The Summer Book

(by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal)

I’d been vaguely meaning to read this book since 2011 (!), when my then-boyfriend read it. More recently, Nina MacLaughlin’s mention of it in Summer Solstice (which I read this June) finally prompted me to get it from the library, and my interest was further piqued when someone at work said she re-reads this every year in July. It’s a series of vignettes about a kid named Sophia and her grandmother and their summertime activities on an island in the Gulf of Finland, and it’s such a delight. In her introduction to the edition I read, Kathryn Davis writes that “every event, every paragraph, every sentence, every word emerges clear and unembellished, north-lit, lucid.” Yeah – that. Early in the book we learn that Sophia’s mother is dead, and death keeps coming up in the book but mostly obliquely, in the form of bones found on the shore, a dead duck, an earthworm accidentally cut in half (though it doesn’t actually die), an argument about the existence (or not) of Hell, a conversation about superstitions. I love how precise Jansson’s writing feels, whether it’s about people or plants or animals. I love sentences like this: “”Gathering is peculiar, because you see nothing but what you’re looking for. If you’re picking raspberries, you see only what’s red, and if you’re looking for bones you see only the white.” Or this: “It was a small black dog, as fierce as it was frightened. Its whole body shook with mixed feelings.” And the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother is really great—I love they way they become partners in crime and the way they mostly just do what they want to do, despite others thinking they’re either “too old” or “too young” to do those things. I also love Jansson’s illustrations, especially this picture of a wild landscape from a lamplit window.