The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
I'm finally back from my epic adventures with Mom and Sis. Thanks for sticking with Book Beginnings while I was gone. Although I see that there were fewer people around. I think lots of folks are on vacation in August. If you went somewhere fun, drop me a comment and tell me about your trip.
And thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night.
-- from The Summer Book by Tove Jansson.
Tove Jansson was born in 1914 in Finland to Swedish parents. She is best known for her Moomintroll character and related Moomin comic strip and books. But she also wrote a handful of books for adults, including The Summer Book, which I have in a pretty NYRB Classics edition. I wanted to read it in the summer to get the full experience. It is a beautiful, charming novel about a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter spending a summer month on a small island in the Bay of Finland.
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events – the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.
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.
