time Jansson creates small connections that remind you that while you haven’t been watching the characters their lives have been continuing, for example Sophia’s grandmother’s illness escalates during the novel and quick mentions of her condition inform readers she is getting worse, but the escalation seems to happen faster than it should from what the rest of the text describes. A simple couple of sentences suddenly makes it clear that she is actually ill, not just frail:
'They crawled on through the pines, and Grandmother threw up in the moss.
"It could happen to anyone," the child said. "Did you take your Lupatro?" '
but it seems as if she must have been deteriorating outside of what is described in the text for some time to have reached this severe stage. So I began to think that chunks of time must be passing outside of the text.
The contained nature of the individual stories in each chapter somehow emphasises the absence of writing around those moments. There are quiet hollowed out spaces you can almost feel the shape of, in between each story, even though they’re unwritten spaces. There’s a push, pull tension in this novel, where the completness of each story makes the reader more aware of these spaces of silence and the spaces accentuate the completness of what Jansson has written.
Perhaps you can tell from some previous posts that my writing brain is kind of skipping around all over the place right now, so after that attempt at using paragraphs and linking sentences (linking sentences steal all my joy sometimes) I’m going to revert to the more bookish chat unconnected observation points that are the most enjoyable way for me to get my thoughts on books out at the moment at the moment.
Additional thoughts:
In her review Nymeth mentioned that Sophia’s mother’s absence (we find out she’s dead early on) haunts the book, a view which I think is spot on. There are moments where Sophie flies into a rage, or worries about something terribly and we feel that it’s connected to her mothers death: when she worries about her father out in a storm, when she worries about going into deep water by herself, when her grandmother worries about Sophia calling her Mama. There’s this touching chapter where she and her grandmother build a minature city outside, but a storm comes along and Sophia worries the city and all the people she’s imagined inside will be destroyed. It is, but seeing how worried Sophia is and knowing (I think the writing encourages me to assume) that this worry is connected to her new issues with impermenance and death her grandmother rebuilds the city inside with great attention to detail and claims to have found it intact.
Sophia’s father’s absence also hangs over the book. While Sophia’s Papa is still alive and lives on the island with her, he’s often very absent from the life of his six year old child and leaves her daily care to her grandmother. Even when he appears in a chapter he feels ...not insubstantial (that would seems like I was implying something negative about the way he’s been written), but in the background, maybe distracted by other things. Sometimes he lives in a tent on the island, away from his daughter. His relationship with his mother doesn’t seem much closer. He seems distant from the other two people on the island, but not deliberately unkind or unhappy in his seperation.
As there are few other characters in Sophia or her grandmothers life the novel is focused on their relationship. A great deal is pulled from such a small focus, despite the fact that Jansson doesn’t use her omniscient narrator position to analyse this relationship from on high. She lays out the relationship and mostly allows the reader to extrapolate their own views of this relationship (although she does show the thoughts of the grandmother to inform how the reader sees parts of the relationship, or maybe to inform how they see inside the grandmothers part in the relationship).
I paid especial attention to a chapter called 'The Visitor' where Sophia’s grandmother talks to a friend about relatives meddling in older people’s lives, just as Sophia’s father has meddled in hers without thinking himself to be meddling. The tone of the grandmother’s thoughts continues in the same way the rest of the book is written, very placid, but there’s also a bit of sharp annoyance mixed in.
After the mention of Sophia’s grandmother being sick in the bushes I watched the book more carefully, taking note of the pills she takes, the tiredness she mentions. I became unsure of how this book might end and then when it came to the end with her grandmother still alive I began to wonder if this would be the last time she’d return to her island.
And that kind of leads into one of my favourite excerpts from the book which shows how unreal those closest to you can find the idea that you ever had a life seperate to them. I was reading something recently (I think it was ‘Journey in Moonlight’) where the protagonists wife said he didn’t understand that anyone but he had an inner life and I was reminded of that by Sophia’s comments here:
' "But who was he?"
"Your grandfather, of course,"Grandmother said. "My husband."
"Are you married?" Sophia cried in astonishment. '
For lovers of The Moomins who are hoping to catch a glimpse of them in this adult book by their creator I present this quote:
'Grandmother sat in the magic forest and carved outlandish animals. She cut them from branches and driftwood and gave them paws and faces, but she only hinted at what they looked like and never made them too distinct. Theyretained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest. Sometimes she cut them directly out of a stump or the trunk of a tree.
Her carvings because more and more numerous. The clung to trees or sat astride the branches, they rested against the trunks or settled into the ground. With outstretched arms, they sank in the marsh, or they curled up quietly and slept by a root. Sometimes they were only a profile in the shadows, and sometimes there were two or three together, entwined in battle or in love.'
I got a pretty Moomin feeling vibe from that passage.
Finally, non-critically, this book was just lovely. I could name lots of chapters I enjoyed and post lots of quotes. It's just delicious, gentle and sympathetic, with a lean power I wasn't quite expecting. It also comes beautifully packaged in the Sort of Books edition (see cover above and there are french flaps, whcih I know some readers love to distraction), translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal.
Other Reviews
Of Books and Bicycles
Tales from the Reading Room
So Many Books
Novel Readings
things mean a lot
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