When an unread book has been in the house for a while it sometimes takes a little prompting to pick it up off the shelf and put it on the top of the 'To be read' pile, but that's what happened with Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. Firstly, a friend gave us Jansson's A Winter Book: Selected Stories, which reminded me I'd better be 'aestival' before becoming 'hibernal', and then Simon over at Stuck in a Book wrote of it so warmly that I had to make a start.
This quickly turned into a delight. Anyone familiar with Jansson's famous Moomins will recognise the humour in these stories which are a series of essay/sketches like a collection of watercolours, but with a sudden stab of the bold and brilliant. They are profound and funny, and following the adventures of the child Sophia and her elderly grandmother on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland, they cleverly capture the cantankerousness of both youth and old age: "Wise as she was, [grandmother] realised that people can postpone their rebellious phases until they're eighty five years old, and she decided to keep an eye on herself."
Sophia and grandmother discuss everything from whether God has secretaries, to the plight of halved worms and the frailty of moss (step on it three times and it dies), and all the while the island's vulnerability and isolation focus the stories inward. In her introduction, Esther Freud says the book's allure "is the allure of summer itself for [Scandinavians] who spend so much of the year in the dark." It is equally appealing to the rest of us, and thanks to a little help from my friends, I'm glad I discovered its charm in the end.
