If you arrived at this post hoping to read a relatively objective review of The Summer Book, I am afraid you will be disappointed (please do see the postscript below, though, if that is what you are after!). Throughout the drafting, this has become more of a reflection on reading and life – specifically, my life.
I have studied literature, but I found when I came to writing this that I didn’t want to approach The Summer Book like a text I was studying – it means more to me than to allow that. In a way, its themes – and, specifically, its importance to me – transcend the literary. I really do believe this, just as much as I believe that statement doesn’t necessarily make sense.
I started writing this at the height of summer. My initial hand-scribbled notes ran to 967 words. This final post is closer to four thousand (an earlier draft was much longer, believe it or not). Despite this being about The Summer Book, something feels right about sharing this on the first day of September. Life prevented me completing it any sooner, but now it is complete I wonder why I thought I would share it on any other day. Perhaps it is the fact that I can feel that familiar feeling of itchiness, of fizziness, as we head towards autumn. A restlessness, and a need to disappear. Somehow, The Summer Book – all of Jansson’s writing – reflects this to some extent, the paradoxical relationship between a secure home and the need to be untethered. I am sure some of this will come through in the post that follows, and I find myself wondering what it would have been like to write this at any other time of year.
Here is what The Summer Book means to me.
On the seventh day of July, accidentally but poetically at the seventh minute after the seventh hour, I walked to the bookcase and took my copy of The Summer Book from the shelf. I didn’t want to start reading it yet, I just wanted to hold it. To re-experience it on my terms first.
I ignored Esther Freud’s foreword and looked at the black and white reproductions of the photographs. One of them, tucked just inside the cover, is a picture of Signe Hammarsten and Sophia Jansson, Jansson’s mother and Jansson’s niece. Since I last read The Summer Book in full, I have read parts of Tove Jansson: Life, Arts, Words by Boel Westin, re-reading from the start each time life demanded I prioritise something else in the scraps of time I have available, and getting a little further into the book each time. I let the sheer force and determination of Jansson’s personality wash over me, seasoning me like sea salt in the way that the best books and stories do; leaving you a slightly different person than you were before you began.
It was interesting looking at the photograph of Signe, a grandmother, and comparing it to the photograph of her much younger self alongside Viktor Jansson, Jansson’s father, in their studio after plaster-casting. A life distilled into reproduced photographs, one much grainier than the other, captured forever in black and white. But, of course, there is much to learn about Signe (or Ham, as she was known) from The Summer Book, Jansson’s reflection on – amongst many other things – both youth and age. When Grandmother tries to remember what it was like to sleep in a tent, and gets frustrated because she can’t remember, one reason why it is so important to her is because she was one of the first people to make it possible for girls to sleep outside in tents. Likewise, Ham had, with two friends and colleagues, played an important and acknowledged role in girl guiding in Sweden, a precursor to the Swedish Girl Guide movement.
Tove Jansson: Life, Arts, Words is possibly the only biography I will ever actively seek out. I also have a copy of Letters from Tove that I really wanted (I remember listening to the BBC Radio excerpts when it was released) that a dear friend bought for me, one of those special friends whom you love even if you don’t see them for years. No matter how much time has passed, you pick up where you left off.
I refuse to read Letters from Tove until after I have finished the biography, eking them both out as much as I can, simply because then I will have finished them and the journey to knowing will have begun. One of the delights of reading a book for the first time is not knowing, the excitement of starting out on a journey with the promise of being thrilled. That first flush of reading as an experience, when you know you have so much more to absorb. Of being further seasoned.
Every time I read The Summer Book, I realise how much of the experience is tied to me growing and learning. It’s a funny experience, at this point in my life, as I nearly start to tip the scales to being closer to Grandmother’s age than to Sophia’s age. I find myself – not always consciously – reflecting back on who I was last time I picked up the book, and the various versions of me who have read the book over the last twenty or so years. Alex mentioned to me back in June that he would be sharing his thoughts on the book for Matthew Long’s Beyond the Bookshelf. I deliberately did not read his final post until after I had finished my first draft, in the same way I deliberately didn’t read Freud’s foreword.
I flicked through the book to find the beginning of the first chapter and, as I did so, it fell open on a page inside which was tucked a boarding pass. I like to leave makeshift bookmarks in books once I have read them, those scraps of whatever was to hand when I read it previously. I also like to press flowers inside books, for practical purposes as much as romantic ones. When I was presented with a handful of flowers gathered by my girls on our recent holiday, I tucked them into the back of the book I had to hand. In this way, a generous handful of my books are much more than just their printed words and images, physically as well as metaphorically. Depending on which book you pull out from one of my bookshelves, you might be greeted by a train ticket, a receipt, or a beer mat. There may be flowers, there may be a brief scrap of notepaper with something scribbled on it. In one book, there is a photograph of the twelve-week ultrasound scan from my eldest daughter.
Inscriptions are also another important part of books and book-giving for me. Nearly all presents I give to family and friends are books, and they are all inscribed (the only exceptions being if they are sealed in a way that opening them might risk spoiling the gift). I love receiving a book with an inscription. In a recent second-hand copy of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop I received, I was delighted to find a bi-lingual inscription dated thirteen years previous to a former owner (“my darling Dawny”). In another book I picked up at a charity shop, there is an inscription from an adult grandchild to their grandmother, reflecting on their summer holiday visits as a child. In a box in a cupboard, I have a copy of a book an ex-boyfriend bought me – an earlier hardback edition of one of my favourite books as a child, Finn Family Moomintroll, also by Jansson – that he had annotated throughout. Somewhere on my bookshelves is a book given to me by someone else with its own lengthy inscription, taking up nearly the entire title page. I haven’t read the inscription for over ten years, but I seem to remember it reflecting upon opportunities missed and things that might have been. I’m sure my children will find it in years to come and ask questions. My answers will be much briefer and simpler than the inscription.
My own copy of The Summer Book has an inscription from the same friend that would buy me my copy of Letters from Tove many years later. I don’t think it was my first copy of The Summer Book, I think I bought it for myself a scant handful of years earlier, but this one is the important copy, with life and layers added to it. I never get disappointed by being gifted a book I already have, being as it is an example of someone buying me the perfect present, of knowing me well. It is a compliment of the highest order, of being seen and understood. In any case, this enabled me to give away my earlier copy of The Summer Book to Alex. He has read it every year.
The boarding pass that was tucked inside The Summer Book was from 2018 and wasn’t mine. It belonged to my husband, one of his middle names spelt wrong, matching his passport. Amusingly, when we got married in 2016 and presented our birth certificates as one does, Euan discovered that for years he had been told one of his middle names had been spelt slightly differently, and had never looked as his own birth certificate closely enough to notice. Alastair, Alistair. I looked at the details on the boarding pass. It would have been when he was travelling to London to head to Sweden for a week (fittingly) to see a friend and present at a conference. I would have been in the early stages of my first pregnancy. The pass was dated only a handful of days before our much-loved dog, Osa, would die.
These bookmarks and inscriptions are time capsules, each and every one. They can bring memories flooding back, sharp bursts of emotion, of what it meant to be an earlier version of yourself at a specific point in time. Stories wrapping around the stories.
In this case, the bookmark showed that Euan didn’t get too far into the book on his travels. That’s not surprising. I can never marry up the mountain of books he has read – mostly in a previous, pre-daughter life – with the speed at which he reads. He has been reading The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth for months now, and he is enjoying it and looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy. If I loved a book like that, I couldn’t help but stay up late night after night – far later than is sensible – to read it. I think I finished off the previous Ben Aaronovitch novel in The Rivers of London series within less than 48 hours of receiving it, because it was just so fun to read. This is also why I have to be careful about how and when I read. There is a part of me which has the potential to have an addictive personality, something I have learnt to manage over the years. At times, it has been easier for me to live in absolutes. I know I can be a lot, an exhausting whirlwind, and I am quite comfortable with knowing that is just how I am neurologically wired. At times, this is misunderstood. The genuine excitement I feel about most things, the energy bubbling away below the surface, gets misinterpreted. I have to slow my speech down on a daily basis. I often get carried away and start to speed up again, but that is still nothing like as fast as I used to talk with my family as a young girl.
Yes, I got all the above from an inside cover photo, an inscription, and a makeshift bookmark.
The Summer Book is the book I have recommended to people ever since I first read it, and it is the one I think of first when people ask me to name my favourite book. It feels strange to see it becoming so popular over the years, going viral at times. I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I am delighted. On the other, I feel protective; irritated and concerned that people will distill it into a series of Instagram-friendly quotes, reducing it to a fractured and incomplete sum of its parts. I am concerned that the raw and honest truths about life and what it is to be human captured within will be sterilised. I find myself feeling a sense of urgency in wanting people to really understand it – to understand themselves – and read it on their own terms. Because, as with many books which people like to quote, the pithy one-liners shared on social media, as pertinent and relatable as they can be, don’t fully reflect the depth of everything that has built up to that point in the book. Of the weight and weightlessness of the experience of reading the whole book. (I first typed “the whole text” here, partly out of academic-related habit, before deleting it, slightly disgusted with myself. This isn’t a text. This is a book.) In fact, one of the excerpts I have seen quoted is Sophia’s observations on love, her statement that “you go on loving… you love harder and harder” if someone does not like you back. Never have I seen someone add Jansson’s follow-up line: “Her grandmother sighed and said nothing.”
As I mentioned earlier, Alex re-reads The Summer Book every year. This is a book – the book – for that kind of practice. Life changes, and so our understanding of both the book and ourselves changes with the years. I now have a six-year-old daughter, the age of Sophia for parts of the book (the book is not clearly chronological, nor tethered to a single summer – it behaves like human memory, grouping some things together and isolating others). It was interesting how this changed things once I settled down and began my latest read (as settle down I did, after my initial reflection – I thought I’d just read a chapter, but by some miracle neither of my daughters woke early and I had read a third of the book before I had even realised).
I loved the Moomin books when I was younger and Auri loves them too, listening to the audiobooks on repeat. There are a number of them translated into English (the first was actually only published in English for the first time in the last few years). There are some I didn’t really understand until I was much older as I wasn’t familiar with some of the emotional themes. They more than stand the test of time, capturing important truths felt by children and known by some adults.
In some way, these truths are more overtly explored in The Summer Book. It is a book about grief, about growing and learning, but most of all about love and humanity in its many forms. It is not delivered in a sentimental way; it captures the realism of life rather than brief romanticised celluloid moments.
All of the chapters are bite-sized; individual, stand-alone moments. By the end of the two and two half pages that make up the first chapter, The Morning Swim, you already have a firm understanding of the lead characters; who they are and how their lives are woven together. Jansson’s writing leans towards being crisp – most of the detailed description focussing on landscape – but is not stark. It is emotive and unashamedly expressive, using words like drenched, lush, and evil in the first paragraph. Seamlessly flipping between the viewpoints of Sophia and her grandmother with such skill, you get an insight into what both of them think and how they view the world. In this first chapter, you also start to understand the grandmother’s grandparenting (or parenting) style, and appreciate their curious and unique friendship. The grandmother doesn’t shy away from awkward topics, including the topic of death – ever present throughout the book – or from danger, gently encouraging Sophia to push her boundaries, even if there are moments when she herself is concerned about Sophia’s safety. She understands that young children are surprisingly robust. When Sophia asks if they will dig a big hole when Grandmother dies, she replies (“insidiously”) that it would be “big enough for all of us”. Yet, she also understands that there are occasions when a child’s fears and concerns envelop everything. She absolves Sophia of her guilt for praying for a storm to liven things up (“Sophia wrapped her arms around her head and wept beneath the weight of the catastrophe that had struck all Eastern Nyland”) by convincing her grand-niece she prayed for one first.
Each chapter is a glorious burst of life, packed with more humanity than seems possible. Sophia and Grandmother have their shared secrets, because Sophia needs space to grow and grieve and love. The two characters are so intertwined that the chapter The Road is almost curious because Sophia’s experiences aren’t tempered by their shared gaze. Compared to the two of them, Sophia’s father appears occasionally in the background like a character in a sepia photograph. He is processing his own grief, but is clearly quite an active man as well from some of his (mis)adventures.
Aside from her ability to hone in on elements of the human condition, I would also put Jansson up there with the best nature writers, the spirit of the island reflected in her economy of words; the descriptions of the landscape – and of finding oneself within the landscape – are written (and subsequently translated) with such clarity that they feel both refreshing and sharp. Anyone who has spent time on an island, or near the sea, can recognise so much.
The island is the world. It is also something to be respected. The landscape can turn “uncertain, hostile”, reflecting and affecting the moods and concerns of the characters. This brusqueness and wildness is reflected in the behaviour of two characters in particular: Moppy is the colour of the island, Eriksson is the colour of the landscape. Both are unchangeable, something which Jansson treats with respect. (There are similarities between Eriksson and the real-life Brunström, a fisherman who helped Jansson and Pietilä with their own island habitation plans, as captured in Notes From An Island: “Brunström is rather small. He has an austere, weather-beaten face and blue eyes. His gestures are quick but measured, and he uses no adjectives in everyday speech. His boat has no name. We trusted him immediately.”)
There is more I could say, so much more: but I find myself reluctant to dissect any further the sharply observed almost-throwaway comments, the perfect descriptions of a child’s behaviour, the imposition of age, and of age being imposed upon us by others. Frustrations, the need to vent. And wildflowers: preserving something wild, helping it along, but pretending it is resilient enough on its own. Over and over, creating a world of reassurance. Not of safety, not a cocoon; but a place where being a child means something, where childhood – with its discoveries, resilience, and raw emotions – is the most important thing there is.
My notes started out life as a reflection on The Summer Book and what it means to me, and became more of a reflection on books, reading, who I am, and where I am in my life right now. I think that’s the power of this book. Like some of the best books, it asks questions of us, a literary mirror. I don’t know where I will be in life when I next read The Summer Book, whether next year or in five years. As in the book, life happens slowly and quickly all the time, and when you look back you remember sweeping, cumulative experiences as much as individual incidents. I don’t know which of these specifics will stay with me, and which will fade into a general mêlée of colours and emotions.
Each time I read The Summer Book, I take away something slightly different, uncover another layer. It makes sense – after all, I am a different person to the last time I read the book.
One evening in July, I had just picked up the book to read in bed when I heard the rapid patter of my two-year-old’s feet as she climbed out of bed and headed towards my bedroom. There was a pause just outside the doorway, then Elfi sauntered in slowly, in a calculatedly cute way, arriving at the side of my bed to explain, quite firmly, that she needed a cuddle. As her older sister was away, I let her climb into my bed and, as I read, I watched her getting sleepier out of the corner of my eye. She rubbed the label on her puppy teddy, and eventually she drifted off to sleep. At one point she moved, throwing her arm over me.
I put down the book after a while and watched her sleep. There was something about the truth of the situation that was reflected in the book, or perhaps I was reflecting the book – a secret, a fact of life so deep that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. There was something there, just out of my mental grasp.
It seems both strange and fitting that The Summer Book – a book so aware of death and rooted in the implications of mortality – is so full of life. There is not a word out of place. The detail, the descriptions, the dialogue. Jansson captures what it is to be human – part of this sprawling, messy species – and invites us to ask ourselves what it is to be ourselves, singular, as an individual in all of this. We are finite, but we tap into something that is infinite. The joy, the frustrations, the humour amidst even the bleakest times. Even (perhaps especially?) the hypocrisies and the contradictions. The Summer Book is the deepest and oldest type of magic – something known, but never understood – and I will spend my life wondering how Jansson (and Teal, with his translation) managed to do what she did, whilst knowing, gladly, that I will never figure it out.
Postscript: If you are looking for more discussion of the book’s themes – something closer to a more thorough review – you would do well to read my brother Alex’s post in full. I deliberately didn’t read this until after I had jotted down my first draft, but it was both interesting and amusing to find similarities between what we both take away from The Summer Book and how we approach its lessons.