Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

This is another review I originally wrote for amazon. A happy book:

Tove Jansson – The Summer Book

The eternal moment

It’s a small point perhaps, but the publishers of this marvellous, slippery novel would have us believe that the two characters at the story’s heart ‘while away a summer together’. Yet in fact, if we examine the openings of the early sections we find that it really takes place ‘One time in July...’, ‘One morning before dawn...’, ‘One Saturday...’, and most tellingly ‘One summer...’. All of the novel is like this, existing in the moment, describing not one, particular summer, but simply ‘summer’. It is the experience of being on the island during the summer for these two emotionally tightly bound characters. The story never really goes anywhere, very little ‘happens’, we are merely shown the ordinary day to day lives of little Sophia and her grandmother, and their connection with the tiny world within which we see them, and consequently of course, so much ‘happens’. Other characters might occasionally impinge onto this idyllic edenic world, but almost the only speech we hear is from the two at the centre of the story. Thus, Sophia’s father, about whom we hear a great deal, and who is presumably there with them on the island for much of the story, is never heard to speak.

This is a masterpiece, a healing book, one of the few works of literature I’ve encountered which, despite the darkness which lurks at the edges of the narrative such as the death of Sophia’s mother which is alluded to once and then never mentioned again, actually seems to describe happiness.