None Ofyourbusiness ❤️ 🇮🇱
Sophia's mother is gone before the first sentence, mentioned once with offhandedness and then left to exert gravitational pressure on every page that follows. The Summer Book is what grief looks like when a writer is too honest to dress it up and too Finnish to discuss it loudly.
The island has no name. It has granite, moss, peonies, a ravine the children are forbidden to visit, a marsh pool, a well of dubious reputation, and one very old woman who walks with a stick and looks like an immense sandpiper. This is Grandmother, who smokes in secret while pretending to believe she has quit, waters her favorite plants at night while officially holding that small islands take care of themselves, and navigates eighty-year-old legs down dark stairs.
Opposite her is Sophia, who is six, recently motherless, and conducting an ongoing theological negotiation with God that God appears to be losing. In the background, largely silent, Papa builds things, fixes things, reads flower catalogues from Holland and brings home an object described as an enormous plastic sausage that nearly sinks the family boat.
The book moves through summer in episodes, each named for its occasion: "The Magic Forest," "Playing Venice," "The Enormous Plastic Sausage," "Sophia's Storm." A miniature Venice constructed in the marsh pool achieves a population of ant pedestrians and a complete Doge's Palace before the weather renders an opinion. A horrible child named Berenice arrives for a visit. A stray cat establishes residency and pursues a career in mouse homicide. A neighbor builds a monstrous house on the adjacent island. Sophia prays for a storm and receives one so comprehensive that she spends the night convinced she has personally destroyed Eastern Nyland. A summer is a life in miniature, and every life contains more weather than expected.
Jansson gave the world the Moomin books, those beloved Finnish children's stories about soft philosophical creatures living through floods, comets, and the perpetual strangeness of existence with curiosity intact, and The Summer Book is the adult version of the same investigation. The Moomins and Grandmother share a worldview. Pay close attention, expect nothing comfortable, carry your stick.
Jansson lived for decades on a tiny island at the farthest edge of the Pellinge archipelago with her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, and they designed their cottage with four windows, one for each compass point, so they could see what was coming and have time to get used to it. This is also, more or less, the philosophy of the book.
What keeps The Summer Book from tipping into sentiment is a bone-deep structural indifference to consolation. Grandmother knows exactly what is coming for her, and her response is to hide the barometer under the bed at summer's end, label the storage tins in the attic in her own handwriting, and leave notes for hypothetical shipwreck survivors about the location of the coarse salt and the proper operation of the stovepipe. She is preparing for a departure she regards with the pragmatism of a woman who has outlasted most of her luggage.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Sophia's mother is gone before the first sentence, mentioned once with offhandedness and then left to exert gravitational pressure on every page that follows. The Summer Book is what grief looks like when a writer is too honest to dress it up and too Finnish to discuss it loudly.
The island has no name. It has granite, moss, peonies, a ravine the children are forbidden to visit, a marsh pool, a well of dubious reputation, and one very old woman who walks with a stick and looks like an immense sandpiper. This is Grandmother, who smokes in secret while pretending to believe she has quit, waters her favorite plants at night while officially holding that small islands take care of themselves, and navigates eighty-year-old legs down dark stairs.
Opposite her is Sophia, who is six, recently motherless, and conducting an ongoing theological negotiation with God that God appears to be losing. In the background, largely silent, Papa builds things, fixes things, reads flower catalogues from Holland and brings home an object described as an enormous plastic sausage that nearly sinks the family boat.
The book moves through summer in episodes, each named for its occasion: "The Magic Forest," "Playing Venice," "The Enormous Plastic Sausage," "Sophia's Storm." A miniature Venice constructed in the marsh pool achieves a population of ant pedestrians and a complete Doge's Palace before the weather renders an opinion. A horrible child named Berenice arrives for a visit. A stray cat establishes residency and pursues a career in mouse homicide. A neighbor builds a monstrous house on the adjacent island. Sophia prays for a storm and receives one so comprehensive that she spends the night convinced she has personally destroyed Eastern Nyland. A summer is a life in miniature, and every life contains more weather than expected.
Jansson gave the world the Moomin books, those beloved Finnish children's stories about soft philosophical creatures living through floods, comets, and the perpetual strangeness of existence with curiosity intact, and The Summer Book is the adult version of the same investigation. The Moomins and Grandmother share a worldview. Pay close attention, expect nothing comfortable, carry your stick.
Jansson lived for decades on a tiny island at the farthest edge of the Pellinge archipelago with her companion, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä, and they designed their cottage with four windows, one for each compass point, so they could see what was coming and have time to get used to it. This is also, more or less, the philosophy of the book.
What keeps The Summer Book from tipping into sentiment is a bone-deep structural indifference to consolation. Grandmother knows exactly what is coming for her, and her response is to hide the barometer under the bed at summer's end, label the storage tins in the attic in her own handwriting, and leave notes for hypothetical shipwreck survivors about the location of the coarse salt and the proper operation of the stovepipe. She is preparing for a departure she regards with the pragmatism of a woman who has outlasted most of her luggage.
❤️ 🇮🇱