The Summer Book (New York Review Books Classics) by Tove Jansson and Thomas Teal

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the complete review - fiction

The Summer Book

by

Tove Jansson

general information | review summaries | our review | links | near the author

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Championship:	The Summertime Book
Author:	Tove Jansson
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1972 (Eng. 1974)
Length:	172 pages
Original in:	Swedish
Availability:	The Summer Volume - US
	The Summer Volume - Britain
	The Summer Book - Canada
	Le livre d'un été - France
	Sommerbuch - Deutschland

• Swedish title: Sommarboken
• Translated past Thomas Teal
• The US (NYRB Classics) edition has an Introduction by Kathryn Davis
• The UK (Sort Of) edition has a Foreword past Esther Freud

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Our Assessment:

A- : very nicely washed

Meet our review for fuller cess.

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Review Summaries

Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
FAZ	.	9/9/2002	Monika Osberghaus
The Guardian	A	12/7/2003	Ali Smith
The Contained	.	14/6/2003	Dea Birkett
The LA Times	A+	27/4/2008	Richard Rayner
Neue Zürcher Zeitung	.	31/seven/2002	gew
The Observer	.	15/6/2003	Jonathan Heawood

Review Consensus:

Very enthusiastic

From the Reviews:

• "Dice Idylle ist in diesen Episoden then flüchtig wie die kurze Zeit im Frühsommer, in der das Moos blüht und die ganze Insel mit einem warmen, kaum sichtbaren Schleier überzieht. Der Rest ist Nüchternheit, Sturm, prekäres Gleichgewicht." - Monika Osberghaus, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
• "Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at to the lowest degree, to have no forward motion, to be in lit moments, gleaming night moments, similar lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully synthetic, random-seeming, complete story. Her writing is all magical deception, her sentences simple and loaded; the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth. As Philip Pullman so succinctly puts it, Tove Jansson was a genius." - Ali Smith, The Guardian
• "(I)t manages to make you feel good as well equally wise, without having to brand besides much endeavour. (...) This book is in danger of taking itself rather likewise seriously; there is a lot of home-spun philosophy but just rare flashes of sense of humour, which nonetheless are very funny. But what makes The Summer Book rise higher up the realm of happy thoughts for grim times are the observations on being young and growing quondam: the girl'south desperation non to appear frightened of deep water, her grandmother's conclusion non to allow her run into that she knew she was." - Dea Birkett, The Independent
• "Underlying all of this, and making the book cohere, is the discipline, not of the microscopic world of the isle or the ever-changing mood of the northern summertime, but of death -- death awaited, death endured, death raged against and non understood." - Richard Rayner, The Los Angeles Times
• "Fiddling happens. Major events on the surrounding seas -- the wreckage of a ship carrying a load of fireworks -- are described lightly, while pocket-sized details -- the texture of moss after it has been trodden on three times -- are observed with careful honesty. All the same the story clings onto the imagination like the trusting hand of a kid, or the clutch of a dying woman, as the two characters stray into and out of life." - Jonathan Heawood, The Observer

Please notation that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased estimation and subjective stance of the actual reviews and practice not merits to accurately reverberate or stand for the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We admit (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, exist entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure out.

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The complete review 's Review:

The Summertime Book collects twenty-ii summer scenes and episodes, centred around a immature girl, Sophia, and her old grandmother, and the time they spend together on a northern isle in the Gulf of Republic of finland. The volume covers several summers (and a few chapters are actually set outside that flavor), but there's barely a sense of chronology hither, the summers melding into an indistinct and always similar time.
There is an absenteeism that haunts the volume -- or rather the two characters --, mentioned early on, as Sophia wakes and remembers: "she had a bed to herself considering her mother was dead". The grandmother isn't quite a substitute, fifty-fifty though at ane point Sophia tries to brand her more than of one, experimenting with calling her: "Mama".
Both are potent-willed characters, though the grandmother at times is concerned near Sophia becoming too ready in certain means and tries to teach her how to get by in the world, as in the overnice scene where she thinks:

Nosotros've got to teach her some manners. We've fabricated a mistake. She has to spend more time with people she doesn't like, earlier it'due south too late.

Much of the time it is just the two of them, with Sophia's father generally in the background, at best, and any other people (or animals) generally not quite fitting into the tight piffling world they inhabit. Role of this island-club, with its specific expectations and attitudes (including: "They had developed a habit, over the years, of not talking about painful things, in gild to make them less painful"), they have a shut relationship and that sort of mutual understanding that can develop between generations.
Jansson's variety of episodes, ranging from those where petty of note seems to happen to the modestly dramatic (including one of the great storms in recent memory, which Sophia thinks she caused -- merely to take her grandmother take that burden from her), are at best loosely connected, yet this mosaic arroyo makes for a very rich picture. And even where and so piddling seems to happen, everything is of consequence -- with Jansson'south success also built on the fact that she doesn't try to hammer domicile that point, simply rather lets the reader come to see it on their ain.
The Summertime Book is a charming work. It feels very light, but is annihilation only fluff. Well worthwhile.

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Links:

The Summer Book :

• New York Review Books publicity page
• Sort Of Books publicity page

Reviews:

• The crazy earth of Bec
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (German language)
• The Guardian
• The Independent
• lewism
• The Los Angeles Times
• Lost in Translation
• The Observer
• Stuck in a Book
• things hateful a lot
• Vulpes Libris
• Ward Six

Tove Jansson:

• Tove Jansson at books and writers

Other books by Tove Jansson under review:

• Fair Play
• The True Deceiver

Other books of interest under review:

• Meet Alphabetize of Scandinavian literature
• Other books from New York Review Books

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Near the Writer:

Swedish-writing Finnish author Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is best known for her 'Moomin' stories.

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Source: https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/suomi/jansson2.htm

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