A lonely rock in the sea
Aug. 23rd, 2016 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileA book club I am theoretically still in read Tove Janssen's The Summer Book, and my library copy got in the day after the book club met. Great timing, library. Anyway, I was curious about it, and it was short, so I read it.
Tove Janssen is best known for her books about the Moomins, a family of adorable little troll creatures. I was big on the Moomins when I was little. I still adore them; I bought a copy of Finn Family Moomintroll in Swedish when I was in Stockholm, which meant that at one point I had three copies of Finn Family Moomintroll.
The Summer Book is all about humans but there's a distinct similarity of style, and hints of the same sense of humor, although The Summer Book is overall much less whimsical. Janssen apparently wrote it in a period of deep grief over the death of her mother, although this is not explicitly covered at any point in the book.
The main character is a little girl called Sophia, and the other main character is her grandmother, who lives on a tiny remote island way out in the Gulf of Finland, where Sophia and her father spend their summers. The book is structured like a bunch of unrelated vignettes, so while I'm fairly certain all the stories are supposed to take place in the same summer, it's not 100% clear that that's really the case.
The book overall does not have a plot, and some of the vignettes sort of do and some of them sort of don't. I'm not usually huge on litfic that has no plot, but these are just charming and melancholy enough to pull it off. They are often sort of wild and sad and mundane all at the same time, and they illustrate a lot about being very young and about being very old, with everyone in the middle sort of off in the distance being distracted by doing things, which is probably about right. There is a blink-and-you-miss it reference to the fact that Sophia and her father are here at her grandmother's house this summer because her mother recently died, which lends some extra weight to some of the volatile conversations Sophia has with her grandmother about God and angels and other sorts of Big Questions that Sophia is too young to understand and the grandmother is too old to pretend to.
Sophia is very much a young child in all the most awkward and embarrassing and real ways that you forget about when you grow up unless any of it turns into stories that your family torments you with for years, but reading this book brings some of it back. (I'm specifically thinking of The Phase Where You Can't Handle Small Animal Death, which I used to think was just me, but apparently if it's not everybody it's at least not just me.) It's pretty annoying to read, but that is not a criticism. I haven't been old yet so I can't be embarrassed by the grandmother; I think she's pretty awesome, actually.
The book is very short, only 150 pages, and while I'm sure there are many things to be said about it, I sort of feel like if I try to say too many of them it will ruin it. It's a very quiet, subtle sort of book and I do not tend to have quiet or subtle opinions/analyses.
Tove Janssen is best known for her books about the Moomins, a family of adorable little troll creatures. I was big on the Moomins when I was little. I still adore them; I bought a copy of Finn Family Moomintroll in Swedish when I was in Stockholm, which meant that at one point I had three copies of Finn Family Moomintroll.
The Summer Book is all about humans but there's a distinct similarity of style, and hints of the same sense of humor, although The Summer Book is overall much less whimsical. Janssen apparently wrote it in a period of deep grief over the death of her mother, although this is not explicitly covered at any point in the book.
The main character is a little girl called Sophia, and the other main character is her grandmother, who lives on a tiny remote island way out in the Gulf of Finland, where Sophia and her father spend their summers. The book is structured like a bunch of unrelated vignettes, so while I'm fairly certain all the stories are supposed to take place in the same summer, it's not 100% clear that that's really the case.
The book overall does not have a plot, and some of the vignettes sort of do and some of them sort of don't. I'm not usually huge on litfic that has no plot, but these are just charming and melancholy enough to pull it off. They are often sort of wild and sad and mundane all at the same time, and they illustrate a lot about being very young and about being very old, with everyone in the middle sort of off in the distance being distracted by doing things, which is probably about right. There is a blink-and-you-miss it reference to the fact that Sophia and her father are here at her grandmother's house this summer because her mother recently died, which lends some extra weight to some of the volatile conversations Sophia has with her grandmother about God and angels and other sorts of Big Questions that Sophia is too young to understand and the grandmother is too old to pretend to.
Sophia is very much a young child in all the most awkward and embarrassing and real ways that you forget about when you grow up unless any of it turns into stories that your family torments you with for years, but reading this book brings some of it back. (I'm specifically thinking of The Phase Where You Can't Handle Small Animal Death, which I used to think was just me, but apparently if it's not everybody it's at least not just me.) It's pretty annoying to read, but that is not a criticism. I haven't been old yet so I can't be embarrassed by the grandmother; I think she's pretty awesome, actually.
The book is very short, only 150 pages, and while I'm sure there are many things to be said about it, I sort of feel like if I try to say too many of them it will ruin it. It's a very quiet, subtle sort of book and I do not tend to have quiet or subtle opinions/analyses.