Tove Jansson's "The Summer Book" revisited

Rhian already posted about this novel a few months ago, but I finally read it the other day and wanted to weigh in. I'm with her on this one: The Summer Book is one of the loveliest, most confident, and most unusual novels I've ever read. The biggest surprise about it is how radical it is.

Generally, when I read the word "radical," I reach for my TV remote. But Jansson's audacity is one that is entirely specific to her--it isn't showy or high-falutin', but clearly comes from her sense of who she is. Or, rather, was; she died in 2001, after a long career writing and illustrating a series of wonderful stories and comics for children. Most of the children's stuff is translated into English from Swedish, but only a couple of the adult books have been; the edition of The Summer Book we have is the current one, from NYRB, with an introduction by a hero of ours, Kathryn Davis.

The book, as Rhian mentioned in her post, is about a series of summers that a little girl spends on an island with her grandmother. The girl's mother has died--this is only mentioned once, but it suffuses every single scene in the book. The girl's father is living with them on the island, as well.

There is no plot--the novel is a series of vignettes. One of the three things that make me call this book "radical" is this particular tactic--though you've seen it before, it's rare to encounter a novel-in-stories that is so utterly confident in its abandonment of traditional narrative momentum. The second of the three is the book's treatment of time. The events, such as they are, clearly take place over several summers (many chapters start with something like "One summer..."), but they appear to be ordered by seasons: the early chapters take place in spring, the late ones August. Doesn't matter which year--what matters is the weather. The effect is to emphasize a certain habit of memory, the arrangement of experience by sensation. The third odd thing is the father: though he is living in close quarters with the grandmother and girl, and though he appears in almost every chapter, he never speaks. That is, he surely does speak, but his speech is never represented in the novel by dialogue. He's there, but this isn't his story, and his silent presence magnifies our sense of the mother's absence. I've never seen a writer do anything quite like this.

The book's climax--and yes, there is real emotional momentum here, subtly lashed to the changing seasons--comes when the girl, Sophia, dictates a book to her grandmother. The book, a description of the life habits of angleworms, is a devastating metaphor for the girl's separation from her mother; she gets the idea for writing it after a worm is accidentally cut in half with a shovel. "Presumably," Sophia dictates,

everything that happened to [the worms] after that only seemed like half as much, but this was also sort of a relief, and then, too, nothing they did was their fault any more, somehow. They just blamed each other. Or else they'd say that after a thing like that, you just weren't yourself any more.

It is a sad and beautiful flourish, and entirely original.

Jansson never calls attention to anything--she is perhaps the most self-assured novelist I've ever read. All you need to do is pay attention; and she is completely confident that you will. The prose is wonderfully simple, and ably translated by Thomas Teal; one gets the sense that Jansson is one of those rare writers who translate well.

Finally, I'd like to throw in a bit of praise for NYRB, which has reprinted a great number of fantastic forgotten classics--Stoner, Lolly Willowes, The Magic Pudding (another hilarious kids' book), and many others. I wish they would start publishing new books, by current writers. There is a need out there to discover and publish books that are liable to be forgotten before they're even published--quiet masterpieces with nowhere else to go.

Tove Jansson's The Summer Book

I finished this book this morning, and I think it's going on my top ten all-time favorites list. It's beautiful, and I don't say that lightly. Jansson, whom we've mentioned here as the author of our favorite kids' books, the Moomintroll series, was a Swedish-speaking Finn who died in 2001. She lived for years on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The Summer Book (which is for adults) is about such an island, and about two people who live on it: a six-year-old girl and her very old grandmother.

The little girl's mother has recently died, and this is mentioned exactly once, in the beginning. The rest of the book happens over 21 short chapters, or vignettes, that each have a subject and stand pretty much alone. In one they get a cat, in another they build a model of Venice out in the marsh, in another they experience a huge storm. There is a lot of walking about, lying on moss, poking things with walking sticks. Somehow it is all lovely, unsentimental, funny, and heartbreaking.

Ugh, I hate describing books -- I can never get them to sound as good as they are (or as bad, for that matter). Kathryn Davis wrote the introduction for the edition I read, the new New York Review of Books one, and since she quotes some of the best lines, I suggest you save it for last, as I did.

Books like this one remind me how little needs to happen in a novel. Sometimes all you need is a good, clear eye to hold everything together.

Moominland Midwinter

We don't post too often about books for children, mainly because (and I think I can speak for Rhian here) we think that most of them are utter crap. It's rare to find a really great one. The Little House On The Prairie books are brilliant and wonderful...Roald Dahl of course...The Phantom Toolbooth. You know the ones.

But it's only recently that we discovered Tove Jansson's "Moomin" series of short stories, novels, and comics (I can hear our comics-pedant son Tobey screaming "Not comic books, graphic novels"). Jansson, a multitalented Finn who died a few years ago, appears to have been some kind of literary and artistic genius. Moominland Midwinter is a moving, haunting, and utterly original piece of work, so much so that it's almost hard to believe somebody actually went to all this effort for children. That she did so makes it even better.

The Moomins are a family of schmoo-esque creatures who live off the land. The protagonist, Moomintroll, is a sensitive little boy; he lives with his parents, Moominmamma and Moominpapa, and the motley collection of orphans, wanderers, and eccentrics whom they take in. This world is packed with different sentient creatures; they all look like animals of some kind but are all human-like, with a few notable exceptions. The stories mostly focus on the Moomin family, and this book does too, though it is quite different from its more lighthearted predecessors.

Moomins are warm-weather animals--they hibernate in the winter. The premise of this book is that Moomintroll wakes up in January and can't rouse his family. The amount of sunlight per day can be measured in seconds (this is Finland, remember), and the world he wakes to is entirely alien. Strange creatures are inhabiting all his old familiar haunts, everything is covered with snow, and everyone he knows in the world is asleep. What follows is a kind of mini-odyssey, in which Moomintroll learns self-reliance and social responsibility, and apprehends fully, for the first time, the sensual wholeness of life truly lived.

The book is filled with sophisticated, beautiful prose composed with a limited but expressive vocabulary. Here, Moomintroll is moping around his silent house, considering the strangeness of other people's lives:

Such things just are, but one never knows why, and one feels hopelessly apart.

Moomintroll found a large box of paper decals in the attic and lapsed into longing admiration of their summerish beauty. They were pictures of flowers and sunrises and little carts with gaudy wheels, glossy and peaceful pictures that reminded him of the world he had lost.

First he spread them out on the drawing-room floor. Then he hit upon pasting them to the walls. He pasted slowly and carefully to make the job last, and the brightest pictures he pasted above his sleeping mamma.

And here, later, when spring finally arrives:

This day the spring had decided to be not poetical but simply cheerful. It had spread flocks of small scatterbrained clouds in the sky; it swept down the last specks of snow from every roof; it made new little brooks run everywhere and was playing at April the best it could.

Evidently (see the Wikipedia link) this was the first of a run of rather more serious Moomin stories, which would lead Jansson, in the seventies, to begin writing entirely for adults. It shows. She brought her sophistication here first, and in this novel (translated with great nuance by Ernest Benn), we see real art being brought to bear upon the strange epiphanies of childhood. Read it to your kid immediately.