The Summer Book

"Well, where I went next was to pick up on the idea of familial relationships with Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book . For me, this is one of the two books that I always need to have copies of (the other being Alice in Wonderland ). I knew of Tove Jansson from the Moomins and then picked up her translated work for adults—short stories and the novellas. The Summer Book is about the relationship between a recently bereaved child and her grandmother and how they share this world of imagination. Have you read this? I love the way it starts: Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance. So this could be an adventure story. “What are you doing?” asked little Sophie, “Nothing,” her grandmother answered. “That’s to say,’ she added angrily, “I’m looking for my false teeth.” This is such an unusual beginning but it’s also so everyday—and I love that. We understand that the mother has died. The father has taken Sophie and her grandmother to this island—along with an uncle—to cope with their bereavement. On the island the grandmother, who is an artist, creates a whole world—a forest with animals made from pieces of wood for the granddaughter. The book explores ways in which they engage with each other. “This is a book you must read. This is a book which has a deep wisdom, which deals with things beyond our comprehension and understanding” I think what is really important is that adults can engage with this book. It is about an aging adult approaching her forthcoming death and adjusting to it. The grandmother and the child have a shared experience of the world that the grandmother will soon leave and the child will carry with her for the rest of her life. For me, it is a really important and outstanding book. I’ve given it to my niece when I’ve felt my age and I’ve given it to people saying, ‘this is a book you must read.’ This is a book which has a deep wisdom, which deals with things beyond our comprehension and understanding. We seem to feel we have to pinpoint a defined answer that comes with a box that can be neatly ticked. In western society, I find, that it is all too fast – there isn’t enough time for mystery, exploration, even for expressing emotions."

"Tove Jansson is known to most people as the inventor of the Moomins, the delightfully hippopotamus-like characters who live in the Gulf of Finland on a little island and have various adventures. I first came across them when I was about nine and I fell in love with them immediately. I read all the books, and I’ve applauded their republishing in recent years in very nice editions by Sort of Books. The Summer Book is a different kind of thing. It’s a book for adults, although I don’t like making these distinctions between books on the basis of whom they are assumed to be aimed at. Because I don’t like my own books to be listed under this heading or that. The great advantage of publishing His Dark Materials as a children’s book was that it wasn’t called a fantasy, it was a children’s book . If it had been called a fantasy, an adult book, it would have gone straight on to the fantasy shelves, nobody else would have seen it. But because it was a children’s book, children read it. They’d say, ‘Dad, Mum, I want you to read this so we can talk about it.’ So, gradually, it became known among adults as a result of being published as a children’s book, rather than by being published as fantasy . The labelling of books has been a cause of great friction between authors and publishers and retailers and various other people. At some time in the past 20 or so years, there was a moment when the publishers decided it would be a good idea to publish age ranges on books—‘this is for 9-13 year olds ’ or something similar. We the writers almost unanimously rose up in wrath at this because it seemed—seemed to me anyway—like turning away readers at the door. You don’t know whether a seven year old might enjoy that enormously. Alternatively, you don’t know whether somebody who is coming across it at the age of 14 would also enjoy it enormously, but be put off because it says it’s for 9-13 year olds. It seemed like a terrible act, almost suicidal really. You don’t want to turn away readers. Welcome them all is my view. But there are books that seem to be expecting a particular type of reader. And I think The Summer Book expects an adult reader. It could be read with enjoyment by a young child, but the point of view throughout most of the book, although we’re focused on Sophie, the little child, is a wise eye that’s looking at her. A lot of the time that seems to belong to her grandmother. Sophie and her grandmother and her father live on this little island from time to time in the summer. They’ve got everything they need there. They’ve got the house and the boat, and Papa has his work—he seems to be a writer. Sophie and her grandmother spend a lot of time pottering about and playing and building little Venetian lagoons for the ants to go into and that sort of thing. It’s very funny and very charming. And you think that’s all it is—a sweet little book about a child and her grandmother. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But, actually, it’s much more than that, because we can see that the grandmother is not very well. At one point, quite suddenly, she throws up. That’s all, it’s not gone into. It’s not mentioned any more, but there’s something about her that’s not right. So we can start worrying about grandma and her health. Sophie does too, but in a very childlike, practical way. ‘Are you going to die grandma?’ that sort of thing. Very matter of fact. And the grandmother answers these questions, but not as an example of a wise granny. She is wise, but she’s also tetchy. She smokes too much. She’s inclined to go to sleep when people are talking to her. It’s a real little family unit that’s described to us here. Jansson does it with such limited means. She’s like a composer who writes exclusively for a string quartet and never adds a clarinet or an oboe, or a brass section. It’s small. But think what Beethoven did with a string quartet. Yes, they encourage each other, and that is enjoyable to watch as well. Sophie’s very interested in little creatures like ants and bugs, and the grandmother is perfectly happy to join in and play. Not with a sense of condescending to the child, not, ‘I’ll keep her busy while she’s doing it’, but as if she’s enjoying it as well. Maybe this is something that old people are particularly good at if they’re good at interacting with children: they join in. This grandmother is—I’ve never met Tove Jansson—but I imagine she’s rather like the Jansson herself. It’s funny too. I keep laughing as I read it. They spend a lot of time playing and Sophie gets impatient in the way children do and suddenly screams, ‘I hate you!’ in the way children do. Yes, the figure we don’t see much of is Papa, but clearly, they both depend on him because he goes to the mainland and brings fresh water when there’s a drought and brings back the petrol and the kerosene and the mail. He does his job. I’m sure. I would love to have met her. But the only time I went to Finland she was very old. She lived on corned beef and whiskey, which strikes me as a very healthy diet. The Summer Book is a book that would appeal to people who enjoy the Moomins. Not everybody likes the Moomins—some readers don’t quite get it and think they’re just silly. The Moomins, and particularly Moomin himself and Moomin Papa, are very easily led into play. One day they find a floating theatre, and instantly, that becomes the focus of all their dreams and excitement. They’re also touched by a sort of Nordic melancholy. We mentioned melancholy in Portuguese terms. But in Moominvalley in November , for example, which is one of the Moomin books, there is a sense of the ending of things and everything vanishing away and of things dying. Not dramatically, not vividly or not as something to be lamented and wailed over. It’s not about grief and sorrow, but about this being what happens: things vanish and they disappear. Time goes past. These little islands in the Gulf of Finland are quite extraordinary. On one occasion I was in a different part of Finland, at some literary festival. After it was over, they took us out in a boat to one of these little islands and we had a big dinner and then a sauna. We all had to go into the sauna. When we came out again, at about one o’clock in the morning, I’ve never heard such an intense silence. There was nothing. There was the stillness of the summer night, there were pines all around, and a little wave occasionally lapped on the rocks, but the absolute silence was ringing because it was so quiet. They’re like nowhere else these islands because you can have this sense of enormous solitude and yet they’re full of all sorts of things going on. Ants, fishes and birds. Seen through the eyes of a genius—and I think Tove Jansson was a genius—there’s a whole world there. That’s right. I think that probably is Sophie, her niece. Tove lived a lot for a long time with her companion, Tuulikki Pietilä. She had a very interesting life. She was the daughter of a sculptor, who was quite well known. She was a young woman during the Second World War —she drew various cartoons of Mussolini and Hitler and people like that. She was really a portrait painter and painter of landscapes. But she started writing too and invented the Moomins. They took off in the 1940s and 1950s. I first came across them in what must have been about 1956 when I was about nine or ten in Battersea Public Library. I didn’t know what these things were. Were they hippopotamuses? Were they talking? But you soon become submerged in this world. I fell in love with them, I really did. But there was also a daily cartoon in the Evening News , which I think was either done by Tove, or by her brother Lars. That was going for quite some time. But there’s nothing like them. It’s a lovely place to be and they’re such engaging characters. Yes."

"Oh, gosh, I think it’s probably in my top three most important books to me in my whole life. I grew up with the Moomin books. They were transformative for me. There was safety in them: you could make mistakes, and it didn’t matter. You could take risks. You could go on an adventure, come home and Moominmama would make you a birch bark canoe. And maybe give you a cigarette to settle your stomach. Everyone was very bohemian. They might eat outdoors. Or they might just pack up everything and go. Money wasn’t important; one character goes to sit on an island, and finds these little flakes of gold and hoards them and thinks they’re very important. The others are all like, that’s a bit weird. They end up using the bits of gold to edge a flowerbed. So, the kind of middle-class concerns that I was growing up within commuter-belt Surrey, were… not scoffed at, but gently undermined. Jansson’s Moomin books showed the value of connected and imaginative life. Then I read The Summer Book as an adult, not long after my Mum died. It’s a book about a summer on a Finnish island, but it’s also a book about grief. It’s about a little girl and her grandmother quietly negotiating the ideas of mortality and bereavement through a series of incredibly delicate and funny conversations. “Summer is a very weird concept” There are subtleties in that book that I find hard to express. When the little girl’s grandmother loses her teeth, they both look for the teeth together. And when they find the teeth, grandmother won’t let the little girl see her put them in, because that bit is private—not the teeth, but the putting them in. And that is to do with selfhood, it’s to do with mortality and being old. There is a wisdom and a kindness that runs through this book. I’ve given it to so many people. It’s wonderful. It’s a little island world. That was interesting to me as well. I used to draw the islands, the maps from the Moomin books, when I was a kid. Over and over again, I’d draw little islands—the idea of a boundaried world. You could know everything that was in it. I was also obsessed with ponds. It’s the same idea: a little world where you can be in control, you know how many frogs there are, the dragonfly larva. You can fish them all out and put them back in. That’s a bit like writing books. You get to draw the line round everything, and say where it stops."