About a year ago, a friend recommended to me Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel The Summer Book, saying it was the most perfect piece of writing he’d ever experienced. So of course I bought it right away—but have just now gotten around to reading it. Yes, it’s extraordinary—and unlike any other fiction I’ve read.
It’s not really a novel in the usual sense. It’s a serious of vignettes, from two to twelve pages each. What connects the vignettes are the two main characters: six-year-old Sophia and her unnamed grandmother, spending the summer on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland. (Jansson—who died in 2001—was Finnish, and her family did sometimes summer on just such an island.)
Nothing much happens in The Summer Book, in the sense that we expect from fiction. Grandmother and Sophia explore the island: Grandmother hobbling along with her walking stick, Sophia usually asking questions. Together, for instance, they tidy the island, “down to the smallest twig,” being careful not to walk on “the carpet of moss.” In another vignette, Sophia asks Grandmother what heaven looks like, “and Grandmother said it might be like the pasture they were just then walking by.” Another time they pretend they’re in Venice, making palaces out of balsa wood, but hard rains come and the palaces sink into the sea; since Sophia is devastated, while she’s napping Grandmother creates a new balsa wood palace. And so on.
But I want to give you a sense of one whole vignette: its tone, its rhythm, its events. I’ll use the five-and-a-half-page episode called “The Scolder.” Scolders, we soon learn, are “long-tailed ducks. They are called scolders, because their cry is a steady, chiding chatter, farther and farther away.” The season is early spring, and “for Grandmother, long-tailed ducks meant anticipation and renewal.”
Grandmother wakens Sophia, and they walk along together. “On the east side of the island, there were small borders of ice around the rocks. No one had had time to gather driftwood yet, and the whole shore was a tangle, a broad bulging mass of tumbled planks and seaweed and reeds…. Small pieces of bark and the splinters of old storms rocked in the water beyond the rim of ice…. The long-tailed ducks kept up their steady call, distant and melodious. ‘They’re breeding,’ Sophia said.”
Then they see a scolder lying “out on a flat rock in the water. It was wet and dead and looked like a wrung-out plastic bag.” Sophia cries out ‘But it’s spring! They don’t die now; they’re brand new and just married—that’s what you said!’ ’Well,’ Grandmother said, ‘it did die now, all the same.’ ‘How did it die?’ Sophia yelled. She was very angry. ‘Of unrequited love,’ her grandmother explained. ‘He sang and scolded all night for his scolder hen and then along came another and stole her away, so he put his head under the water and floated away.’ ‘That’s not true,’ Sophia screamed. She started to cry. ‘Long-tails can’t drown. Tell it right!’”
So Grandmother revises her story, telling Sophia that the scolder “had simply hit his head on a rock.” “’That’s better,’ Sophia said. ‘Shall we bury him?’ ‘It’s not necessary,’ Grandmother said. ‘The tide will come in and he’ll bury himself. Seabirds are supposed to be buried at sea, like sailors.’ They walked on and talked about burial at sea, and the long-tails sang in dyads and triads, farther and farther away.”
Then Grandmother wants to rest. “She stretched out full length on a bed or whitened reeds and looked at the sky. Sophia lay down beside her.… ‘What’ll we do now?’ Sophia said. Grandmother suggested that Sophia walk around the point and see what had drifted ashore. ‘Are you sure you won’t be bored?’ Sophia asked. ‘Absolutely sure,’ Grandmother said. She turned on her side and put her arm over her head.”
In this position, Grandmother sees “a blade of grass in the sand beside her, and between its sawtoothed leaves it held a piece of seabird down. She carefully observed the construction of this piece of down—the taut white rib in the middle, surrounded by the down itself, which was pale brown and lighter than air…. She wondered if the down had caught on the grass now, in the spring, maybe during the night, or if it had been there all winter.” She continues musing on this, then notices “a piece of bark” next to the blade of grass, the bark “beautiful and dramatic.”’
“Sophia came back, running. ‘I found a floor grate!’ she hollered. ‘It’s big; it’s from a ship! It’s as long as a boat!’ ‘You don’t say!’ her grandmother said. It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. ‘I saw a feather,’ she said. ‘A piece of scolder down.’ ‘What scolder?’ Sophia said, for she had forgotten the bird that died of love.”
And that’s how the vignette ends. I’ve quoted about a third of it: enough, I hope, to give you a feel for Tove Jansson’s prose: it’s minutely detailed descriptions of life and objects on and around the island; and the conversations she invents between Sophia and her grandmother.
They’re ordinary conversations—in ordinary life. But they make you feel that there’s something extraordinarily precious about ordinary life. This is The Summer Book’s gift.
Close Reading is now available on Substack, where you can sign up to receive all posts directly to your inbox. To learn more, click here.
Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.
