This is another book that I found by way of a read-along organized by Henry Eliot.

It's by Tove Jansson (1914-2001); it was first published in 1972; and I read Thomas Teal's translation from the Swedish (which came out in 1974).

Jansson is chiefly famous for creating the Moomins. I'm probably the only person in the world who's never heard of the Moomins, but their round cuteness and adorable expressions definitely make them worth exploring at some future date. Moomin's Day, incidentally, is celebrated on 9 August, Jansson's birthday. This year it was a particularly significant occasion, marking the 80th anniversary of their first appearance in a book called The Moomins and the Great Flood (published on 9 August 1945).


A self-portrait by Tove Jansson

Jansson is an interesting person. She was born in Helsinki at a time when Finland was still part of the Russian Empire. Her family were part of the country's Swedish-speaking community, and although they lived in the Finnish capital, they spent their summers on various islands in the Gulf of Finland.

On learning this, you immediately want to know which island, and what it was like... According to Ailsa Sheldon, the first was Pellinki, in the Porvoo archipelago about an hour east of Helsinki, where they rented accommodation from an island family: "From the woods you can see the small island of Bredskar, where the Jansson family built a house in 1947. Craving further solitude, Tove built a cabin on the even tinier island of Klovharun in 1964, where she spent 28 summers with her life partner, graphic artist Tuulikki Pietila. The couple lived a very simple life here, with the island, each other, and their vast imaginations for company. The landscapes of Pellinki, Bredskar and Klovharun are easily recognisable throughout Tove’s work in all mediums. The sea and the weather play a central role: storms rage, belongings are lost and found in the sea, and life is lived with respect for the elements."

This is worth unpacking a little further... Susannah Clapp points out that Jansson was already in her fifties when the love affair with Klovharun started. It's tiny -- about 6,000 square metres -- and it's isolated: "'[It's] a rock in the middle of nowhere', according to Jansson’s niece, Sophia. It has scarcely any foliage, no running water and no electricity. Yet for Jansson, it was an oasis." She and Pietila would head out there in April, as soon as the ice broke, and would leave in October. It was a rough life. Chopping wood, building fires, rowing boats, preparing fish -- all in a day's work...


Swimming near the house on the island of Klovharun

Now, this is all very relevant -- I'm not just off on an islander's tangent -- because The Summer Book is itself set on a small island. Indeed, as Barbara Tesio-Ryan points out, the island is not just a backdrop, but an important character in its own right.

Jansson's mother, artist Signe Hammarsten Jansson, nicknamed Ham, died in 1970, and this story was part of her daughter's response to that loss. The parallels are not direct. Ham becomes the inspiration for the character of Grandmother. Sophia, the six-year-old granddaughter, is partly based on Jansson's young niece (but partly also on her own childhood and her own imagination). There's also Father (reportedly based on Jansson's brother Lars), but he's mostly a silent presence.


Ham, Jansson's mother, designed more than 200 Finnish postage stamps...

In the book, the person the family is grieving is Sophia's mother. Their sorrow is palpable, but it's not talked about overtly. Rather, it becomes a part of a much larger canvas. It's as though Jansson is reminding us that we can't outrun death, but we have to see it in the context of an amazing world full of opportunities for connection.

The result is an utterly beautiful book, understated but very powerful.

Some themes:

1. Death

As we've noted... "When are you going to die?" Sophia asks her grandma. On page 2... Quite early on, too, we're told, starkly: "Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead."

The huge loss is reflected in a number of incidents. Sophie finds the skull of an animal, for example, which she and Grandmother put in the "magic forest". But the child is suddenly afraid, and Grandmother unobtrusively moves their play site elsewhere; there's the dead "scolder" (a type of duck), about which Grandmother invents a succession of comforting stories.

And, of course, there's their reconstruction of Venice in the marsh pool. Sophia wants to play mother and daughter: "Call me 'Dear Child' and I'll call you 'Mama'," she orders. This worries Grandmother. She makes a Doge's Palace out of balsa wood, and explains: "In this palace..., there lives a mother and a father and their daughter." But then there's a storm, and Venice takes a battering from which the palace is not exempt: "'It's sunk,' Sophia screamed. 'She's gone!'... Venice had disappeared beneath the sea." Grandmother promises to find the palace. Which is, of course, impossible... Instead, she makes another one, which she doctors to look like the original. Sophia pronounces herself convinced.

At the end, a poignant scene marks summer's close. The family gets ready for departure. Grandmother gets up in the middle of the night, and sits down outside, waiting for her balance to return. She hears what she thinks is the thrub-thrub-thrub of a herring boat, but it's the sound of her heart... "For a long time she wondered if she should go back to bed or stay where she was. She guessed she would stay for a while." That's the end of the book. Ambivalent, but profoundly moving, however you interpret it.


Tove Jansson also did the book's line illustrations, which are simple and effective

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2. Ageing

The Summer Book is brilliant on this topic. There are so many moving little episodes. Here's Grandmother: "I got to thinking about sad things... I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away... And things that were a lot of fun don't mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? ... I've been doing everything for an awfully long time, and I've seen and lived as hard as I could, and it's been unbelievable, I tell you, unbelievable. But now I have the feeling everything's gliding away from me, and I don't remember, and I don't care, and yet now is right when I need it!"

Specifically, she can't remember what it was like to sleep in a tent... So, Sophia tries sleeping in a tent, and reminds her of various aspects of the experience. "When she had gone, Grandmother rolled up in her blanket and tried to remember what it had been like. She could remember better now, much better, in fact. New images came back to her, more and more of them. It was cold in the first light, but she fell sound asleep in her own warmth."

Verner visits. He's 75, and he hates that people worry about him all the time: "They do have a certain responsibility for you, after all," he acknowledges. "And when you get right down to it, you are mostly just in the way." Grandmother hopes he will prove able to outwit these "nasty relatives". She explains to Sophia: "They tell him what to do without asking him what he wants, and so there's nothing at all he really does want." Sophia assures her that would never happen with them...

August comes, with changeable weather, "but for Grandmother, no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything is vanity and a chasing after the wind".


Labuan, 2024. A very different island from the one in The Summer Book, but it gave us a real sense of freedom and relaxation. Islands are special...

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3. The relationship between Sophia and her Grandmother

Again, this is beautifully depicted, in a very unsentimental, down-to-earth way. For Tesio-Ryan, "it's one of the most truthful descriptions of inter-generational relationships ever written."

Sometimes we see the alliance of grandmother and grandchild against the strictures of the middle generation, the father. But sometimes Sophia and Grandmother squabble, and get on each other's nerves.

Grandmother doesn't soft-soap anything... She's brutally honest, and tolerates no nonsense. And yet she's very perceptive, very protective. So she often makes up stories, designed to ease Sophia's way past sad circumstances. She's unconventional, and she shocks Sophia by refusing to believe in hell, and singing a song with the word "shit" in it. But she's solid as a rock.


The magic forest... "Grandmother sat in the magic forest and carved outlandish animals"

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4. Nature

Jansson is not in your face about it, but you clearly understand her love of the natural world. She teaches us so much: About the fragility of moss; the persistence of bogs ("early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist"); the anticipatory significance of long-tailed ducks; the transience of sand; the resilience of grass roots; the admonitory role of the dancing midges when the moon is full ("you have to be careful about tempting fate").

You learn about Midsummer bonfires (it's a disgrace if they won't burn). You learn about salvage operations when a ship has gone down. And you learn about August, and the turning of the seasons: "Every year, the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone's noticing... It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive."

You feel their pain when a "forest-eating monster" makes a road on the island (but, as is always our problem, Sophia concedes: "It'll be a lot of fun to ride instead of walk"). You feel how things are changing when a businessman builds a house on Blustergull Rock: "Now the view was no longer clear. It was broken by a big square house, a new and threatening landmark, a deep notch in the aspect of a horizon that had been their own for a very long time." Grandmother is very conscious of what it symbolizes: "As [she] rowed home, she gazed at the big house interrupting the horizon, and it seemed to her it looked like a channel marker. If you squinted and thought about something else, it might almost be a channel marker -- an objective indicator that here was a change of course."



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5. Humour and pathos

There's also so much that's fun in this book, however. Little, low-key incidents that are just so engagingly human. There's Berenice, the visiting kid who really doesn't like islands or the outdoors or really anything (quotable quote: "An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place"). There's the wild cat who won't take any notice of Sophia, and the tame cat who bores her. There's the "enormous plastic sausage" that Father employs in his (probably misguided) attempts to water his flower garden.

I come from an island myself (a much bigger one, of course). There the "visitors" were always a breed apart, welcome but also a tad nuisancy. So it is with our family on their island, who feel themselves distinctly apart from the "summer people".

There are also a few almost mystical moments. The chapter about Father's bathrobe probably comes into that category. As Tess Maginess explains: "The robe changes meaning, becoming at times menacing, a signifier of the collective unhappiness and sense of emptiness... At the end, there is a kind of mystery, something crawls out of the robe, unseen and disappears under the door. There is a parable-like feeling here, as if an evil spirit had just been exorcised."



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All in all, this was a gem. The group that I read it with all seemed to fall under its spell, especially those who had known their own grandparents closely, or were grandparents themselves.

I came away feeling sad for the natural turning of things (we all die; everything changes, often not for the better), and conscious that the fragility of a small island mirrors the fragility of our bodies -- but also primed to salute our resilience, and the sheer weight of the beauty out there, and the miracle that is our days. And all these feelings are elicited without mawkishness or false romanticism in just 170 small pages.

A truly beautiful read.