The Slummer: Quarters Till Death

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Benjamin Brandt is a hero I need right now and will be someone I'll think of often during my long runs. I think I'll go for a long run! Signe Hammarsten-Jansson – Jansson's mother and the real-life model for the character of Sophia's grandmother. [7] There's a father in the story, though he never bores us with anything he has to say, and a sexy, loner neighbor named Eriksson who I hoped to God looked like this: Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story. Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth. As Philip Pullman so succinctly puts it, Tove Jansson was a genius." - Ali Smith, The Guardian

A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge”.

Windsor, Antonia (12 August 2011). "Summer readings: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 January 2018. It was perfect, actually, as this is a story about wildness, both the wildness of living on a small island in the Gulf of Finland and the wildness of living with fewer social conventions and conveniences. Tove Jansson, the world-renowned creator of the Moomintroll characters, succinctly harnesses the power and glory of a seaside summer season in the twenty-two elegant vignettes contained within The Summer Book. Here is a book in no need of magic or any other fantastical adornments as she reminds us that we can discover pure, beautiful magic in the natural world all around us if only we quiet our lives and open our eyes to it. Set upon a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland much like where Jansson’s own family spent their summers, Summer Book chronicles the interactions and adventures between a young girl, Sophia, and her grandmother as they embrace the world and all the facts of life that surround them. Tender and subtle, yet laced with poignant investigations of life, love and death, Jansson’s words caress the soul like a warm breeze carrying with it the effluvium of the sea and all its majesty. This book consists of 22 vignettes of moments between Grandmother and Sophia and their time on the island. All took place in summer, but not necessarily the same summer. You can tell that the author has a respect for nature and our planet. Grandmother, through her conversations with Sophia, is trying to install her love of their natural surroundings into her. We learn early on that Sophia’s mother has recently died. There is never an outright discussion of this, but at moments, you can sense this in Sophia’s actions. The author has a beautiful, understated style to her writing. The Publisher Says: 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.

I loved it and it's a perfect read for a summer which will, I think, be memorable for many of us as a kind of shadow season, a time carved out from normal life and defined by the absence of normality.An island is one of the few places on earth where it is possible to create your own world, and Jansson manages to build a small universe where old and young, danger and beauty, real life and imagination coexist in perfect balance, feeding on each other’s experiences, making everything new yet cosily familiar at the same time to the astonished reader.

The New York Review of Books writes that Jansson's characters, the girl and her grandmother, "discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love." [4] Nobody cared to get data to support their claims. It was the lies that everybody wanted to believe in. The lies were more palatable." Underlying all of this, and making the book cohere, is the subject, not of the microscopic world of the island or the ever-changing mood of the northern summer, but of death -- death awaited, death endured, death raged against and not understood." - Richard Rayner, The Los Angeles Times The story really dives into some deep social issues. I wasn't surprised at some of the hate, but I was really happy to see some compassion throughout the story. Lots of tears of sadness and joy all around.

Author Biography

Lucy Knight, celebrating the book's 50th anniversary in The Guardian, quotes the novelist Ali Smith's description of The Summer Book, "a masterpiece of microcosm, a perfection of the small, quiet read". [5] Knight adds that Sophia Jansson – Tove's niece and the real-life model for the character of the granddaughter Sophia, [6] [7] thinks that Tove was "poking fun" at what people consider normal. In her view, the island allowed the Janssons, like the book's characters, to shape their own sort of "normality". Tolerance and care for nature were essential virtues. [5] Adaptations [ edit ] This is, in short, what Tove Jansson portrays in The Summer Book, a summer that is not Mediterranean, and a book that is not only for children but rather for those of all ages who still see the world as a place full of potential wonder and adventure. Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was born in Helsinki into Finland‘s Swedish speaking minority. Her father was a sculptor and her mother a graphic designer and illustrator. Winters were spent in the family’s art-filled studio and summers in the fisherman’s cottage on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, a setting that would later figure in Jansson’s writing for adults and children. Jansson loved books as a child, and set out from an early age to be an artist; her first illustration was published when she was fifteen years old; four years later a picture book appeared under a pseudonym”. It’s clear to me that this novel between a grandmother and a granddaughter….was very personal to Tove Jansson. Passing on the baton to our children seems like an obvious idea, but Jansson’s depiction of the magic bond that can be developed between the elderly and children is nothing short of a miracle, a gem to be treasured, nurtured and understood as one of those important things that give meaning and purpose to life.