A Backward Glance at Summer
The Summer Book
by Tove Jansson
(New York Review of Books, 2008)
True to my contrarian nature, I read The Summer Book during the first week of autumn. I had the best intentions of making this my summer book when I spotted it on an NPR book page way back in June (I think), but I waited till the NYRB summer sale to pick it up and well, the season slipped away on me.
It wasn't the title that made me buy this book, it was its Finland setting. One August over twenty years ago, I was in Leningrad and stood on an ugly slab of cement perched over the Gulf of Finland. As I stared out over that gulf and tried to imagine what it would look like in winter, I also wondered about the land that gave that gulf its name. I'd met a few Finns that summer --they seemed to like to come to Leningrad for weekend drinking fests -- and that and the gulf was enough to make me want to visit. Life has a way of giving you what you want in unexpected ways. While there's still a slim chance I will see Finland for myself one day, if I don't, it's okay. The Summer Book has taken me there for a remarkable 170-page visit.
Are the best books the simplest one? Lately those seem the books that are striking all the right chords with me. The Summer Book is not filled with any obvious mysteries or dramas, and there are only three characters that matter -- a six-year old girl named Sophia, her grandmother, and the tiny island in the Gulf of Finland where they summer; Sophia's father is but a hard-working shadow with only a story about his near-mythic bathrobe to coax him out of the plot for a bit. I fear that if this book had been taken in hand by a publicist it would've been marketed as a collection of stories (shudder -- see my blogpost on that subject here). Yes, each chapter could be slipped from the novel and read alone, but the book's gossamer thread of theme -- life unwinding itself towards death -- would have been severed.
One tiny sentence brings Sophia and her path on that thread into focus: "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." Rather than writing off her amazing mix of fear and bravado, rage and compassion, as the vagaries of a six-year old, we must look at her through the prism of this one simple, perfectly wrought sentence.
Then we meet her grandmother in a moment typical of this entire novel, a moment that dances on the edge of humor and sadness:
"Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rain forest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.
'What are you doing?' asked little Sophia.
'Nothing,' her grandmother answered. 'That is to say,' she added angrily, 'I'm looking for my false teeth.'
The child came down from the veranda. 'Where did you lose them?' she asked.
'Here,' said her grandmother. 'I was standing right there and they fell somewhere in the peonies.' They looked together.
The love story between these two women and their island has all the hope, humor, despair, loss and light that anyone could ever hope to find in a novel. Find this book. Read it. And love it because it deserves all the love we can give.