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rushthatspeaksAs I have said before, bless the press of the New York Review of Books, for they consistently print things I want to read. I picked this up at Raven Used Books in Harvard Square while I was in town over the weekend; Raven is one of those places where you may as well just hand your wallet to the cashier when you walk in, and go from there. They stock a lot of NYRBs.
Jansson is primarily known for her magnificent Moomin books, those friendly but still numinous collections of the adventures of funny, endearing, never ever human people of several different peculiar varieties. This is one of her novels for adults, and I have to say, it is fascinating watching her write human characters, as I have never seen her do that before. She is, unsurprisingly, very good at it.
The Summer Book is--
well. I need to resort to analogy here for a moment. There is a French movie I am very fond of by Jacques Tati, called M. Hulot's Holiday, which is set at a seaside resort, and which has the peculiar property that it is so timelessly filled with summer that every time you watch it it does not feel as though you are watching the same film of the same summer over again, but rather that you are watching the next year along, with everything going on about the same as last year, just as it ought to, in the subtly shifting rhythms of the world. I can tell without having reread it that The Summer Book will have this quality.
It is composed of short vignettes, which might take place in the same summer, or in different ones, or in all summers at once. There is an island in the Gulf of Finland, and every summer for forty-seven years the same family has lived on it (according to them they live there always, and they are quite contemptuous of summer people although they clearly have a winter house; the island is where their real existence lies). Right now there is a little girl, Sophie, and a grandmother, and a father, though he spends most of his time in his study typing away at something. And there is no mother, which is the one change from the way things have always been, and not a good one.
Sophie and the grandmother have the island in their bones. Sometimes there are visitors, who don't, which is confusing for everybody. Sometimes there is weather, all the drama of storm and wave. On Midsummer there are meant to be fireworks, but they are a bit salt-encrusted. The grandmother carves animals out of roots in the thickets, builds a tiny scale model of Venice for her granddaughter, smokes too much, is intemperate and intransigent and impossible to live with and absolutely without question the best grandmother I have ever seen in fiction, end of sentence. Sophie is writing a book on the natural history of the angleworm, to explain whether it is all right that it splits into two halves to avoid being put on a fishhook. (Does it live, after all that, happily? Does the tail end grow a new head, or does it decide to be the head, and move up in the world?) She has a complex and tormented relationship with her cat, as who does not. She is a bit young to have grasped the concept of generations and doesn't remember her grandfather, but she is invested in asking questions and is fairly convinced the Devil has something to do with death-- the grandmother says that at her own age she is too old to start believing in the Devil and she's damned if she's going to.
This is clear water of a book, both deep and crystalline, the work of a writer at the height of her powers, using them lazily and in perfect mastery, with a crooked smile. Jansson was over sixty when she wrote this, and it shows, a lifetime of having learned herself and her art and her oceans. It is the kind of book that invalidates many standard ideas about the nature of the novel, because it is in a conventional sense plotless, arcless, conflictless, not even really a pastoral. This is one reason I am quite often annoyed at standard ideas about the nature of the novel: The Summer Book is vital, there is nothing else like it. It is full of the sound of an old woman and a little girl laughing and quarreling, on an island, in the shadow of a newish grief, somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, every summer.
It is perfectly itself.
Jansson is primarily known for her magnificent Moomin books, those friendly but still numinous collections of the adventures of funny, endearing, never ever human people of several different peculiar varieties. This is one of her novels for adults, and I have to say, it is fascinating watching her write human characters, as I have never seen her do that before. She is, unsurprisingly, very good at it.
The Summer Book is--
well. I need to resort to analogy here for a moment. There is a French movie I am very fond of by Jacques Tati, called M. Hulot's Holiday, which is set at a seaside resort, and which has the peculiar property that it is so timelessly filled with summer that every time you watch it it does not feel as though you are watching the same film of the same summer over again, but rather that you are watching the next year along, with everything going on about the same as last year, just as it ought to, in the subtly shifting rhythms of the world. I can tell without having reread it that The Summer Book will have this quality.
It is composed of short vignettes, which might take place in the same summer, or in different ones, or in all summers at once. There is an island in the Gulf of Finland, and every summer for forty-seven years the same family has lived on it (according to them they live there always, and they are quite contemptuous of summer people although they clearly have a winter house; the island is where their real existence lies). Right now there is a little girl, Sophie, and a grandmother, and a father, though he spends most of his time in his study typing away at something. And there is no mother, which is the one change from the way things have always been, and not a good one.
Sophie and the grandmother have the island in their bones. Sometimes there are visitors, who don't, which is confusing for everybody. Sometimes there is weather, all the drama of storm and wave. On Midsummer there are meant to be fireworks, but they are a bit salt-encrusted. The grandmother carves animals out of roots in the thickets, builds a tiny scale model of Venice for her granddaughter, smokes too much, is intemperate and intransigent and impossible to live with and absolutely without question the best grandmother I have ever seen in fiction, end of sentence. Sophie is writing a book on the natural history of the angleworm, to explain whether it is all right that it splits into two halves to avoid being put on a fishhook. (Does it live, after all that, happily? Does the tail end grow a new head, or does it decide to be the head, and move up in the world?) She has a complex and tormented relationship with her cat, as who does not. She is a bit young to have grasped the concept of generations and doesn't remember her grandfather, but she is invested in asking questions and is fairly convinced the Devil has something to do with death-- the grandmother says that at her own age she is too old to start believing in the Devil and she's damned if she's going to.
This is clear water of a book, both deep and crystalline, the work of a writer at the height of her powers, using them lazily and in perfect mastery, with a crooked smile. Jansson was over sixty when she wrote this, and it shows, a lifetime of having learned herself and her art and her oceans. It is the kind of book that invalidates many standard ideas about the nature of the novel, because it is in a conventional sense plotless, arcless, conflictless, not even really a pastoral. This is one reason I am quite often annoyed at standard ideas about the nature of the novel: The Summer Book is vital, there is nothing else like it. It is full of the sound of an old woman and a little girl laughing and quarreling, on an island, in the shadow of a newish grief, somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, every summer.
It is perfectly itself.
