"The Summer Book," by Tove Jansson (Session 1)

🏖️ Summer beach reading usually entails light, breezy, relaxing, absorbing, and, of course, summery material. This month's selection is just what the ocean ordered. You'll be whisked away to a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, and you'll meet a grandmother and her granddaughter as they pass the time during one particular summer.

Short, episodic chapters provide emotional resonance through a gentler narrative tone, while not shying away from deeper themes. Will you enjoy the seaside ruminations that this book has evoked in so many earlier readers?

If you seek out authors who have been recognized for masterful craftsmanship and posthumously never really slipped into obscurity, then Jansson might fit that bill for you. She has been internationally lauded with profuse praise for her varied work, so much so that Philip Pullman called her a "writer of genius."🏖️

Publishing Date: 1972
Number of Pages: 170 pages, NYRB Classics
Author Nationality: Finnish
Translation: from Swedish, by Thomas Teal

Remember, please pick only one of today's two sessions. Thank you! Your Zoom invitation will be emailed to you closer to the meeting date.

From Goodreads:

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.

Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.