The Slummer: Quarters Till Death

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Damned child Grandmother thought. Confounded children. But that’s what happens when people won’t let you do anything fun. The people who are old enough”.

My Review: I am a person who likes quiet. My home environment, when I'm able to force my will on my roommate, is free of audio pollution like TV and radio. Perhaps in compensation, I love spy stories and space-war epics and historical novels with battles, explosions, near misses with the main character dangling from rooftops...the very essence of un-quiet. Most of the stories, and I would say this is less a novel and more a collection of stories deal with the relationship between Sophia and her grandmother, and this reminded me very strongly of Lea Ypi's book Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History in which the relationship between the young Ypi and her grandmother is very important. Sophia though is younger than Lea, we hear the voice of a child of between five and seven I guess; crawling, exploring and asking questions. Those latter are quite funny. Equally we are increasingly in grandmother's head experiencing her responses, her reactions and her thought on want she can't express or explain to a child. And that makes it a very pleasing book about the fairly different intellectual and emotional worlds of being old and being young, and the relationship between the two. So it becomes a little book about family life. Every once in a while I read a book that makes me jealous, that makes me wish I could write and do what the book did. Like this one. It's a wisp of a book - brief, with no plot to speak of and only two real characters, no compelling crisis to drive the action, no suspense. Oh, you mean he's dead,’ said Grandmother. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time. It’s clear to me that this novel between a grandmother and a granddaughter….was very personal to Tove Jansson.

Grandmother is the book's force, but the interactions between her and Sophia, her young granddaughter, fuel it. Sophia's mother has died before the book starts and, though there is only one mention of it, Sophia's outbursts, actions and reactions are colored by her personal tragedy. Grandmother, though always remaining true to her cranky self, understands, worries and mostly knows what to do to help Sophia. I love wild settings, and I adore wild characters, and Grandmother's as wild as they make 'em. She's a queen, a crone, a woman who has outlived her husband and her son's wife and has “reached the age where a person can safely be truthful” about certain things. (And she says them). The Summer Book’ is often talked about this way. Tove Jansson wrote it in 1972, a year after the death of her mother, the artist Signe Hammersten. Their bond had been close and Jansson’s grief was intense; it is the dark generative heart of a book that describes the relations between a very old woman and her six-year-old granddaughter, Sophia, and the life that goes on around them on a very small island over the course of a single summer”. This is, in short, what Tove Jansson portrays in The Summer Book, a summer that is not Mediterranean, and a book that is not only for children but rather for those of all ages who still see the world as a place full of potential wonder and adventure.

One interesting point is made that almost seems like a judgment of America today. It's just a couple ot lines towards the end of the book that stood out to me: Sophia Jansson, the late author’s niece and the inspiration for the granddaughter character in the novel, tells me over Zoom that she never realised her family wasn’t “normal” growing up (“whatever normal is”). The Janssons were adventurers, discovering the uninhabited islands on which they would go on to spend every summer and campaigning in Sweden for girls to be allowed to camp outdoors. Following the death of her mother when she was six, Sophia’s “core family” was made up of her father, her grandmother, her aunt Tove, and Tove’s partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä.Sophia: “ What a dumb question! You know they all wear dresses. But now listen carefully: if one of them wants to know for sure what kind another is, he just flies a under him and looks to see if he is wearing pants.” Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events – the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.” Nobody cared to get data to support their claims. It was the lies that everybody wanted to believe in. The lies were more palatable." Bloody nitwit, Grandmother muttered to herself. Out loud she said, ‘You better ask your father about generations and all that. Ask him to draw it on a piece of paper. If you’re interested’”. Grandmother takes cigarette breaks to keep her chatty granddaughter, Sophia, at bay, and she favors crawling, on all fours, when her dizziness is bad.

And we know, if the child does not, that the summers of her grandmother are limit; she has already passed into the autumn of her life and winter is nipping at her heels. But what a blessed thing this time is for them both, for Grandmother has a chance to see the wonder that her life has been and Sophia is building memories that will someday stand in for this person she must surely lose. Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, 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 But the unique-closeness they shared had something to do with ‘quantity’ time, close proximity, the ‘day-to-day’ interaction with each other. When I read the synopsis, I thought to myself, how original can a story like this be? But I decided to give it a shot, and commented to the author that I would read it over Christmas and give it an honest review. This kind of deep respect for nature is characteristic of Jansson’s writing, from the Moomin books, which focus on a family of trolls who live in harmony with their surroundings, to The Summer Book and the nine other novels and short-story collections she wrote for adults.I was ready to move in with the family and spend the second half of my life on their blustery, small island filled with quirky, faraway neighbors and weird wood carvings of animals. I find this sort of writing – which has no real plot but is all about exploring characters – very hard to do and I am always lost in admiration when I see it done well. Sophia and Grandmother strike me as absolutely real, but even the cameos are brilliantly described – Jansson has a real flair for these thumbnail character sketches, unusual and specific: I loved it and it's a perfect read for a summer which will, I think, be memorable for many of us as a kind of shadow season, a time carved out from normal life and defined by the absence of normality. Jansson manages to have her cake and eat it too. She allows us to enjoy Grandmother, in all her magisterial forthrightness; but she herself as a writer is anything but blunt. She is subtle, and the book's themes accumulate gradually while you're concentrating on something else.

a b Knight, Lucy (1 September 2022). " 'A masterpiece': why Tove Jansson's The Summer Book is as relevant as ever at 50". The Guardian.The Summer Book manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort . . . [it] says so much that we want to hear in such an accessible form, without ever really saying anything at all. Walter Anderson's Father Mississippi, carved from an oak tree that fell during a 1947 hurricane. It weathered away over the next ten years. Only the deer in the left foreground survived.) D'Alessandro, Anthony (2 March 2023). "Glenn Close To Star In Charlie McDowell's Feature Take Of Finnish Novel 'The Summer Book' ". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved 3 March 2023.