The Summer Book (New York Review Books Classics)
Tove Jansson
Language: English
Pages: 184
ISBN: 159017268X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.
Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.
The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.
throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom. “Look, Mama,” said the lovely Venetian girl, “the kitchen is under water today.” “Dear child, it doesn’t matter,” her mother replied. “We still have the drawing room.” They rode down in their elevator and stepped into a gondola and glided through the streets. There wasn’t an automobile in the entire city, they had all long since sunk into the ooze. The only sound was footsteps on the
over the stern. And then it moved on again, but very slowly. Grandmother started snoring. A hard, dry clap of thunder rolled out between the islands, and black breezes sprang out across the water and then vanished. As they rounded the long point, there came a second thunderclap, just as the plastic sausage slid over another reef. Grandmother woke up. She saw a short, glassy wave pour in over the stern, and she realized she was wet. The air had cooled off a little. Confused puffs of clouds were
the barrels and every crevice in the granite fill with water and overflow. She looked at the mattresses out being aired and the dishes that were washing themselves. She sighed contentedly, and, absorbed in thought, she filled a coffee cup with precious drinking water and poured it over a daisy. THE CROOKS ONE STILL, warm August night there came a ringing trumpet blast from out at sea—like Gabriel blowing his horn. A double row of lights came gliding in toward the island in a slow curve. It
isn’t my boat,” he said. “I didn’t think it was. It has a hogged keel, too. Did you borrow it?” “I just took it,” Verner said. “I took it and drove off. It’s very unpleasant to have them worry about you all the time.” “But you’re only seventy-five,” said Grandmother in astonishment. “Surely you can do what you like.” “It’s not that easy,” Verner replied. “You have to be considerate. They do have a certain responsibility for you, after all. And when you get right down to it, you are mostly
the sea was running a long, windless swell. It was on days just like this—dog days—that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from the sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation. Lizards were not afraid. When the moon came up, red spiders mated on uninhabited skerries, where the rock became an unbroken carpet of tiny, ecstatic spiders. “Maybe we ought to warn Papa,” Sophia said. “I don’t think he’s