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jaeleslie at 11:21am on 17/04/2004
jaeleslie at 11:21am on 17/04/2004I have been reading aloud to Mr S from Tove Jansson's last book, The Summer Book. The chapters stand alone quite well as short stories, with a fine quirky humor and deep understanding of how humans are, but the book builds up as well into a quiet story of a family's summers on an island. We read one chapter happily with great attention, like eating a bonbon, then if there's time another.
Blurbists and reviewers who have not read too carefully seem to imply that it is the story of one particular summer, but it clearly takes place over a series of summers, while the daughter Sophia is a young child, and her grandmother is very old. The narrator's view is close to that of the grandmother, who is wise and cranky and not in good health, and at the same time to Sophia, who is very young and sometimes fearful and just discovering the ways of her people. Sophia's father is a widower. He is observed to have his occupations and obsessions, somewhat like a Hemulen. They seem to live there most of the time except for the deep of winter, but the weather they have in Finland and the late spring sounds a lot like what we have here.
Reading it is like learning a family mythology of how We have always done things, on this our particular island, described in close detail, in an historical golden age -- except this was a golden age where difficulties naturally arose and unnecessary new roads and buildings were built and cats were intractable. In other words, it is a realistic novel.
But it is not so far from the children's fantasies Jansson wrote. They have a strain of the idealised Moominfamily in them. Sleeping in a tent makes an entire adventure, and it's really rather an interesting one. Odd characters turn up, like Snufkin with his harmonica, and relatives sweep through like a horde of Hattifattiners and are gone. Things return to normal.
It is a familiar kind of normal to us. Maybe it is the strain of something Scandinavian. Mr S whose grandparents were from Norway says, oh, Finns are different, and just to annoy him I say Finns are as different from Swedes as Norskes are. He thinks I should write stories like these.
Blurbists and reviewers who have not read too carefully seem to imply that it is the story of one particular summer, but it clearly takes place over a series of summers, while the daughter Sophia is a young child, and her grandmother is very old. The narrator's view is close to that of the grandmother, who is wise and cranky and not in good health, and at the same time to Sophia, who is very young and sometimes fearful and just discovering the ways of her people. Sophia's father is a widower. He is observed to have his occupations and obsessions, somewhat like a Hemulen. They seem to live there most of the time except for the deep of winter, but the weather they have in Finland and the late spring sounds a lot like what we have here.
Reading it is like learning a family mythology of how We have always done things, on this our particular island, described in close detail, in an historical golden age -- except this was a golden age where difficulties naturally arose and unnecessary new roads and buildings were built and cats were intractable. In other words, it is a realistic novel.
But it is not so far from the children's fantasies Jansson wrote. They have a strain of the idealised Moominfamily in them. Sleeping in a tent makes an entire adventure, and it's really rather an interesting one. Odd characters turn up, like Snufkin with his harmonica, and relatives sweep through like a horde of Hattifattiners and are gone. Things return to normal.
It is a familiar kind of normal to us. Maybe it is the strain of something Scandinavian. Mr S whose grandparents were from Norway says, oh, Finns are different, and just to annoy him I say Finns are as different from Swedes as Norskes are. He thinks I should write stories like these.