On Tove Jansson's The Summer Book
A Scandinavian Summer Classic
First of all, let me begin by saying that this is not meant to be a book review. Or if it appears to be, it is quite unintentional. Few dispute the fact that summertime is about reading, at least for a certain class of people not inclined to the more rigorous activities of summer like white water rafting or rock climbing. Reading in summer is a kind of deep breathing accorded to some in the brief moments of leisure they have when the world is at its most verdant and vibrant. The Summer Book by Tove Jansson is one of those deep-breath reads that is most suitable to the season. It’s an old book, first published in 1972 in Swedish, and then translated into English in 1974. My copy is a slim volume with a lovely image of a remote island in summer in the Gulf of Finland where the ‘story’ of the book, if it could be called that, takes place. Six year old Sophia who has lost her mother is spending time with her elderly artist grandmother and her father at their summer cottage on the island. The young girl and the old woman have their share of adventures on the tiny outcropping of rocks, trees, and sea that make up their remote summer locale with a kind of spirited vigor and depth that only the best literature can convey. I read this book with intense pleasure. So intense, in fact, that I am writing about it. And perhaps that is what the best books do — make you want to write about them and tell others. Part of my pleasure derives from the fact the book is set in Finland where the summers are short and where enjoyment of the season is enhanced by a sense of its fleeting brevity. In a northern clime, too, the gains made in summer by the flora are transitory and delicate, easy to miss if not for the sense, cultivated by some, that the summer is all one has as a bulwark against the darkness and cold that is winter. Finland, in short, is much like my corner of the eastern prairie, where spring is abrupt and summer almost as sudden. Living as close as I do to Lake Winnipeg and not far from the lake country of northern Ontario where cottage life is the summer norm for many middle class families, the story of The Summer Book rings especially true to me. There is the ferment of activity before the travel to the summer place and then the dog days of idle leisure spent there. There are boats and swimming, beach combing and blueberry picking. Author Tove Jansson built the cottage where The Summer Book takes place in 1947 with her brother Lars. She spent nearly every summer of her life there until she removed herself to an even smaller island not far away where she summered five months of the year until she was 77 years old. In the recent re-released UK edition of the book, the introduction is prefaced by Esther Freud who notes that in her visit to the island, it took her all of four and a half minutes to circumnavigate the entire space covered in the book. But of course, such a tour could only be superficial compared to the depth of the world created by Jansson’s intensely keen and sensitive eye honed by years of familiarity with one season in one place. And too, her characters — an old woman and a young girl — are exactly the right kind of people to know a place in both its wonder and frailty. The Summer Book has never been out of print in Scandinavia. It is one of their modern classics. If I had a cottage, it’d be a permanent fixture there. It’s the kind of book one can read over and over again, like the best kind of children’s books — and Jansson, of course, was initially a children’s writer famous for her Moomin series. But the curious thing about The Summer Book is that it is the only book that has ever made me really understand what summer means for a northern people like Canadians. The shortness of the season, the frailty of the life it supports, the stoic, bracing equanimity that is at the heart of the characters approach to the place is captivating and compelling. When are you going to die? asks the six year old Sophie of her grandmother. Soon, but that is no concern of yours, snaps the grandmother as she and Sophie search for her false teeth in the undergrowth by their cottage on a warm July morning. The opening is an intimate summer scene all right, played out before the eye in a book that answers beautifully the perennial question: What are you reading this summer?
*This article was first published in the Globe and Mail in 2009