Book 128: Finland (English) – The Summer Book = Sommarboken (Tove JANSSON)

 

Except for the magic forest, the island became an orderly, beautiful park. They tidied it down to the smallest twig while the earth was still soaked with spring rain, and, after that, they stuck carefully to the narrow paths that wandered through the carpet of moss from one granite outcropping to another and down to the sand beach. Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss. What they don’t know – and it cannot be repeated too often – is that moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies. Eider ducks are the same way – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back. Sometime in July the moss would adorn itself with a kind of long, light grass. Tiny clusters of flowers would open at exactly the same height above the ground and sway together in the wind, like inland meadows, and the whole island would be covered with a veil dipped in heat, hardly visible and gone in a week. Nothing could give a stronger impression of untouched wilderness.

In some ways there are many similarities between my Swedish book (Strindberg’s Hemsöborna) and the Summer Book: both were written in Swedish, are set on the holiday islands in the Baltic Sea, and both treat the sometimes prickly relationship of the long-term residents with newcomers.

Tove Jansson is a legendary children’s writer in the Nordic lands. However, this is a novel for adults; although the heroine is a young girl. This is a wonderful description of the playful, imaginative relationship between Sophia and her grandmother. It is a book about contrasts, and love of contrasts, both stated and unstated – between girl and grandma, while her parents are barely mentioned; between island and city (I think there is only a single mention of the winter residence that they have in the city), and between summer life and (implicit) winter hibernation. There is something masterful about an author who can delineate a contrast while only describing one side.

I wonder if anyone has ever drawn a lovelier, more insightful picture of the relationship between granddaughter and grandmother. Sophia’s worldview seems to be totally understood and taken seriously (funny as it often is), and Jansson shows how grandparents become more like children again with their eccentricities, undiplomatic speech and seemingly endless time and patience – but also with enormous wisdom. Lacking another girl friend, except for one who visits briefly – or is she a doll? – and some cats, the grandmother is her playmate and confidante. Sophia is continually asking childish, profound, difficult questions, sometimes very funny. Her real world is still magical – the island, and her vision of Venice gleaned from a postcard.  As someone who has always loved islands and daydreamed about owning one, no matter how small, this seems like paradise to me (although I would perhaps move my island or islet to the tropics so I could live on it all year. But perhaps then I wouldn’t appreciate it as much?) Coming from a land with not such great climactic changes during the year, the novel made me realise just how intensely life is lived and loved during the northern summer.

It is totally impregnated with love of the natural world in even its smallest details. They explore the seashore, the jetsam, the ‘magic forest’ and the creatures of land and sea. There are changes – the intrusions from the outside are increasing, and Grandma is slowly losing her memory.

There is a touching ambiguity, equanimity and resilience in Sophia’s world-view. Though she is shocked to find that a new road has suddenly cut a swathe through her island, she soon recovers her balance and is able to see its good side as well. Perhaps the funniest part was when a newcomer builds an obtrusive house on one of ‘their’ islands, grandmother and child raid the island and break into the house, just then the owner returns, they hide, are discovered and in turn find that the strangers are not as fearsome as they seemed…

Despite their sometimes insular attitudes, I loved the islanders’ kindness in thinking about and providing for possible shipwrecked outsiders.

One thing that niggled with me (but I’m sure won’t worry many people) is that any Swedish (or Finnish) words have been quarantined from the book. I missed both these beautiful languages, though I sadly don’t know any Finnish.

A deceptively simple story. I can totally see why so many Scandinavians love it….

JANSSON, Tove (1914 – 2001), The Summer Book, translated from Swedish by Thomas Teal, London, Sort Of Books, 2003, ISBN 978-0-95422-171-3

First published in Swedish as Sommarboken, 1972

Book 100: Sweden (Swedish) – Hemsöborna = The people of Hemsö (August STRINDBERG)

But the city dwellers’ arrival at the island did not fail to exert its influence on the natives’ feelings and customs in general. Every day to see men dressed for holidays, for whom it was always Sunday, who went strolling, rowed aimlessly, fished without caring about the catch, swam, made music, killed time, as if there was no worry, no work to be done in the world; this aroused no envy at first, only astonishment that life could fashion itself in such a way, admiration for men who were capable of making their existence so pleasant, so peaceful, so neat and fine above all, without anyone being able to say that they did injustice to someone else or plundered the poor. Unnoticed and slowly the Hemsö people began to walk in gentle dreams, to cast long furtive looks at the big cottage; if they glimpsed a light summer frock in the meadow, they stood still enjoying the sight as if faced with something beautiful; if they caught sight of a white veil on an Italian straw hat, a red silk ribbon around a slender body in a boat on the bay from between the forest fir-trees, they fell silent and full of devotion for something which they didn’t comprehend, which they didn’t dare to hope for, but which they were drawn towards.

[my translation]

For Sweden, even though there are so many fantastic works from there, I really wanted to read something by Strindberg. But for present purposes it had to be a novel. Did Strindberg write novels? I have to admit that I didn’t realise that either until I went looking. So here it is. And if you thought that he only wrote gloomy, traumatic plays, here is another surprise.
Here we are in a much poorer, more uncomfortable, more rural Sweden, the one from which so many Swedes emigrated (including some of my ancestors).
Carlsson is a mainlander who comes to put a widow’s farm on its feet, and succeeds, though after his success he tends to ‘lose it’. He feels himself superior to (more cluey than) the locals, but is conscious of his inferiority in a hierarchy to the family of a professor that he brings in as paying guests. When he is rejected by the professor’s attractive daughter, he ends up marrying the widow as consolation prize – mainly for her farm – and earns the eternal enmity of her son Gusten. He gets taken for a ride by a mining company and in the end loses out to Gusten.
It is set on the islands and skerries of the Stockholm Archipelago, loved for getaways then as now by the city people; but Strindberg made himself persona non grata there by his overly close to the bone observations on the islanders in this novel. It is realistic, but shot through with a lot of humour that you might not have expected from this author.
While there is a touch of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ in Strindberg’s islanders, they are hardly idealised. It is close to the long tradition of ‘country bumpkin upstages sophisticated city slicker’ but neither side is treated maliciously or without understanding.
We realise at the outset that Carlsson is an awkward fit when the girls come to pick him up from the mainland and he yells that they should raise the jib – which their square-rigger doesn’t have.
The novel is full of beautiful descriptions of nature and folk life. Depressing it certainly isn’t. Even the tragic dénouement has its funny aspect, and doesn’t seem so catastrophic to everyone.
The Swedish book I ended up buying online was rather strange. Almost square, it was a printing from a website (see below), and deceptively thin: only 43 pages (in a normal format it would be more than 200). The page numbers of the original pop up right in the middle of the text.

STRINDBERG, August (1849 – 1912), Hemsöborna, Memphis, General Books, 2012, ISBN 9781236729163; first published Stockholm, Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1914
(printing of Project Runeberg digital facsimile, available at http://runeberg.org/strindbg/hemsobor/)
Translated into English as: The People of Hemsö