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! And we know, if the child does not, that the summers of her grandmother are limit; she has already passed into the autumn of her life and winter is nipping at her heels. But what a blessed thing this time is for them both, for Grandmother has a chance to see the wonder that her life has been and Sophia is building memories that will someday stand in for this person she must surely lose. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness. Rayner, Richard (27 April 2008). "Dreams of an endless summer". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 28 May 2010 . Retrieved 6 September 2012.

As I read this book, it is the dead of winter here in Calgary. It was lovely to imagine being on an island where the sun is shining (except for when it stormed). The Summer Book (in the original Swedish, Sommarboken) is a novel written by the Finnish author Tove Jansson in 1972. The book covers several summers (and a few chapters are actually set outside that season), but there's barely a sense of chronology here, the summers melding into an indistinct and always similar time. 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 Jansson transports us to this island and helps us to see it through the loving eyes of a person who has known it forever and the wondering eyes of a person who is just discovering all its hidden treasures. I kept thinking of another work of this type, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories, in which the natural environment is almost a character itself. The Summer Book gave me that same immersed feeling.An elderly woman and her six-year-old granddaughter Sophia spend a summer together on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland exploring, talking about life, nature, everything but their feelings about Sophia's mother's death and their love for one another. [1] Reception [ edit ]

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. Sophia has “no understanding for people who have these very harsh opinions about who they choose to live with”. This echoes the sentiment of The Summer Book’s grandmother, who, after an argument with her grandchild about the existence of the devil, firmly tells her young relative: “You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.” From the preceding rambly preamble, you may well have already realised a couple of paragraphs ago that I don't have a great deal to say about this bookWindsor, Antonia (12 August 2011). "Summer readings: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson". The Guardian . Retrieved 5 January 2018.

Jansson's variety of episodes, ranging from those where little of note seems to happen to the modestly dramatic (including one of the great storms in recent memory, which Sophia thinks she caused -- only to have her grandmother take that burden from her), are at best loosely connected, yet this mosaic approach makes for a very rich picture. The Summer Book is pure loveliness. The movements of tides and winds and boats and insects loom larger for our narrator than the currents of history, and the profound quiet of the setting—I'm reminded of Akhil Sharma's description of a prose like "white light"—allows us to hear Jansson's unsparing and ironic tenderness, a tone that remains purely her own, even in translation. Oh, you mean he's dead,’ said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time. Signe Hammarsten-Jansson – Jansson's mother and the real-life model for the character of Sophia's grandmother. [7]Die Idylle ist in diesen Episoden so flüchtig wie die kurze Zeit im Frühsommer, in der das Moos blüht und die ganze Insel mit einem warmen, kaum sichtbaren Schleier überzieht. Der Rest ist Nüchternheit, Sturm, prekäres Gleichgewicht." - Monika Osberghaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung The novelist Ali Smith, reviewing the book in The Guardian, wrote that Jansson was better known for her Moomin books than for her novels, and that with her worldwide fame, she knew the virtues of withdrawal. In Smith's view, The Summer Book is an astonishing achievement of artistry, "the writing so lightly kept, so simple-seeming, so closely concerned with the weighing of moments that any extra weight of exegesis is too much." [2] Telling the tale of the child and her grandmother in the simplest language, Smith writes, "The threat of brevity, even on this timeless island in this timeless, gorgeous summer, is very marked. But 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." [2] Smith praises Thomas Teal's English translation as "original and stunning". [2]

I could read this story forever. I could easily make it an annual tradition to read it every summer. Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again. Or else they forgot their idea along the way and didn’t even realize that they had forgotten”. 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 ] Geoffrey is the author of the middle-school aged adventure-mystery series, The Three Hares, and the near-future, speculative fiction novel, The Slummer.

Customer reviews

I love wild settings, and I adore wild characters, and Grandmother's as wild as they make 'em. She's a queen, a crone, a woman who has outlived her husband and her son's wife and has “reached the age where a person can safely be truthful” about certain things. (And she says them). Poetic understatement, dry humor and a deep love for nature are obvious throughout her oeuvre. . . . The book is as lovely, as evocative as a film by Hayao Miyazaki. Jansson's clear prose — capable of sentiment without being sentimental — contains multitudes. The Summer Book is bright but dense; it is slim enough to read in a day but holds a whole world between its covers.